News

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema

Martin Scorsese has programmed Living, Breathing New York, which continues with a 35mm print of Bringing Out the Dead on Friday and Saturday; The Quiet Man plays on 35mm Saturday and Sunday; David Lynch shorts and Lost Highway screen.

Anthology Film Archives

A new restoration of João César Monteiro’s Snow White plays on Saturday; a Rosemary Hochschild retrospective screens.

Film Forum

A René Clair retrospective has begun; Luis Buñuel’s Él continues screening in a 4K restoration alongside Play It As It Lays and Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman; Modern Times screens on Sunday.

IFC Center

Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop plays in a new restoration; Stop Making Sense, Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway, Best in Show, Palindromes, and Pink Flamingos show late.

Bam

Heiny Srour’s Leila and the Wolves continues.

Nitehawk Cinema

Paper Moon...

Eve Babitz, the “dowager groupie” who wrote Slow Days, Fast Company and was known for her relationships with the likes of The Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison and Steve Martin, and Joan Didion, the author of Play It As It Lays and The White Album, who wrote Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson’s A Star Is Born, are unquestionably two of Los Angeles’ most-revered writers.

A new book – Didion & Babitz written by Lili Anolik – highlights the relationship between the pair, helped by the author unearthing scores of previously unseen letters.

The book, which published today by Simon & Schuster’s Scribner, also explores their contrasting relationship with Hollywood (the town) and Hollywood (the industry).

Didion wrote a slew of screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, including the aforementioned A Star Is Born, 1971’s The Panic In Needle Park, which starred Al Pacino, 1981’s True Confessions, which starred Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall,...

Patti Scialfa, musician and longtime wife of Bruce Springsteen, disclosed in a new documentary that she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2018.

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band premiered Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The film features several interviews of the E Street Band members, including 71-year-old Scialfa, who joined the Band in 1984 as a singer and guitarist.

For fans wondering why her public appearances have been so limited, she revealed in the documentary that with her diagnosis, touring has become a challenge for her.

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“This affects my immune system, so I have to be careful what I choose to do and where I choose to go,” the singer said.

Scialfa also explained that this is largely why she has remained absent from most of the 2023-...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook.NEWSThe Delinquents.The start of the Academy Awards ceremony was delayed by hundreds of protestors obstructing the red carpet to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.Asghar Farhadi has been cleared of plagiarism charges by an Iranian court after allegations were leveled by a former student, who accused him of stealing the idea for A Hero (2021) from her documentary on the same subject, produced in his 2014 filmmaking workshop.Meanwhile, Alexander Payne has been accused of plagiarizing The Holdovers (2023) “line-by-line” from a screenplay by Simon Stephenson he appears to have read on spec.Thailand is planning to reform its national film industry as part of a “soft power” program, which may include increased production funding, more rebates for foreign productions, and a reduction of state censorship domestically.

Exclusive: Matthew Wilder has been set to write and direct an untitled film that chronicles the life and work of author Joan Didion.

The plan is to paint a dreamlike day in the life of Didion and California in the late 1960s, when the brilliant young journalist is hurtled from encounters with jailed Manson girls to protesting Black Panthers, and from Nancy Reagan pausing in a photo op to Vietnam War POWs — climaxing with an epilogue in a near-future California where an AI Joan encounters a dystopia beyond her wildest anxiety dreams.

The film, produced under David Michaels’ Enfant Terrible Cinema, will shoot in Los Angeles in the first or second quarter of 2024. Financing is being discussed with potential partners this week at AFM.

A National Book Award winner and recipient of a National Humanities Medal, Didion’s account of grief and loss in 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking...

"Gunsmoke" ran for a very, very long time. Beginning as a half-hour adaptation of a similarly long-running radio show in 1955, it transitioned to an hour-long show in its 7th season, which gave its stock Western storylines a greater sense of place, and more opportunities for great, up-and-coming actors to star in them. Over the course of 20 seasons, the show told every story under the sun (often multiple times over) about the frontier town of Dodge City, Kansas.

The show's protagonist was ostensibly Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness), whose casting has been attributed to no less a Western star than John Wayne. But the world of "Gunsmoke" went far beyond him, especially as the show went on. While Arness appeared in every one of the show's 635 episodes, he often looked more like a guest star the further along it went, showing up for scenes here and there while the supporting cast...

The passing of Joan Didion, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, is tough to put into words. Really, only Didion herself could fully pull off the mighty task of encapsulating her grand and wildly influential output. Her clear-eyed and no-nonsense view of American culture, stripped of its own propaganda to reveal the grimy hypocrisies lying underneath a gleaming surface, could be as elegiac as it was merciless. During the most confusing and incomprehensible of times, be it the paranoia of post-Manson Hollywood or the battlefield of her own grief, Didion provided a guiding light forward. Even as some of her most famous words have become iconography for Pinterest boards devoid of their original context, Didion's anti-Romantic glance lost none of its potency.Given her status as one of California’s homegrown talents, a Sacramento girl who partied with the Doors, hired Harrison Ford as her carpenter, and had dinner with Sharon Tate,...

Actor and filmmaker Griffin Dunne paid tribute to his aunt, acclaimed author Joan Didion, who died on Thursday at 87.

Dunne said Didion, who was the subject of his haunting 2017 Netflix documentary “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” “wrote about grief to find out what she felt, but ended up giving hope and meaning to those who needed it most.”

“Yesterday morning I said goodbye to my Aunt Joan for the last time,” Dunne, the son of Didion’s brother-in-law, author Dominick Dunne, said in a statement on Friday. “Yesterday morning her enormous readership also began their goodbyes to Joan Didion, one of the greatest writers of our time.

“In 1961, as a young contributor at Vogue, Joan once wrote, ‘People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character.’ As her nephew, I was fortunate enough to witness firsthand Joan’s character,...

Many Netflix watchers are catching up with actor-director Griffin Dunne’s documentary about his aunt, “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” following the news that the prolific writer died December 23 at age 87 from Parkinson’s. When President Barack Obama gave Didion the National Humanities Medal in 2012, he called her “one of our sharpest and most respected observers of American politics and culture.”

Didion not only chronicled the literati scene of New York in the 1950s and early ’60s but astutely dissected her home state of California. After graduating from Uc Berkeley, she landed a job at Vogue in New York, where she penned movie reviews — until her pan of “The Sound of Music.” After marrying Time staffer John Gregory Dunne in 1964, the couple moved to Los Angeles and wound up becoming the ultimate Hollywood insiders. When Didion and Dunne later moved to New York City in 1988, they had lived in Los Angeles for 24 years.

Many Netflix watchers are catching up with actor-director Griffin Dunne’s documentary about his aunt, “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” following the news that the prolific writer died December 23 at age 87 from Parkinson’s. When President Barack Obama gave Didion the National Humanities Medal in 2012, he called her “one of our sharpest and most respected observers of American politics and culture.”

Didion not only chronicled the literati scene of New York in the 1950s and early ’60s but astutely dissected her home state of California. After graduating from Uc Berkeley, she landed a job at Vogue in New York, where she penned movie reviews — until her pan of “The Sound of Music.” After marrying Time staffer John Gregory Dunne in 1964, the couple moved to Los Angeles and wound up becoming the ultimate Hollywood insiders. When Didion and Dunne later moved to New York City in 1988, they had lived in Los Angeles for 24 years.

Joan Didion, the journalist, novelist, and screenwriter of such films as the 1976 “A Star Is Born” died Thursday at her home in Manhattan at the age of 87. The New York Times reported that the cause was Parkinson’s disease.

Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934. The fifth-generation Californian found some of her most important material for her earliest writing in the culture and chaos of her home state. Her career began after she won a pair of writing contests put on by magazines during her time at Uc Berkeley. One of those wins led her to begin writing at Vogue.

She worked her way up to features editor at the fashion magazine. In 1963 she published her first novel, “Run River,” about the unraveling of a marriage that also serves as a commentary on the history of California.

Around that time and while living in New York she struck up a friendship,...

Joan Didion, the author of five novels including the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking who also excelled in essays and has screenwriting credits including the 1976 version of A Star Is Born, died Thursday of complications of Parkinson’s disease in Manhattan. She was 87.

Her publisher at Knopf confirmed the news to The New York Times.

Didion’s career blossomed in the midst of and reflected sea changes in America, with books published in the 1960s and ’70s including Run River, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer and The White Album, an anthology of her magazine writing for the likes of Life and The Saturday Evening Post that detailed stories mostly about California. Didion was born in Sacramento and was drawn to stories about her home state.

As a journalist, she wrote political essays including “Salvador,” about the U.S. involvement in El Salvador.

Joan Didion, the storied author and New Journalism icon best known for books like Play It as It Lays, The White Album, and The Year of Magical Thinking, died Thursday, The New York Times reports. She was 87.

Didion died at her home in Manhattan after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, a spokesperson for her publisher, Knopf, confirmed. “Didion was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers,” the statement read. “Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are considered modern classics.

Joan Didion, the author revered for her coolly dispassionate essays and novels such as “Play It as It Lays,” has died, her publisher confirmed to The New York Times on Wednesday. She was 87. Along with her late husband John Gregory Dunne, Didion co-wrote screenplays for the films “True Confessions,” “A Star Is Born,” “The Panic in Needle Park” and “Up Close and Personal.”

It was the 1968 essay collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and 1970 novel “Play It as It Lays,” which she also adapted for a 1972 film, that secured her reputation as a sharp-eyed observer of the culture and people of California and beyond.

Another essay collection, 1979’s “The White Album,” assembled from her pieces in Esquire and other magazines, took on subjects that defined the era such as Charles Manson and the Doors, further cementing her place as one of the foremost chroniclers of the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s.

With lines...

At 8:45 p.m. on Thursday night came one of my favorite regular reports on the state of the entertainment industry and its denizens. That is, an emailed “blog” from lawyer and friend Robert Mirisch about life in the Wasserman Campus retirement residences and skilled nursing facilities operated by the Motion Picture & Television Fund.

“Oh Happy Day!” wrote Bob, whose special charm is that he wears his very large heart on his sleeve. “This week, for the first time in a year, I got to eat a meal seeing people in person.”

It was, as Bob described it, an outdoor lunch at the Woodland Hills campus, with maybe a dozen people at individual tables. “We were allowed (nay-encouraged) to take our masks off to eat.” Speaking, but not visiting, was permitted. “At first I was baffled by the metal utensils at our place settings,” wrote Bob. “We even had glass glasses.

In the early Nineties, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa moved to Los Angeles and found themselves living next door to movie and TV director Bobby Roth, who has worked on everything from Miami Vice and Beverly Hills 90210 to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. They formed a tight friendship that resulted in Roth occasionally sprinkling Scialfa and Springsteen songs into his movies, including his 2003 John Ritter–Janeane Garofalo black comedy Manhood, and that bond only deepened when he married Springsteen’s sister, actress and photographer Pamela Springsteen. “He’s part of the family,...

Joel Schumacher, the director, screenwriter and costume designer with a wide-ranging filmography that includes St. Elmo’s Fire, The Lost Boys, several John Grisham movies and two Nineties Batman films, died Monday after a year-long battle with cancer, Variety reports. He was 80.

Schumacher’s publicist confirmed the filmmaker’s death, though did not offer any specifics on Schumacher’s cancer diagnosis. The publicist said he “passed away quietly” and “will be fondly remembered by his friends and collaborators.”

Schumacher spent five decades in Hollywood, an openly gay man who moved...

Joel Schumacher, the outspoken and shameless American filmmaker whose often flamboyant productions have become cult classics, died Monday morning at the age of 80. He passed away peacefully after a year-long battle with cancer, Schumacher’s representatives confirmed to IndieWire. His last efforts behind the camera were directing two episodes of the Netflix series “House of Cards” in 2013, though he’d since continued to regale with his unfiltered stories of Hollywood lore, most recently in a 2019 profile of the filmmaker in New York Magazine.

Born in New York City, Schumacher studied at Parsons New School for Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology — an education that informed his dazzling visual style as a filmmaker — before moving to Los Angeles to study at UCLA. His earliest credits in Hollywood included as costume designer on “Play It as It Lays” and Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” and “Interiors,” and as screenwriter of cult favorites “Sparkle,...

Joel Schumacher, the outspoken and shameless American filmmaker whose often flamboyant productions have become cult classics, died Monday morning at the age of 80. He passed away peacefully after a year-long battle with cancer, Schumacher’s representatives confirmed to IndieWire. His last efforts behind the camera were directing two episodes of the Netflix series “House of Cards” in 2013, though he’d since continued to regale with his unfiltered stories of Hollywood lore, most recently in a 2019 profile of the filmmaker in New York Magazine.

Born in New York City, Schumacher studied at Parsons New School for Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology — an education that informed his dazzling visual style as a filmmaker — before moving to Los Angeles to study at UCLA. His earliest credits in Hollywood included as costume designer on “Play It as It Lays” and Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” and “Interiors,” and as screenwriter of cult favorites “Sparkle,...

There’s a reason why, over the course of a career that has spanned nearly six decades, Joan Didion’s remarkable body of work has received the film adaptation treatment just twice. In 1972, Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne wrote the screenplay for Frank Perry’s big-screen take on her novel “Play It As It Lays,” a celluloid turn that Didion followed up with various contributions to other scripts unrelated to her own books (including the 1976 “A Star Is Born” remake).

Despite mostly good reviews for the Perry film, even Didion seemed to quickly get hip to the fact that her work isn’t necessarily translatable to other mediums. Others surely got the memo, too, with almost a half a century going by before anyone else tried to turn Didion’s gimlet-eyed writings into a movie. And time has not been kind to the endeavor: and even less by...

Tuesday Weld, nominated for an Oscar in 1978 for her co-starring role in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” has splashed out almost $1.8 million for a desirably private home in the Cahuenga Pass area of the Hollywood Hills. Invisible from the street and down a long driveway, the single-story, renovated ranch-style residence has four bedrooms and three bathrooms in just under 2,000 square feet.

A three-sided stacked-stone fireplace divides the living and dining rooms, both featuring chestnut-toned hardwoods, an integrated sound system and room-wide banks of sliding-glass doors that provide panoramic views over the neon lights of Universal CityWalk. Open to the dining room over a raised breakfast bar, the kitchen has up-to-date stainless steel appliances and stone-like speckled-granite countertops. Two guest bedrooms, one with a barn-style door that slides open to the laundry room, share a small hall bathroom, and a third guest bedroom is en suite. The master bedroom, unconventionally situated off the dining room,...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of the Moving Image

The Scorsese retrospective has a music-filled weekend with The Last Waltz, his George Harrison documentary, and more.

Anthology Film Archives

The late, great Leonard Cohen is paid tribute with a small retrospective that includes Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Jean Vigo’s masterpiece L’Atalante has showings.

In one of the more random celebrity mashups we've seen lately, Jennifer Lawrence appeared in a snap on Kris Jenner's Instagram account on Friday night. The photo apparently came out of a belated birthday celebration for Jennifer, seeing as Kris included the following caption: "Happy Birthday you piece of sh*t... God I love you #Jenniferlawrence thanks for making this night a night to remember.....even if we did get caught." Of course, Jennifer is a noted fan of reality TV - let's not forget how she fangirled over the Real Housewives with Eddie Redmayne and admitted to texting Liam Hemsworth about Vanderpump Rules - so it kind of makes sense that she'd want to hang with a Jenner. Even so, we have a few questions about how this all came about. Read them below, and let us explain why Jennifer's having such a great year. So, like . . . who texted whom?...

“We’re making it because no one else, incredibly, has made a documentary about Joan Didion. It’s a mystery.” During my senior year of college, the majority of my otherwise lax schedule (a brief flirtation with a double major had loaded up my credits during junior year) was built around a class called “Road Write,” a high-level class for English majors that was pretty much exactly what it sounds like — a class about the road, and also a class about writing. We read lots of books and poetry by the Beats, lots of books about California (I went to school in Los Angeles, but Road Write’s curriculum covered the entire state without prejudice) about travel, about movement, and about creativity. We also zipped through stacks of Joan Didion, burning through her earlier works like “Play It as It Lays” and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” We took trips to Malibu and Big Sur and Palm Springs and...

Anthony Perkins in Goodbye Again

Happy birthday to the man I call my Time Machine Husband (Tm), Anthony Perkins. The effete, beautiful actor best known for his astonishing performance as Norman Bates in Psycho would've been 81 today, and without even reading Charles Winecoff's gripping biography Split Image, you can tell in Mr. Perkins' performances that he was enigmatic, complicated, and conflicted. Though Perkins died of AIDS in 1992, his silver screenlegacy endures thanks to his lengthy, strange filmography.

Hollywood wanted Perkins to be the next James Dean, but his vulnerability and (frankly) apparent gayness stood at odds with that demand. As I like to say, we can't rewrite cinematic history to include all the wonderful gay characters we deserve, so we as gay entertainment anthropologists have to find our stories in the nuances, innuendos, and otherwise untold stories hidden right onscreen (perhaps unintentionally), right within all the stated heterosexuality. Though...

Deborah Kerr in the classic ghost story The Innocents, screenplay by Truman Capote.

The Anthology Film Archives in New York is holding a unique film festival throughout the month of September honoring screenwriters who were best known for their work as novelists. Here are the details:

On this calendar we are highlighting the screenwriting work of writers best known as novelists – including pulp novelists like Richard Matheson, Donald Westlake, and Elmore Leonard, cult figures such as Don Carpenter and John Fante, and such highly respected authors as Truman Capote and Joan Didion. Paying homage to the long tradition of novelists trying their hand at writing for the movies, we will present a selection of films based not on these writers’ novels, but on their original screenplays (which are sometimes adaptations of other novelists’ work).

From The Pen Of is programmed in close collaboration with author/musician Alan Licht.

Very special thanks to Alan Licht,...

News about writer/director Todd Field generally comes in fits and stars, but when it does arrive, it's usually pretty exciting. Earlier this month, his long-developing "The Creed of Violence" got a big boost when Christian Bale stepped into the lead role, and now comes another intriguing project, although it's not one he'll direct (for now). Field is teaming up with acclaimed author and essayist Joan Didion to write the political thriller "As It Happens." Jennifer Fox ("The Bourne Legacy," "We Need To Talk About Kevin," "Michael Clayton") will co-produce the project with Field, but it's Didion that truly has us intrigued. While she has dipped her toes into screenwriting, the bulk of it came in the '70s ("The Panic In Needle Park," "A Star Is Born" and an adaptation of her own novel "Play It As It Lays") and her last produced screenplay was 1996's "Up Close and.

New York. The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Béla Tarr opens today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through Wednesday, and R Emmet Sweeney has a wide-ranging talk with the retired filmmaker. "Whether or not The Turin Horse turns out to be Béla Tarr's last film, as the gnostic, gnomic Hungarian master has claimed it will be, the sense of finality is absolute," writes the L's Mark Asch. Aaron Cutler for Moving Image Source: "Primo Levi writes in Survival in Auschwitz that the lowest point a human can reach is when he or she is forced to act without choice, performing tasks purely for his or her own survival. Freedom of choice is what separates humans from other animals. The Tarr crew (which, beginning with him and partner, Ágnes Hranitzky, has gone on to include a regular screenwriter [László Krasznahorkai], composer [Mihály Vig], and cinematographer [Fred Kelemen]) began by comparing humans to each other,...

Bruce Springstreen has announced his new album title: Wrecking Ball, an angry-sounding name fitting for what The Hollywood Reporter learned will be his "angriest" offering yet. The record, scheduled to drop March 6 through Columbia Records, was produced by Springsteen and Ron Aniello (Lifehouse, Jars of Clay); Jon Landau, the singer's manager, also is on board as executive producer. It's the first time working on a Springsteen record for Aniello, who co-produced Play It as It Lays, the 2007 album by the singer's wife, Patti Scialfa. The track list for the album, recorded with the E Street Band:

read more...

"Tuesday Weld will not be attending the Film Society of Lincoln Center's retrospective American Girl: Tuesday Weld, running from September 21—25, which will showcase 10 performances by the unconventional actress." Louis Jordan, who's working on a biography of Weld, at the House Next Door: "For a tantalizing moment, the reclusive Weld agreed to be interviewed at the Walter Reade Theatre in an event called 'An Evening with Tuesday Weld,' but later suddenly cancelled. Weld hasn't made a public appearance in more than a decade. Perhaps she's gone into self-imposed exile a la Marlene Dietrich, wanting to preserve the public's memory of the brazen, luminous beauty that made her an icon of the '60s and turned the heads of everyone from Elvis Presley to Pinchas Zukerman. But then again, Weld has made a career of not giving the public what they want, or expect."

"As an actress, Weld is famous for...

This post was originally published when Shit Year premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. The film opens today at the IFC Center.

It is both accurate and reductive to call Cam Archer’s Shit Year, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight section, the story of a retiring actress grappling with the emotions produced by her move away from the Hollywood spotlight. Of course, on narrative terms, that is what it’s about. Ellen Barkin plays the actress, who has just given her final talk-show interview, moved to a cabin in the woods, and now spends her days avoiding her neighbors and flashing back to a brief affair she had with a younger actor (Luke Grimes) on the set of her last film. In an eerily composed performance, Barkin projects the steely emotional control of a woman determined not to descend into...

Starting this week, we're introducing a brand new weekly movie feature. Every Thursday, movie critic Alonso Duralde will guide you to what's new at the box office that a gay or bi guy (and our gay-friendly straight readers) might want to check out! Alonso will also have news about coming movies, trailers from coming attractions, pictures from the week's premieres and much more!

And now on with the show, er, column!

Opening This Week:

Taking Woodstock

The obvious place to start is with Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, a comic look behind the scenes at the legendary rock concert. (Am I alone among Gen-Xers in having grown tired of glassy-eyed nostalgia for this event sometime around 1981?)

It’s Lee’s first comedy since The Wedding Banquet in 1993, and Taking Woodstock confirms that the man behind Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon doesn’t have the lightest touch when it comes to wit and whimsy.