The prolific screenwriter first trained to be a doctor, and then a journalist, and after quitting Hollywood in disgust said she would have preferred to be a washer woman.
The movies? Maas gave up on them, too, saying in 1999: “The product they’re making today is even worse than the product we made in the early days.”
The art of the trailer. NPR’s Brent Baughman reports on those ninety-nine seconds cut from four hours of unfinished movie with visible green screens and the director yelling cues from off-screen.
Apparently au fait with Leni Riefenstahl's work, North Korea's recently deceased dictator Kim Jong-Il staged this must-attend mass rally in Pyongyang in 2009 to celebrate his supremeness.
Korea’s just-departed hereditary communist Dear Leader and self-promoted demigod, Kim Jong-Il, was not only a diminutive but enormously vain playboy and bon vivant with a bouffant hairstyle and platform shoes, he was also a huge movie buff.
Fiction was among the supremo’s predilections. His apparatchiks trumpeted his fantastical origin myth – that his humble birth in a log cabin was marked by a double rainbow and bright star – and he engaged in various of the arts. During one two-year run, for example, he composed six operas. He designed a famous Pyongyang landmark. When he joined the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party, he assumed charge of his country’s arts-and-culture administration.
He knew how to live like a rap star: He drank like a fish, delighted in Hennessy VSOP cognac, kept himself well supplied with lobster and champagne, and surrounded himself with knock-out “companions.” And, man oh man, was he a golfer! …MORE >>
Much has been written about how Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane so annoyed its quasi-subject, media baron William Randolph Hearst, that he set the dogs on Welles. Peter Rainer, a Bloomberg News arts and culture critic, revisits the sordid response, on the occasion of Warner Home Video’s 70th-anniversary re-issue of the film in a restored, three-disc edition, on both DVD and Blu-ray.
Rainer describes a documentary film included in the package, The Battle Over Citizen Kane, which tells the tale of Hearst’s anger at Welles and his co-screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz.
Turns out it wasn’t the depiction of Kane/Hearst that bothered the magnate so much, but a Freudian reference to his mistress’s genitals.
