While the pundits debate last night’s debate, the DGA Quarterly‘s rolled out a new Special Election Issue. Profiles and interviews: Thomas Schlamme, creator of The West Wing; Michael Cuesta director of the pilot “and a handful of key episodes” of Homeland; Jim Hoskinson, who directs The Colbert Report; Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It, In the Loop, and Veep); Jorn Winther, who directed the original Frost/Nixon interviews; and Rod Lurie (Deterence, The Contender, and Commander in Chief) ruminates on fictional presidents. The Quarterly also runs a 1976 piece in which Alan J. Pakula looks back on the experience of directing All the President’s Men (and that poster to the left is designed by the very talented Jay Shaw), a collection of photos of various directors on the set of their political films, Terrence Rafferty on the impact of television on the way film directors have depicted political drama, Jay Roach on Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957), Jeffrey Ressner on Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Robert Abele on John Frankenheimer. Plus, book reviews and more.
Books. “Hilary Mantel has made Man Booker prize history by becoming the first woman and the first British writer to win the literary award twice,” reports the Guardian‘s Mark Brown. “Bring Up the Bodies, the blistering and bloody second installment of her trilogy charting the life of Thomas Cromwell, was also the first sequel to triumph in the prize’s 43-year history. The first installment, Wolf Hall, won three years ago…. Mantel is already working on that third book, to be called The Mirror and the Light, and the works will get a wider audience as the BBC has bought the rights. A six-hour adaptation of the first two books, by Peter Straughan, is planned for late 2013.”
“Johnny Depp will launch a publishing imprint with Harper, a division of HarperCollins, called Infinitum Nihil,” reports Carolyn Kellogg for the Los Angeles Times. And the first two titles out of the gate will be The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan by Doug Brinkley and House of Earth, an unpublished novel by folk singer Woody Guthrie.
The Paris Review runs an excerpt from The Richard Burton Diaries in which Burton discusses the poets of his day: “Eliot was clerically cut with a vengeance. The only nice poets I’ve ever met were bad poets and a bad poet is not a poet at all—ergo I’ve never met a nice poet.”
New York. Salut les jeunes! Young French Cinema, a celebration of “the 20th anniversary of ACID, a French association of film directors that has found innovative ways of mentoring and promoting young, emerging filmmakers’ first feature-length projects,” opens today at BAMcinématek and runs through October 25. For Artforum, Courtney Fiske reviews Armel Hostiou’s debut feature, Day (Rives) (2011), which “envisions Paris as a contemplative landscape of haze and flux” as it “follows three characters as they navigate the city on a single, autumn day.”
“Those who can’t see all 13 films in the series,” writes David Fear in Time Out New York, “should proceed directly to Sophie Letourneur’s 2009 raunchy dramedy about twentysomething hipsterettes. If any film could convince people that ACID is the patron saint of tomorrow’s Godards, it’s this one.” But Melissa Anderson, writing in the Voice, finds that La Vie au Ranch (2010) “puts too much faith in the appeal of its garrulous, aimless leads.”
The Miguel Abreu Gallery is hosting the Light Industry Benefit, happening today through Saturday.
Gary Kramer talks with Henry Jaglom, whose Just 45 Minutes from Broadway has arrived in town after playing the west coast. Also in Slant: Calum Marsh‘s review. In brief: 0.5 out of 4 stars.
London. “Drawn from the extensive archive of the John Kobal Foundation, Hollywood Unseen showcases photographs seemingly showing the ‘ordinary lives’ of the stars, including Rita Hayworth, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe.” The exhibition’s on at the Getty Images Gallery through November 3.
DVD/Blu-ray. Criterion’s running Oscar Moralde‘s essay on Joshua Marston’s The Forgiveness of Blood (2011), “a poignant tale of the clash between the dreams of a youthful modernity and the strictures of ancient custom.”
List. Film.com‘s “Top 50 Horror Movies of All Time.” Related: “Let’s examine horror’s powers of ten,” writes Greg Ferrara at Movie Morlocks. The idea is to start in 1912, and then check in on the state of the genre every ten years (1922, 1932, etc.) up to the present.
In the works. “Paramount Pictures has closed a deal for domestic distribution on The Wolf of Wall Street, the Martin Scorsese-directed saga of the rise and fall of a Wall Street hotshot that stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort,” reports Deadline‘s Mike Fleming.
“Offering a glimmer of hope to all those who may be feeling shunned, invitations are apparently still going out to Lars von Trier’s ponder-porn Nymphomaniac,” reports Sean O’Neal at the AV Club. “Both Willem Dafoe and Udo Kier have now been added to a cast that includes Charlotte Gainsbourg, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgard, Jamie Bell, Christian Slater, Connie Nielsen, and Uma Thurman as of the writing of this sentence—although the previously attached Nicole Kidman, much like her character in Eyes Wide Shut, will not be attending the sex party, having dropped out to focus on portraying Grace Kelly in Grace of Monaco.”
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