David Poland - FishbowlLA

Many Journalists, Fans Wish Zach Braff Wasn’t on Kickstarter

Richard Horgan — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:45:03 +0000

Across Twitter today, a sizable gallery of journalists and fans are rolling their eyes at the idea of TV sitcom millionaire Zach Braff joining the Kickstarter ranks to fund indie sequel Wish I Was Here. Below is a small sampling of that sentiment, from EW‘s Anthony Breznican, TheWrap’s Tim Molloy and Chicago moviegoer Clayton Smith:

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James Franco Gets Thrust Into a Very Awkward Sundance Analogy

Richard Horgan — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 12:00:55 +0000

Apparently, there is going to be a lot of sex on-screen as well as off this year at Sundance. At least that’s the Day One decoupage offered by Movie City News head honcho David Poland.

In setting the salacious scene, Poland pays a certain male A-lister the ultimate backhanded compliment (the bolding is ours):

We’ve already seen Gaby Hoffman running around buck naked – and not highly sexualized – in the title role of Crystal Fairy. But just wait til they get a load of dick. James Franco is the finger in the ass of Sundance this year, with two strong pieces.

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BuzzFeed LA Wades Into Bond, Elmo

Richard Horgan — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:30:10 +0000

So how’s it going over at BuzzFeed’s brand new LA outpost? Well, for starters, bureau chief Richard Rushfield and chief correspondent Kate Aurthur have each earned some nice right-hand margin badges: New User, 1,000 Views, 10,000 Views.

This week, Rushfield makes the argument that Skyfall is the first true James Bond blockbuster, while Aurthur got no response (surprise!) from a TMZ rep when she tried to find out if the outlet had paid cash for some 2010 email correspondence between Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash and his now recanted accuser. Meanwhile, via Twitter, David Poland took the media to task for jumping on the TMZ bandwagon and got into it a little bit with Aurthur over her piece:

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Playboy Deputy Editor Ponders Hollywood Trades Love Match

Richard Horgan — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 10:00:17 +0000

Stephen Randall (pictured) has been on staff with Playboy for a long time. To put it in Nikki Finke terms, when the current deputy editor first started at the magazine, she was in her late twenties and in the middle of a brief marriage to attorney Jeffrey W. Greenberg.

This weekend, Randall takes humorous stock in the LA Times of the acquisition of Variety by Finke’s boss Jay Penske. While the op ed by this third-generation Angeleno is not entirely successful, Randall ends on a serious and very salient note:

Executives in Hollywood are in a shrinking business. They want to be important, but they increasingly aren’t. Important people have powerful enemies, and Hollywood has two dying trades and a handful of bloggers…

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WATCH: Tony Scott DP/30 Interview

Richard Horgan — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 23:10:38 +0000

On this night of tragic Hollywood news, there’s no better way to remember the soft-spoken kinetic genius of Tony Scott than to watch a half-hour interview he gave to Movie City News’ David Poland at the end of ~~last year~~ of 2010.*

Poland is a great admirer of Unstoppable, the last film directed by Scott and the Northumberland, UK native’s fifth collaboration with Denzel Washington. At one point during this DP/30 conversation, Scott reveals that, “The most rewarding days of my life are when I’m doing the toughest performance scene, not an action scene, and I watch these guys [like Denzel] give it back. And it’s rewarding, it’s such a good feeling.” RIP.

*Correction – 08/22/12: The original headline for this item, “WATCH: Tony Scott December 2011 Interview”, has been amended. The interview was in fact recorded by Poland in the fall of 2010. FishbowlLA regrets the error.

Previously on FishbowlLA:
BREAKING: Director Tony Scott Jumps to His Death

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Stephanie Zacharek Dismissal a Sad, Familiar Plotline

Richard Horgan — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 14:15:48 +0000

How perilous have things become for journalists paid handsomely to review movies?

Put it this way. The ongoing dismissal of full-time film critics, to which the name of Movieline’s Stephanie Zacharek can be officially added July 13, grew into such a somber death march that Movie City News’ David Poland stopped formally tracking the print side of the trend a year and a half ago. “It was so depressing,” he tells FishbowlLA, “but my guess is that we’re down to around 80 full-time print film critics in the U.S.”

Indiewire’s Matt Singer first broke the news of Zacharek’s tweeted dismissal, eliciting comments of condolence from such notables as Roger Ebert and David Edelstein. Poland says people typically skip over a critical big picture element when discussing the dumping of marquee critics. Namely, that daily newspapers never took them that seriously in the first place.

“I think the most overlooked element in all these conversations is how abusive print was to criticism,” Poland says. “That the attitude about film criticism from traditional media – for decades – was that they could move someone from the city or obits desk, anywhere, and make them a film critic.”

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David Ansen on LAFF’s Dynamic Differentiator

Richard Horgan — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 03:00:51 +0000

It’s an expensive undertaking. But Los Angeles Film Festival artistic director David Ansen tells David Poland he is determined not to lose the element that he believes makes his annual event so unique.

That would be the annual “filmmaker retreat,” which took place once again this year just ahead of LAFF’s start. From Ansen’s DP/30 conversation with Poland:

“At most film festivals, filmmakers come in from all over the world, they don’t know anybody, they’re in a strange city… They do their thing and they leave and they never really interact. We bring all our feature filmmakers who can come, together, just before the festival starts. We do it up at Skywalker Ranch, which is an idyllic setting.”

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Columnist Rails Against Box Office ‘Slump Scam’

Richard Horgan — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:30:16 +0000

MovieCityNews.com maestro David Poland has never been one to mince words. In a December 26 Op Ed, he decries “the bastardization of journalism” that is the coverage of this year’s purported domestic theatrical box office slump and berates the “profoundly undereducated media group covering the film beat.”

He argues that because the studios do not report ancillary revenues the way they do weekly theatrical box office, a film’s full earning curve is rarely documented or even properly understood. Poland also points out that from April through September of 2011, domestic grosses for Hollywood were actually up. Writes Poland:

Would it surprise you, amidst all this slump talk, that two of the six Hollywood majors were up for this year, and a third will end up about even?…

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Filmmaker Craig Brewer Says ‘Hooray’ for Hollywood Film Festival

Richard Horgan — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 08:45:20 +0000

The awards portion of the annual Hollywood Film Festival, running at the Arclight Cinemas October 20-24, has its fair share of detractors. Most notably MovieCityNews.com grand poobah David Poland, who each year takes a running jump at the ceremony’s transparent, self-serving mechanics.

But the wholly separate film festival has done a lot of good over the years, including way back in 2000, when the event showcased then-unknown Craig Brewer. With the Footloose remake currently in theaters, Brewer will be in town tomorrow night for a tribute Q&A and special screening of a restored version of his early drama The Poor and the Hungry. He spoke with Sean O’Connell, lead journalist for festival founder Carlos de Abreu‘s spinoff website HollywoodNews.com, about how critical the early HFF support was:

“I remember getting a call from Carlos saying that he wanted to show it in the digital showcase. It was a huge deal for me. Some people dream of Sundance and other festivals. For me, with the size of this movie, it just felt like some validation that somebody outside of Memphis saw it and appreciated it. It was a fantastic experience. Probably one of the best of my life.”

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David Poland is Not Afraid of Getting Sued by Nikki Finke

Pandora Young — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 17:24:32 +0000

Nikki Finke published a lengthy post yesterday slamming outgoing MMC exec Lynne Segall, accusing her of an assortment of unethical behavior. The charge that Segal attempted to blur the line between advertising and editorial is especially serious, but given Finke’s somewhat elastic relationship with the truth, media sites like LA Observed and The Wrap are taking the claims with a grain of salt.

David Poland over at Movie City News goes one further, calling Finke out for her hypocrisy:

What kind of person tries to kick someone as they leave a job? A piece of shit. The same kind of piece of shit who writes nary a negative word about a failed Paramount executive as she is in bed (figuratively) with his boss.. until he is dumped… at which point she shits all over the guy in print, never, of course, mentioning the man who hired him in a fit of brain damage in the first place. The same kind of person who roots for a network exec to fail, never taking into account the many, many people whose livelihoods depend on his success.

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Mel Gibson Exclusive Impresses Anita Busch, Revolts David Poland

Richard Horgan — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 09:00:37 +0000

The two most intriguing media reactions to last night’s big exclusive interview with Mel Gibson posted on Deadline.com come from Anita Busch and David Poland. Busch is the former Hollywood Reporter journalist-editor who was targeted by renegade P.I. Anthony Pellicano. In the Deadline comments, she writes:

[Interviewer] Allison Hope Weiner always drinks upstream from the herd. And was the only one to do so during the Pellicano case. Gibson picked the right [Q&A] format and the right journalist to give the interview to.

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Ebert Revamps At the Movies, Again

Richard Horgan — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:32 +0000

Elvis Mitchell has left the At the Movies building.

In a somewhat cryptic blog post last night on the Chicago Sun-Times website, Roger Ebert makes no mention of Mitchell, previously announced as co-host of this month’s At the Movies PBS reboot alongside LA-based AP reviewer Christy Lemire. Instead, it’s now all about a 24-year-old Russian immigrant:

Born in the Soviet Union, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (pictured) moved to America when he was not quite nine… He is a critic and essayist for MUBI.com, a new multi-national streaming site calling itself an online cinematheque… He is also a contributor to The Chicago Reader. Prior to becoming a film critic, Vishnevetsky, who is multi-lingual, worked as a translator for Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Russia’s premier literary journal.

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Awards Season Journo Tries to Grit and Bear It

Richard Horgan — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:00:43 +0000

Movie City News mayor David Poland offers a great snapshot history of online Oscar punditry and how it has devolved from the trades, to bulletin boards, to a select group of journalists, to everyone. Since technical web know-how and even domain registration fees are no longer barriers to entry, it’s now the Mild Mild West. Just in time for something like the Coen brothers remake of True Grit.

In fact, per Poland, things may have come full corral circle, with someone bylined at The Hollywood Reporter sounding more like an everyman. Writes Poland:

I like Tim Appelo a lot… MCN has happily linked to his work for years… But his Grit screening piece had all the earmarks of someone who was new to the Oscar beat and suffering from being part of the cluster.

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Carlos, the Awards Season Terrorist

Richard Horgan — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 06:00:04 +0000

While many LA film journalists scoff privately at the mercenary aspects of the Hollywood Movie Awards, set for Monday, October 25th at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, few are willing to state these same opinions publicly. So thank goodness for David Poland.

In a tart take-down of the annual event shared earlier this week, Poland – who once served as an Advisory Board member for the ceremony – marvels at the way Hollywood Film Festival founder Carlos de Abreu (pictured) is able to bilk the studios for talent, sponsored table money and silent subservience.

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FBLA EXCLUSIVE: Patrick Goldstein ‘Blogging Is Journalism’

Greg — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:00:00 +0000

We announced Monday that Patrick Goldstein will be a full-time blogger for the LAT, shifting his “Big Picture” column to a by-the-minute blog on the L.A. Times web site.

The news floored us. We thought newspaper reporters still viewed bloggers as unkempt basement monkeys writing snarky hyperbole in their underwear. Turns out, we were wrong. (We totally have to buy a pair of pants.)

For more insight about what this shift means, we asked Patrick a few of our patented stupid questions. He was kind enough to answer:

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