The whole article is good, but I want to highlight two parts:
“Bezos’ financial empire relies on federal contracts.”
I learned, for instance, that the newspaper’s media critic, Erik Wemple, had submitted an essay about his disappointment in the new edicts. Then I found out that the piece had been spiked, and wrote about that.
To bring it back to Bond: as part of an empire that is a) beholden to government largess, and b) does not tolerate dissent, community members can rest assured that Bezos Bond will never, ever go rogue.
This one will certainly be of interest to @MrKiddWint. It doesn’t have a concrete Bond angle other than giving a glimpse into avant-garde filmmaking of the 1960s - and for a time, Bond films used to be at least akin to avant-garde.
Thanks @Dustin. As the article notes, Godard rarely followed the script he wrote, so it would be interesting to read. He (in)famously had someone write a script for ALPHAVILLE to get funds, and then ignored it when making the movie.
Indeed, dreadful business. And not at all harmless, as countless cases of femicide show. Often enough authorities are slow to act decisively or fail at all to fully grasp the seriousness of such behaviour - until it is too late.
Yes, they are, though not in conformity with the traditional lines by which creators were acknowledged/anointed.
When I saw the article and decided to post it, I thought of you, and said to myself: “SAF needs to get his platform going.” In some ways, today’s creators are the descendants of the club kids of yesteryear, who made dressing up, and going out into fantastic acts of creation–for themselves and their friends.
In their case, the audience was limited to the cohort of people who went out alongside them, but the concept of the presentation of oneself as an art work was there. Nowadays, TikTok and all the other platforms provide a larger potential audience for these creators to curate a world and a vision.
Film also has such traditions–think of John Cassavetes, Jean-Pierre Melville, Peter Watkins, Ernie Gehr, and many other avant-garde/outsider artists. They are/were not studio-based creators, but create(d) the conditions/circumstances for their own art-making.
If younger artists do not have to enter the institutions in order to create, then it is not surprising that they are not interested in what the institutions are creating, since members of their cohort are not involved. As John Carpenter says in an interview published today: “The studios aren’t what they were. They’re kind of these old bones of dinosaurs sitting there. It’s sad now. This is not the business I got into.”
There is one other aspect of our current social development that’s going to be problematic for the industry and Bond in particular: our society is increasingly going down a route towards solitude in everyday life. This has already been going on for some time, but it’s been accelerating over recent years. And it will definitely mess with the cinema release of Bond films. Perhaps not BOND 26 - but certainly with BOND 27 and onwards.
It will mess with the release of all films. The nature of movie-going is being altered on a fundamental basis.
Small example: last night I was watching AVANTI! (1972) on Blu-ray, and my husband commented that it was “so grainy.”
In a spousally supportive way, I pointed out that it was supposed to be grainy, and that removing grain is one of the most unforgiveable of cinematic sins. He went to read a book.
That’s very encouraging of you, and I actually am right now at a juncture where I made some decisions in order to plan the next stage (last decade) of my career. Which is quite frightening due to the bonkers situation the industry is now in.
My hope is to be less constrained by people who are not in love with storytelling, only in hitting the numbers the beancounters are mostly incorrect in predicting.
Striving for more independence at a time like this, though, might be quite naive…
Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.
BBC…why are you surprised that the WB owned Harry Potter isn’t there when attractions based on things Universal have distributed is at a Universal theme park?
