Seth Abramovitch
Sony Pictures Television issues a talking-points memo in an effort to minimize media backlash over Harmon’s exit as showrunner of the NBC series.
Vintage Siamese Cat Photos
On The Road To Awards Season? Kerouac Book Finally Makes It To The Screen After 55 Years – Cannes
Critics may have been mixed after this morning’s press screening,  but the World Premiere audience at
 Wednesday night’s Cannes gala of director Walter Salles’ long-gestating film On The Road was highly enthusiastic giving the film about the Beat Generation a 10 minute standing ovation. Co-producer Rebecca Yeldham said it was sweet justification for the 8 years she has been shepherding the picture with Salles. I caught up with her and the cast at the ultra-crowded after-party next door to the Palais at the oddly-named club, Magic Garden Meets LeBaron. The film based on the famous 1957 classic book by Jack Kerouac (actually written in 1951) has had several people attempt a film version with no luck and it has taken 55 years to get to the screen. Kerouac himself even sent it to Marlon Brando right after publication but never got a response. Francis Ford Coppola eventually secured the rights over 30 years ago but couldn’t come up with a way to make the complex film work. Finally Salles and his The Motorcycle Diaries screenwriter Jose Rivera cracked the code and after some false starts finally got the job done (Roman Coppola is also a producer on the film for American Zoetrope). IFC and Sundance Selects will distribute the film but it won’t be part of their VOD platform, but rather a major theatrical release. IFC’s and Sundance Selects President Jonathan Sehring, also at the party , said he couldn’t be higher on the film and they plan to open it in December and mount a major awards campaign. “We are going for it in a big way,†he said. “And initially I was skeptical about the whole thing. I didn’t know if it 
could work. I had never really seen a good Beat film done right before but Walter has done a magnificent job and all the actors are great. “She’s great,†he said pointing to Kristen Stewart who was standing in a nearby corner of the party talking with Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson (RPat is in Cannes for his own premiere on Friday, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis). Sehring’s been busy here. He is also high on the acquistion title, Sightseers, a wickedly dark and clever British comedy I saw today in Directors Fortnight. It’s one of the more entertaining films I have seen here this year and should find an audience. Director Ben Wheatley has a following. Sehring just viewed the film this week and quickly snapped it up for release in 2013. †We had handled Kill List, a film he wrote, but a  lot of people were after this one,†he said. Sehring sees so many films so quickly at film fests he always chews gum thoughout each one so he doesn’t doze off. He said he got the tip from a journalist. I think I will try it. Some of these films are real endurance tests.
When I got my chance to chat with Stewart who is here (with her mother too)  for her first Cannes ever, she told me she didn’t know what to make of the visible glowing reaction from the Grand Lumiere crowd after the film ended. “It was a very surreal experience for me. I didn’t know what to think. But if they had all roundly booed us I believe everyone in our row would have stood up and said ‘yeah, you go!’,†she said in the counter-cultural spirit of the film’s characters who behave in anything but conventional ways. Stewart has some topless nude scenes in the film which epouses sexual freedom even in the uptight era of the 50′s in which the beatnik story is set. For her playing Marylou (based on Luanne Henderson who at age 15 married Neal Cassady – known in the film as Dean Moriarty) was a challenge and one she was eager to take. Salles had seen her in Into The Wild and cast her in 2007 before Twilight turned her into a pop culture icon. Like most of the cast members she had to hang in there for a while before it finally came to fruition. Her agents urged her to drop out. “They kept saying ‘don’t do it’. It’s not on the page’ but I disagreed and I am so glad we all did it. I do relate to her in some ways but I am nothing like Marylou at all. I internalize everything. She’s the opposite,†she said. It certainly worked out. Stewart delivers here and audiences will see a side of the star they haven’t seen before.
Sam Riley plays the Kerouac character Sal Paradise and told me he actually first got the role right down the street here in Cannes when his wife Alexandra Maria Lara was a juror for the festival in 2008, the same year Salles had a film in competition, Linha De Passe. Salles told Lara he really liked Riley in Control, the movie in which they co-starred the previous year and so a meeting was arranged. Riley said the role was quite challenging because he has to listen a lot. Quite frankly it is never easy getting the essence and passion of a writer on film but this one, particularly in the kinetic final scene in which he starts to write his book , gets it right. Writers should eat it up. Riley obviously had been to Cannes before but he too was totally perplexed by the power of the ovation they all got. “I stood there wondering, ‘Do they pay these people to clap like that?’.†he asked.
Garrett Hedlund, previously best known as Jeff Bridges’s son in Tron Legacy and for the musical ,
Country Strong, plays the most flamboyant of the characters Dean Moriarty (based on Cassidy), a free loving and living Beat poet who often travelled with Kerouac. This is potentially a real breakout role for him. He dominates every scene he’s in. There’s one killer breakup sequence with wife Camille played with bite by Kirsten Dunst who also is back in Cannes for this film after winning Best Actress here one year ago for Melancholia and of course that famous press conference where her director Lars Von Trier said he sympathized with Hitler “a little†and caused an uproar. No such controversy this year.
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via Deadline.com http://www.deadline.com/2012/05/on-the-road-to-awards-season-kerouac-book-finally-makes-it-to-the-screen-after-55-years-cannes/
Two Female Soldiers Sue for Right to Enter Combat Positions
U.S. Army reservists Jane Baldwin and Ellen Haring filed a lawsuit against Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Army Secretary John McHugh on Wednesday that seeks to end the U.S. military’s ban on women in serving in combat roles. The suit says that the ban violates women’s Fifth Amendment right to equal protection and “restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits.”
The Pentagon refused to comment directly on the lawsuit, but spokesman George Little said that Panetta is, “strongly committed to examining the expansion of roles for women in the U.S. military, as evidenced by the recent step of opening up thousands of more assignments to women.” In February the Pentagon announced that it would open more than 14,000 new positions to women, but many complained that it was only a minor step forward for women serving in the military.
Due to the high demand for troops in the last decade, many women were already serving in these roles as temporary “attachments” to battalions. The reservists attacked this policy in their suit, calling the restrictions on women in combat “arbitrary and irrational,” and adding, “There is no practical difference, in terms of the work that servicewomen do, between ‘assigning’ women to a ground combat unit and ‘attaching’ women to a ground combat unit.”
Read more posts by Margaret Hartmann
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via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/05/female-soldiers-sue-to-enter-combat-positions.html
Bolaño’s Last, Great Secret
R.B. Moreno in The Millions:
Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Roberto Bolaño, the prolific genre-bender whose narratives and exile from Chile began seriously enchanting the literary world in 2005, the year The New Yorker began publishing his short stories. Altogether, nine stories have appeared in the magazine, including January’s “Labyrinth,†which accompanied a curious photograph. But I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a bit about Bolaño’s following, which may be credited in part to his early exit from said world at the age of 50, by way of liver failure. For the uninitiated, “Gomez Palacio,†his posthumous New Yorker debut about a tormented writer interviewing for a teaching post in a remote Mexican town, tends to work a kind of magic. A ragged copy of the issue in which “Gomez Palacio†appeared caught critic Francine Prose in a waiting room: “I was glad the doctor was running late,†she wrote later in reviewing Last Evenings on Earth, “so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.â€
Francisco Goldman, who likened “The Great Bolaño†to Borges in a profile for The New York Review of Books, dates the ex-Chilean’s rise to 1999, the year The Savage Detectives won a coveted Venezuelan prize for the best Spanish-language novel. “The inseparable dangers of life and literature, and the relationship of life to literature, were the constant themes of Bolaño’s writings,†reads Goldman’s summary of his subject’s legacy, which at the time spanned ten novels and three story collections. (Bolaño’s drive to finish his 900-page masterwork, 2666, a far-flung novel involving the murders of women in the Sonora desert, is thought to have exacerbated his liver condition.) “It’s as if Bolaño is satirizing the routine self-pity of exile,†adds Goldman, in turning to one of his short fictions (“Mauricio ‘The Eye’ Silvaâ€). “Yet the story’s mood of nearly inexpressible and lonely grief leaves you an intuitive sense of its truthfulness, which seems something other than a literal truthfulness.â€
via 3quarksdaily http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2012/05/bola%C3%B1os-last-great-secret.html
Bill Clinton’s celebrity London bash called “worst party everâ€
An exclusive London event hosted by Bill Clinton with tickets costing up to $1,600 was blasted as “the worst party ever†by guests who…
via NY Post: Page Six http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/bill_bash_bust_A3TpJ5X0tEUK2F8a2jaE4O?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=%20%20%20%20%20%20Page%20Six
Engelbart’s Violin
A detailed history, explanation, and defense of the chorded keyboard.
via MetaFilter http://www.metafilter.com/116243/Engelbarts-Violin
Did Some Appalachian Whites Oppose Obama Because of His Race? Yes. Of Course.
Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake spend around 1100 words teasing out the uncomfortable questions about Barack Obama’s piss-poor Kentucky/Arkansas primary results. Yes, Obama’s blackness is probably something that causes a few white voters to shudder. But…
simply labeling the 42 percent of Kentuckians who supported “uncommitted†over Obama or the 41 percent of Arkansas who backed Tennessee lawyerÂ
John Wolfe over the incumbent as “racists†is a major oversimplification. Untangling or decoupling how people feel about Obama’s race from how they feel about the policies he has pursued in office and his general beliefs about the size and necessity of government is impossible. No poll or election result can divine voters’ motivations.
Really? No poll? How about the exit polls from Appalachian states that were conducted at the end of the 2008 Democratic primary? In West Virginia:
In Kentucky:
Long before they knew anything about how Obama would govern, or whether he’d make War on Coal, a sizable number of Appalachian whites grabbed anonymous exit poll forms and confirmed that they would vote against the guy because they didn’t like his skin color. Hard to calculate, but not impossible.
via Slate Blogs http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/05/24/did_some_appalachian_whites_oppose_obama_because_of_his_race_yes_of_course_.html
Media Decoder: New Orleans Times Picayune About to Undergo Big Cuts
The New Orleans Times-Picayune survived Hurricane Katrina, but its owner, Newshouse Newspapers, appears to be ending its run as the sole daily newspaper in New Orleans.
via NYT > Television http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo
$18.5M settlement for ‘Transformers 3’ injury
The family of a woman left with brain damage after an accident during the filming of “Transformers 3” has reached an $18.5 million settlement with Paramount Pictures.
via Yahoo! News – Latest News & Headlines http://news.yahoo.com/18-5m-settlement-transformers-3-injury-235632578.html