Mid Movie Quotes

But the muse won’t always cooperate and she will never be coerced. Sometimes she’d rather take a nap or see a mid-afternoon movie.

The wizards from the mid-1990s or later refused to discuss any movies at all for fear of letting slip any details of the Star Wars prequels or the fourth Indiana Jones, a group of works that the later wizards would only refer to by the collective title The Unpleasantness.

Remember that string of movies when we were younger, like mid ’90s? The ones where the nerdy girl finally puts on makeup and a Wonderbra and everyone realizes how totally boneable she is?” “Yeah.” “Well, that’s you,” she says. “We’re in one of those movies. You’re my hopeless teenage girl, all stuck in your shell, and I’m here to give you a fresh coat of makeup and a slutty dress. Push those boobies up, Andy Carter, it’s go time.” “Do

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we are going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

Q: Are you guys shooting a movie? A: No. We're opening a mid-priced Italian restaurant. Q: Huh? A: Yes of course we're shooting a movie. Q: What's the movie about? A: It's a documentary about human stupidity. Q: Can I be in your movie? A: We'd be stupid not to put you in it.

The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living. An increasing part of living, at my age, is mere bodily maintenance, which is tiresome. But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.

By mid-summer only Ma Barker remained in Chicago, lost in her jigsaw puzzles. Karpis drove over to visit her one weekend and found she was doing surprisingly well. He and Dock took her to see a movie. To their horror, the film was preceded by a newsreel warning moviegoers to be on the lookout for Dillinger, Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Karpis, and the Barkers. Karpis scrunched low in his seat as their pictures flashed on the screen. “One of these men may be sitting next to you,” the announcer said. Karpis pulled his hat low over his forehead.

The Wall as a piece represents large amount of material spread across a range of media: the record, the concerts – enhanced with film, stage effects an props – and a movie. This has been Roger’s intention from the outset. He had already shown his fondness for exploring the possibilities of multimedia, but the Wall took things considerable further. The whole project also covered a large amount of time, a period of work that actually lasted from mid-1978, when Roger was creating the initial version, until 1982, with the release of the movie.

I begin this chapter with President Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Speech on January 11, 1989. President Reagan encouraged the rising generation to “let ’em know and nail ’em on it”—that is, to push back against teachers, professors, journalists, politicians, and others in the governing generation who manipulate and deceive them: An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties. But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection]. So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.1

Cassidy had been created by Clarence Mulford, writer of formula western novels and pulpy short stories. In the stories, Cassidy was a snorting, drinking, chewing relic of the Old West. Harry Sherman changed all that when he bought the character for the movies. Sherman hired Boyd, a veteran of the silent screen whose star had faded, to play a badman in the original film. But Boyd seemed more heroic, and Sherman switched the parts before the filming began. As Cassidy, Boyd became a knight of the range, a man of morals who helped ladies cross the street but never stooped to kiss the heroine. He was literally black and white, his silver hair a vivid contrast to his black getup. He did not smoke, believed absolutely in justice, honor, and fair play, and refused to touch liquor. Boyd’s personal life was not so noble. Born in Ohio in 1898, he had arrived in Hollywood for the first golden age, working with Cecil B. DeMille in a succession of early silents. By the mid-1920s he was a major star. Wine, women, and money were his: he drank and gambled, owned estates, married five times. But it all ended when another actor named William Boyd was arrested for possession of whiskey and gambling equipment.

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we're gonna have it haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

There are two Santa Monicas. One is a fairy tale of spangled gowns and improbable breasts and faces from the tabloids, of big money and fixed noses and strung-out voice teachers and heiresses on skateboards and even bigger big money; of movie stars you thought were dead and look dead; of terraced apartment buildings cascading down perilous yellow bluffs toward the sea; of Olympic swimmers and hip-hop hit men and impresarios of salvation and twenty-six-year-old agents backing out of deals in the lounge bar at Shutters; of yoga masters and street magicians; of porn kings and fast cars and microdosing prophets and shuck-and-jive evangelists and tattooed tycoons and considerably bigger big money; of Sudanese busboys with capped teeth and eight-by-ten glossies in their back pockets; of Ivy League panhandlers, teenage has-beens, home-run kinds in diamonds and fur coats, daughters of sultans, sons of felons, widows of the silver screen, and the kind of meaningless big money that has forgotten what money is. There is that. But start at the pier and head southeast until you reach a neighborhood of tidy, more or less identical stucco houses separated by fourteen feet of scorched grass. In a number of these homes, you will find families, or the descendants of families, who have lived here since the mid-to-late forties. For them, upscale was a Chevy in the driveway. Mom mixed up Kool-Aid at ten cents a gallon, Pop pushed used cars at a dealership off Wilshire Boulevard, Junior had a paper route, Sis did some weekend babysitting. Nowadays, the house Pop bought for $37,000 will fetch just under two million in a sluggish market, but as Pop loved to say, secretly proud "What kind of house do you buy with the profit? A pup tent? A toolshed in Laguna?

My sisters and I giggled at “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three” (“Tits and ass / bought myself a fancy pair / tightened up the derriere”) while our parents sat in the front of the car—my father at the wheel, my mom in the passenger seat—both distracted and nonplussed. We flipped through the Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins hardbacks in my grandmother’s bookshelf and watched The Exorcist on the Z Channel (the country’s first pay-cable network that premiered in LA in the mid-’70s) after our parents sternly told us not to watch it, but of course we did anyway and got properly freaked out. We saw skits about people doing cocaine on Saturday Night Live, and we were drawn to the allure of disco culture and unironic horror movies. We consumed all of this and none of it ever triggered us—we were never wounded because the darkness and the bad mood of the era was everywhere, and when pessimism was the national language, a badge of hipness and cool. Everything was a scam and everybody was corrupt and we were all being raised on a diet of grit. One could argue that this fucked us all up, or maybe, from another angle, it made us stronger. Looking back almost forty years later, it probably made each of us less of a wuss. Yes, we were sixth and seventh graders dealing with a society where no parental filters existed. Tube8.com was not within our reach, fisting videos were not available on our phones, nor were Fifty Shades of Grey or gangster rap or violent video games, and terrorism hadn’t yet reached our shores, but we were children wandering through a world made almost solely for adults. No one cared what we watched or didn’t, how we felt or what we wanted, and we hadn’t yet become enthralled by the cult of victimization. It was, by comparison to what’s now acceptable when children are coddled into helplessness, an age of innocence.

In Hollywood today, the simple truth is that there are two types of movie studios: Disney, and those that wish they were Disney. Understanding why studios have turned so aggressively toward franchises, sequels, and superheroes and away from originality, risks, and mid-budget dramas takes more than an appreciation for the financial pressures faced by executives like Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal. Just as Olympic swimmers can’t help but pace themselves against Michael Phelps, Sony and its competitors have for years been jealous of and frustrated by Disney. Hollywood is a herd industry. Its executives are constantly looking out the side window or at the rearview mirror and asking, “Why aren’t we doing that?” For those peering at Disney, that means slashing the number of movies made per year by two-thirds. It also means largely abandoning any type of film that costs less than $100 million, is based on an original idea, or appeals to any group smaller than all the moviegoers around the globe. Disney doesn’t make dramas for adults. It doesn’t make thrillers. It doesn’t make romantic comedies. It doesn’t make bawdy comedies. It doesn’t make horror movies. It doesn’t make star vehicles. It doesn’t adapt novels. It doesn’t buy original scripts. It doesn’t buy anything at film festivals. It doesn’t make anything political or controversial. It doesn’t make anything with an R-rating. It doesn’t give award-winning directors like Alfonso Cuarón or Christopher Nolan wide latitude to pursue their visions.

...grand oaks, maples, and chestnuts muscle in on one another, flared in their autumn robes; a motley conflagration under the dazzling mid-October sun. We are in the middle of a beautiful nowhere, digging into sprawling hinterlands, into territories of wild earth. The rolling, winding roads away from Bangor took us through towns with names like Charleston, Dover-Foxcroft, Monson, and Shirley, all with their own quaint, beautifully cinematic set dressing. It was like each was curated from grange hall flea markets and movie sets rife with small-town Americana. Stoic stone war memorials. American flags. Whitewashed, chipping town hall buildings from other centuries. Church bell towers in the actual process of tolling, gonging, calling. To me, the sound was ominous in a remote sort of way, unnamable.

The theme of music making the dancer dance turns up everywhere in Astaire’s work. It is his most fundamental creative impulse. Following this theme also helps connect Astaire to trends in popular music and jazz, highlighting his desire to meet the changing tastes of his audience. His comic partner dance with Marjorie Reynolds to the Irving Berlin song “I Can’t Tell a Lie” in Holiday Inn (1942) provides a revealing example. Performed in eighteenth-century costumes and wigs for a Washington’s birthday–themed floor show, the dance is built around abrupt musical shifts between the light classical sound of flute, strings, and harpsichord and four contrasting popular music styles played on the soundtrack by Bob Crosby and His Orchestra, a popular dance band. Moderate swing, a bluesy trumpet shuffle, hot flag-waving swing, and the Conga take turns interrupting what would have been a graceful, if effete, gavotte. The script supervisor heard these contrasts on the set during filming to playback. In her notes, she used commonplace musical terms to describe the action: “going through routine to La Conga music, then music changing back and forth from minuet to jazz—cutting as he holds her hand and she whirls doing minuet.”13 Astaire and Reynolds play professional dancers who are expected to respond correctly and instantaneously to the musical cues being given by the band. In an era when variety was a hallmark of popular music, different dance rhythms and tempos cued different dances. Competency on the dance floor meant a working knowledge of different dance styles and the ability to match these moves to the shifting musical program of the bands that played in ballrooms large and small. The constant stylistic shifts in “I Can’t Tell a Lie” are all to the popular music point. The joke isn’t only that the classical-sounding music that matches the couple’s costumes keeps being interrupted by pop sounds; it’s that the interruptions reference real varieties of popular music heard everywhere outside the movie theaters where Holiday Inn first played to capacity audiences. The routine runs through a veritable catalog of popular dance music circa 1942. The brief bit of Conga was a particularly poignant joke at the time. A huge hit in the late 1930s, the Conga during the war became an invitation to controlled mayhem, a crazy release of energy in a time of crisis when the dance floor was an important place of escape. A regular feature at servicemen’s canteens, the Conga was an old novelty dance everybody knew, so its intrusion into “I Can’t Tell a Lie” can perhaps be imagined as something like hearing the mid-1990s hit “Macarena” after the 2001 terrorist attacks—old party music echoing from a less complicated time.14 If today we miss these finer points, in 1942 audiences—who flocked to this movie—certainly got them all. “I Can’t Tell a Lie” was funnier then, and for specifically musical reasons that had everything to do with the larger world of popular music and dance. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, many such musical jokes or references can be recovered by listening to Astaire’s films in the context of the popular music marketplace.

Not like Ainsley. My wife was remarkable, with natural, auburn hair that fell to her mid-back, never a hair out of place unless we were in bed. Her skin was so porcelain I could trace my fingers along her veins when I studied them. She was curved in all the right places, thin in the others. I had no idea girls like her existed outside of dirty magazines and movies until we met.

End June 2012 In response to Dr. Arius’ questions for his research, I wrote: Dr. A.S., As always it is a delight to receive your emails. I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions. I’ll respond to them one at a time. Please bear with me if my answers are lengthy at times. If I veer off into a tangent, please feel free to eliminate or edit my response. I’m eager to find out the results your research will yield when you are done with the survey. I’m ready to begin. Question one: * In “Initiation,” you said that as far as you can remember, even as a baby, you disliked your father. What was it that you didn’t like about the man? Did he have a certain smell that repelled you or something conscious or subconscious that blocked your connection towards him? Answers: Although I cannot provide you with definitive answers, I’ll do my best to remember how I felt when I was with my dad. a) Mr. S.S. Foong was a heavy smoker since the day I was born. I presume as a baby, the cigarette smell on his person repelled me. His aggressively loud booming voice did nothing to my gentle ears, either. Although he never shouted at me when I was a child, his stern demeanor deterred me from wanting to be near him. Moreover, his angry reprimands toward his subordinates when they had done nothing wrong challenged my respect for the man I called Father. b) Maybe unconsciously I was imbued with a glamorized portrayal of the “ideal” family from western magazines, movies, and periodicals of the mid-20th century. I wanted a father whom I could look up to: a strong, kind man who understands the needs of his family and children. But this was a Hollywood invention. It doesn’t exist, or it exists empirically in a small sector of the global population. c) Since my dad was seldom at home (he was with his mistress and their children), it was difficult to have a loving relationship with the man, especially when he roared and rebuked me for my effeminate behavior over which I had no control. I was simply being who I was. His negative criticisms damaged my ego badly. d) I could not relate to his air of superiority toward my mother. I resented that aspect of my father. I swore to myself that I would not grow up to be like my old man.

Not with my hair like this.” I touched its short red-gold strands. He snorted. “Oh, yeah, like that’s a master disguise no one could see through.” “But if you and Kara were covering me, then—” “Do you even know what ‘covering’ someone means?” Alex asked coldly. “This isn’t a movie. Do you really want us to have to start shooting at a screaming mob to get you out of there if something goes wrong?” Where had this argument come from? “No, of course I don’t want that,” I said. Everyone had gone quiet, watching us. Trish’s eyes were wide; her coffee mug paused in mid-air. “But Alex, you know I can usually sense if a place is going to be a danger to me. I mean, okay, it’s not foolproof, but—” “Willow.” He lashed my name at me like a whip. “I said no, all right? Drop it.” It felt like he had slapped me. In the sudden roaring silence, Alex tossed the sheet down and shoved his chair back. He left the room without a word. My

That is their work, they imply, and they also imply that you, and your actual work, are fine but also neglectful and sad. They don’t say that, though. They say, Don’t worry if you can’t be there, at the mid-fall solstice sing-along, the late-winter sledding-song craft fair and potluck. Not a big deal with the mid-spring parent-student doubles badminton under-the-lights evening funmaker. No problem with the mother-daughter pajama party on every third Wednesday movie day Sound of Music bring your own guitar or lyre. No need to bring treats on your child’s birthday. No need to come in for career day. No need to swing by the opening of the new art studio which features real clay-throwing technology. Don’t care about art? Not an issue. No need, no need, no need, it’s fine, no problem, though you really are selfish and your children doomed. When they are first to try crack—they will try it and love it and sell it to our culture-loving children—we will know why.

My typical day began at five o'clock in the morning when I would finish reading scripts by the side of Rebecca's bed until she woke up at seven. It was thrilling to find a script that I loved, something I desperately wanted to make. And when I found one, my day was made by seven A.M. If I didn't have a script to finish, I had notes to make on those I had read. And if I'd finished my notes, I went downstairs to exercise. After mornings with Rebecca, I'd arrive at the office at nine-thirty. The phone calls had started long before I got there. By ten o'clock I was in a staff meeting, and depending on the day of the week, it was either a production, marketing/distribution or business-affairs meeting. By eleven-thirty, I might be in a meeting with an executive about a particular movie or problem. By twelve, I was meeting with a director I was trying to seduce back to the studio. By twelve forty-five, I'd get in my car and drive across town to a lunch meeting with an agent, a producer, a writer or a movie star. While driving, I'd start to return the phone calls that had started before I ever arrived at my office. At two-thirty, I was back in the car, returning more phone calls, the calls from early morning, from mid-morning, plus East Coast and Europe calls that came in during lunch. At two forty-five, I was back in the office. Inevitably, there were people waiting to see me, executives with personal problems, political problems, and/or production problems. In between, I returned and made more phone calls. At three-thirty, there could be a meeting with someone I was trying to bring to the studio. At four-thirty, there was a script meeting with an executive, writer, producer and/or director. At five o'clock, there were selected dailies of the movies we were shooting. And if I hadn't finished watching them by six-thirty, the rest were put on tape for me to watch later at home. At six-thirty, I'd jump into my car and return more phone calls on my drive home. The call sheet numbered one hundred to one hundred and fifty calls a day. And I always felt it was very important to return every call. The lesson here is people remember when you don't call them back. I'd go home to be with Rebecca. If I didn't have a business dinner or a sneak preview of one of our movies, I had to go to a black-tie event. There was at least one of them a week, honoring someone from our industry. I went out of respect for the talent involved and my counterparts at the other studios. So Rebecca would keep me company while I washed off my makeup, put on new makeup, dressed in black tie, kissed her good-bye and shot out the door. That's where men really have it good: they just put on a tux and go. After I got home at ten-thirty, I would sit on the chair next to Rebecca's bed. Watching her sleep dissolved all the stress in my body. Then I would get up, either finish watching the dailies, or read a script, wash my face and fall into bed at eleven-thirty. But the part of my workday that made me the happiest was when I was closest to the actual making of a movie.

Anne and I took a train in one day to meet Jamesy Black, a guy she had known in Glasgow. He was a fellow student of hers at the art school and had married an impossibly glamorous American fashion model named Lucy. They lived on Avenue B between Ninth and Tenth streets, which, during the early and mid-1980s, was one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in New York City. We met Jamesy at the Odessa, that wonderful café on Avenue A. I had never been to the East Village before. I thought I’d died and gone to punk-rock heaven. There were Goths and junkies and rockers everywhere, mixed in with the scary street-life people. The whole neighborhood seemed alive with a tangible, cinematic danger. Everywhere I looked was a movie set—there

Kelly is the only one who knew me when we were both young and pretty, when we were impulsive and the world seemed full of men, and we would find ourselves sometimes transported by sex, picked up and carried into situations that, in the muddle of memory, seem a bit like movie scenes. She is the only one who would understand that I am relieved to find a sliver of this girl still inside me. Relieved to find that, although older and more suspicious and heavy with marriage, under the right circumstances I can still be picked up and carried.

In fact, the wizards from the mid-1990s or later refused to discuss any movies at all for fear of letting slip any details of the Star Wars prequels or the fourth Indiana Jones, a group of works that the later wizards would only refer to by the collective title The Unpleasantness.

Roy shook his head. He was the oldest man in the room in terms of physical age, because he was in his early fifties, and because he was from the year 1973. He also was an aerospace engineer by training and exuded a demeanor of terse, dependable authority. “See, kids, back in Phil’s and my day, if you made a good movie, you took that success and made a different movie, not the same movie over again.” Phillip was the second-oldest man in the room. He was in his early forties, from the mid-1980s, and exuded an air of foppish, fallible authority. He smiled broadly and said, “Actually, that was your day. In my day they had started doing the endless sequel thing. This movie was from before, and I don’t think there was ever any plan for a sequel.

from their peak in 2006, and the decline is explained entirely by the evaporation of interesting, intelligent mid-budget films. Studios realized their assumption that they had to make every type of movie for everyone was no longer true. So they focused on the types of movies that delivered the biggest and most consistent profits to their publicly traded parent corporations. Increasingly, that meant movies that appealed to audiences in Russia, Brazil, and China. These consumers weren’t likely to understand the cultural subtleties of an American drama or to consider people talking or even running for their lives to be adequate bang for their buck on an expensive night out. They expected spectacle, particularly if they were paying premiums for an IMAX or 3D screen, and they wanted stories that made sense to a villager in China, a resident of Rio de Janeiro, or a teenager in Kansas City. Transformers, in other words. And The Avengers. And Jurassic World and Fast and Furious and Star Wars. With the exception of 1997’s Titanic, which made a spectacle out of the sinking of a cruise ship and Leonardo DiCaprio’s eyes, the forty-eight highest-grossing Hollywood films overseas are all visual-effects-heavy action-adventure films or family animation.

That's the thing about Ohio - winter drags on so long that once mid-March hits, if it's above forty degrees everyone's outside wearing shorts and t-shirts and dining on patios.

A few months later, Sandler got word that Netflix, newly interested in movies, had set its sights squarely on him. Using data gathered from Sony movies that Netflix had played through its Starz deal, Sarandos’s team knew that even as his box-office power waned, Sandler remained one of the most popular stars on the streaming service. His aging audience might be less likely to pay to see him in a theater, but they still loved laughing at his antics at home. “We knew he was popular in markets where his movies had never even opened,” Sarandos said. The mid-budget star vehicle, in other words, still worked great for Netflix. When people went to theaters, they preferred brand-name franchises. But when they were browsing for something to stream rather than pay fifty dollars for a night out, a familiar face doing the familiar shtick was perfect. Movies without massive visual effects were just as enjoyable at home, after all, if not more so. And if the stars had chosen to stretch their wings and you didn’t like the movie you clicked on, you could turn it off immediately. You lost a little bit of time, but not any money. And though there may not be as many fans of Adam Sandler, or any movie star, as there used to be, that didn’t necessarily matter to Netflix. All studios care about is how many people buy tickets or DVDs. They get their money whether you loved the movie or hated it. But Netflix measures success by how many people finish a movie and are satisfied enough to keep subscribing as a result, or who sign up just in order to watch it. Adam Sandler’s fan base may have shrunk, but those who remained were loyal and they were global—just what Netflix wanted. Additionally, Netflix wouldn’t have to spend millions of dollars on billboards and TV ads to market each film. Its algorithm would prominently suggest each Sandler movie to his fans on their home screen the moment it was available.

Emotions Dreams I feel like my skin is crawling with viruses when it is on my figure. It’s mid-November and I am standing in the rain, as I run out the door it is, so cold, so lonely, and so freaking loveless! As I found my way back to him, I left behind oh so long ago. Up till now this is not habitual for me, I am always naked around my house, yet this is not a home at all, I don’t know what you call this place, it’s like a school however not so. I have my reason you’ll see, not to say too much, I have someone looking down at me with the eyes and the face and crap. The rain is falling on me, eyes and ears, and boys and girls all like knives inside me, never since the moment I got off the damn bus so it could just run my ass over and get it over with. The rain is matting my long brown hair on me as it lies on down my rump, just like a movie just like the books. Just like me living it, like her. Some of this shower is cascading off my little face, and it slowly collects on my breasts, where it beads up and separates into two different watercourses down to my belly button. I eyeball it, as it goes all the way down the front of me. Yet I am okay with it… at last, I am free. To a fact! I still feel so shut in by all of them. Ten or twenty-five or three minutes have passed, I am still in a similar varied advertisement. ‘Girly portion.’ Almost like a waterfall gushing in-between my legs. It trickles down to me to where it turns and goes in my butt cheeks, falling too and thrashing my mud exposed toes. After standing so long, holding me upright, weekly my legs so not right give out. Just letting water follow me down. I'm soaked! Soft thump, sooner or later the pounding gets rains resilient. Making me fall to the ground with where I will remain until I feel that I can get up and over what has happened to me. I can feel the wetness as it lingers in my hair for a while, so unforgivably waterlogged my body even more. That’s if I can… like if I can accept it all. It’s all because of them! Counting my sanctification, I feel dissatisfied in a way when I do feel it releasing offends my hair. Like it is wiping away everything that happened to me today, away from the day of the past. I feel the dropping rain weeping for me, like hell’s tears of pain and flam it runs out of me as I yell out for his safety in a call of his name.

While timing was only part of the issue with Doris Day, it would be a key reason why, from the mid-1950s onward, good people were unable to appear in good musicals. An original like Never Steal Anything Small was unsuccessful on every level—and heinous in its waste of Jimmy Cagney’s talent—while skillful adaptations like Silk Stockings and Bells Are Ringing flopped resoundingly. As fewer opportunities arose, they were sometimes attended by the questionable notion that dubbing solves all problems. This is why Rossano Brazzi and Sidney Poitier could look great, in South Pacific and Porgy and Bess, and sound ostensibly like the opera singers who were doing the actual vocalizing. While dubbing had been present from the very beginning, it achieved some kind of pinnacle from the mid-fifties to the late sixties. Hiring nonsinging names like Deborah Kerr and Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn, even nonsinging non-names like Richard Beymer, was viewed as a form of insurance, conviction be damned.8 Casting for name recognition instead of experience has long been part of the film equation, and it cuts both ways. It may, for example, have seemed more astute than desperate to put Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood into Paint Your Wagon, despite the equivocal results. Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge! was far less a musical player than a photogenic, aurally enhanced artifact, and many people left Mamma Mia! wondering if Pierce Brosnan’s execrable singing was intended as a deliberate joke. In contrast with these are the film people who take the plunge with surprising ease.

To this day, Huston seems less amazed that she found Polanski with a thirteen-year-old girl than that he was arrested for being so. "Those were the days where everybody thought that was just great," she remembered. "Everybody was operating with immunity. . . . Somebody takes the fall, and I think Roman probably took the fall for a lot of immunities. A lot of people I know at the time were going out with extremely young women, maybe not on a regular basis, but he certainly wasn't the only person around town who was sleeping with very young women.'97 It was a measure of how thoroughly the cloud of decadence had settled onto the Los Angeles scene by the mid-1970s that it didn't strike Huston as particularly unusual to find Polanski with a girl that young. Among the stars glittering in LA, the vices varied, but the costs were consistent.

Anyone comparing photos of Glenn Frey and Don Henley in 1972 and, say, 1977 could track the price of the years of drugs and high living. Julia Phillips's drug addiction incinerated her Hollywood career. Martin Scorsese barely survived his own cocaine addiction in the mid-seventies. Since the days of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, Los Angeles had sold a vision of personal liberation. A decade later, liberation had curdled into license. The theme song for Los Angeles in the buoyant early 1970s could have been "Take It Easy" or "Rock Me on the Water." But by 1976, when the Eagles released Hotel California, the mood of lengthening shadows was more precisely captured by their rueful "Life in the Fast Lane.

Rae Lynn was a Gemini. And a night person. Her favorite drink was a strawberry margaritas and her favorite perfume was straight vanilla extract... Her favorite movie star used to be Mel Gibson, but now that he'd had such an obvious mid-life crisis, it was Matthew McConaughey and she felt too much loyalty to ER to even start on Grey's Anatomy. If she were a Crayola Crayon, she's be bluebell. And if she was a kind of weather, she's be the rain when it spits. She couldn't even remember her natural hair color, and she twirled spaghetti, not cut it. And if she knew the world was ending tomorrow she'd go out and eat a whole pecan pie and not care if it gave her a migraine. Jane didn't know if Rae Lynn preferred her men shy and inexperienced, but she hoped so. They all hoped so. If only Rae Lynn could see past Jimmy's deficits to the deeply kind and honorable man who dwelt inside.

What brought chautauqua to a sudden end were the automobile, the movies and above all the advent of radio. By the mid-twenties almost every rural American family had a car and could drive to the larger towns and cities to see a good movie or take in a concert or a play. But it was radio that dealt the death blow.

Nuggsy continued on. ‘Seriously, legend. A bloke might have a six-figure salary at a job he truly loves, but it all means nothing if he has a shit rig and a poor grasp of Anchorman quotes. It probably doesn’t even matter if he averages in the mid-30s and does a lot at the club, because he’ll never go anywhere.’ I briefly wondered as to the relevance of Will Ferrell movie quotes, but then remembered back to my first training session. I had overheard a crew of second graders reciting dialogue from the movie Step Brothers while mucking around on the slips cradle. Obviously this broad style of comedy had particular resonance within grade cricket circles. The humour was absurd, male-skewed, anti-intellectual, and highly quotable. Suddenly, I was beginning to understand the things that made grade cricketers tick. Meanwhile, Nuggsy continued to bluster on, flecks of spit now hissing out from his animated mouth. The next piece of advice he had for me revolved around women: a subject I knew little about.

Long-term observers of video games will remember that they went through something of an identity crisis in the mid-'00s, during which they were continually trying to ape films, as if the creative apex of the video game form was to be exactly like a movie... It took a good while for games to emerge from this phase and realise that they didn't actually have to be like film; that they have their own ways of telling stories, their own ways of getting into your head. Dark Souls didn't start that counter-movement, but it was a hugely persuasive example of it.

Long-term observers of video games will remember that they went through something of an identity crisis in the mid-'00s, during which they were continually trying to ape films, as if the creative apex of the video game form was to be exactly like a movie... It took a good while for games to emerge from this phase and realise that they didn't actually have to be like film; that they have their own ways of telling stories, their own ways of getting into your head... An especially interesting aspect of Dark Souls' story is that it could only be told through a video game, making it almost unique. It tells us very little through the mediums of text or film, and vast amounts through context, exploration and environmental storytelling that simply would not be possible in any other format. Nowadays it's widely regarded as a masterclass in interactive narrative design, despite the fact that any given player could bypass the story entirely if they weren't inclined to investigate.

Long-term observers of video games will remember that they went through something of an identity crisis in the mid-'00s, during which they were continually trying to ape films, as if the creative apex of the video game form was to be exactly like a movie... It took a good while for games to emerge from this phase and realise that they didn't actually have to be like film; that they have their own ways of telling stories, their own ways of getting into your head... ...An especially interesting aspect of Dark Souls' story is that it could only be told through a video game, making it almost unique. It tells us very little through the mediums of text or film, and vast amounts through context, exploration and environmental storytelling that simply would not be possible in any other format. Nowadays it's widely regarded as a masterclass in interactive narrative design, despite the fact that any given player could bypass the story entirely if they weren't inclined to investigate.

Annie was trying to listen but she was unable to shake the image of herself dressed in a knock-off Lady Lightning outfit, sitting alone at a table at a mid-level comic book convention, drinking a diet soda and staring at her cell phone, which did not ring. “Annie?” Daniel said. “I want to talk to you about the movie.” Annie imagined herself in Japan, shilling caffeinated tapioca pearls, living in a closet-size apartment, dating a washed-up sumo wrestler. “Annie?” Daniel said again. Annie imagined herself doing dinner theater in a converted barn, playing Myra Marlowe in A Bad Year for Tomatoes, getting fat on carved roast beef and macaroni and cheese from the buffet during intermission. “I want to help you, Annie,” Daniel continued, undeterred by Annie’s blank-faced analysis of her future. “And I think I can.

Specifically, they argue that digital technology drives inequality in three different ways. First, by replacing old jobs with ones requiring more skills, technology has rewarded the educated: since the mid-1970s, salaries rose about 25% for those with graduate degrees while the average high school dropout took a 30% pay cut.45 Second, they claim that since the year 2000, an ever-larger share of corporate income has gone to those who own the companies as opposed to those who work there—and that as long as automation continues, we should expect those who own the machines to take a growing fraction of the pie. This edge of capital over labor may be particularly important for the growing digital economy, which tech visionary Nicholas Negroponte defines as moving bits, not atoms. Now that everything from books to movies and tax preparation tools has gone digital, additional copies can be sold worldwide at essentially zero cost, without hiring additional employees. This allows most of the revenue to go to investors rather than workers, and helps explain why, even though the combined revenues of Detroit’s “Big 3” (GM, Ford and Chrysler) in 1990 were almost identical to those of Silicon Valley’s “Big 3” (Google, Apple, Facebook) in 2014, the latter had nine times fewer employees and were worth thirty times more on the stock market.47 Figure 3.5: How the economy has grown average income over the past century, and what fraction of this income has gone to different groups. Before the 1970s, rich and poor are seen to all be getting better off in lockstep, after which most of the gains have gone to the top 1% while the bottom 90% have on average gained close to nothing.46 The amounts have been inflation-corrected to year-2017 dollars. Third, Erik and collaborators argue that the digital economy often benefits superstars over everyone else.

Some viewed Chinese investors as the latest “dumb money” to hit Hollywood. It is no doubt true that financing movies is not the smartest way for any investor, from anywhere in the world, to earn the best returns. Others had a different theory—that some wealthy Chinese individuals and businesses were seeking to get their money out of China, where an autocratic government could still steal anyone’s wealth at any time, for any reason. Certainly Hollywood had long been a destination for legal money laundering. But those who worked most closely with the Chinese knew that the biggest reason for these investments was a form of reverse-colonialism. After more than a decade as a place for Hollywood to make money, China wanted to turn the tables. The United States had already proved the power of pop culture to help establish a nation’s global dominance. Now China wanted to do the same. The Beijing government considered art and culture to be a form of “soft power,” whereby it could extend influence around the world without the use of weapons. Over the past few years, locally produced Chinese films had become more successful at the box office there. But most were culturally specific comedies and love stories that didn’t translate anywhere else. China had yet to produce a global blockbuster. And with box-office growth in that country slowing in 2016 and early 2017, hits that resonated internationally would be critical if the Communist nation was to grow its movie business and use it to become the kind of global power it wanted to be. So Chinese companies, with the backing of the government, started investing in Hollywood, with a mission to learn how experienced hands there made blockbusters that thrived worldwide. Within a few years, they figured, China would learn how to do that without anyone’s help. “Working with a company like Universal will help us elevate our skill set in moviemaking,” the head of the Chinese entertainment company Perfect World Pictures said, while investing $250 million in a slate of upcoming films from the American studio. Getting there wouldn’t be easy. One of the highest-profile efforts to produce a worldwide hit out of China was The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon and made by Wanda’s Legendary Pictures. The $150 million film, about a war against monsters set on the Chinese historic landmark, grossed an underwhelming $171 million and a disastrous $45 million in the United States. Then, to create another obstacle, Chinese government currency controls established in early 2017 slowed, at least temporarily, the flow of money from China into Hollywood. But by then it was too late to turn back. As seemed to always be true when it came to Hollywood’s relationship with China, the Americans had no choice but to keep playing along. Nobody else was willing to pour billions of dollars into the struggling movie business in the mid-2010s, particularly for original or lower-budget productions.

hipped dino moved on two feet, they are Theropods. Those who walk on all fours are Sauropods. Allosaurus Outside of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the Allosaurus is perhaps the scariest dinosaur. This meat-eating predator which preferred to snack on the stegosaurus can reach up to 30 feet long and weighs around two tons. The Allosaurus was first called Antrodemus by paleontologist Joseph Leidy. It got its new name, which translates to “different lizard”, in the mid-1970’s. These big-headed, sharp-toothed dinosaur walked on two legs, had two short arms and a large tail that helped it keep balanced. Due to its popularity, the Allosaurus has been depicted in books, documentaries, movies and video games such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, BBC’s The Ballad of Big Al, and Jurassic World – The Game. Ankylosaurus

The vicar had already started speaking when the door banged open again. Rachael was reminded of an old, bad British movie, though whether it was a thriller or a comedy she couldn't quite say. The vicar paused in mid-sentence and they all turned to stare. Even Dougie tried to move his head in that direction. It was a woman in her fifties. The first impression was of a bag lady, who'd wandered in from the street. She had a large leather satchel slung across her shoulder and a supermarket carrier bag in one hand. Her face was grey and blotched. She wore a knee-length skirt and a long cardigan weighed down at the front by the pockets. Her legs were bare. Yet she carried off the situation with such confidence and aplomb that they all believed that she had a right to be there. She took a seat, bowed her head as if in private prayer, then looked directly at the vicar as if giving him permission to continue. Neville had booked a room in the White Hart Hotel and afterwards invited them all back to lunch.

Roy Scheider was mad because it was all about the kids