What was it W. B. Yeats wrote, that line Joan Didion lifted and twisted in her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” about West Coast chaos in 1967? Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. That’s how it felt on Thursday, a few minutes before lunch with some seasoned film executive-friends at the Academy Museum (Salad Niçoise
Media
Where did everybody go? They certainly weren’t watching the Friday night Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony. The audience dropped to about 17 million, down 37 percent from 26.5 million viewers for the Rio de Janeiro opening in 2016. (Though Saturday was better.) We know they weren’t at the movies. The box-office dropped 25 percent from last
Shares of AMC Entertainment are down nearly 40% today on another wild ride, reversing gains after an explosion of support by retail traders that started last week catapulted stock of the pandemic-pummeled chain to levels not seen since 2017. Around midday, shares of the nation’s largest cinema operator are changing hands at $8.21 That’s still
A word for stocks in 2020: epic — as in monumental, as a bona fide crash in the spring alternated thereafter with convulsions of angst and optimism reflecting a world turned upside down by the first global pandemic in a century. Major indexes from the Dow Jones to the Nasdaq, S&P 500 and Russell 3000
Auditions make me nervous. Not for myself — I’m beyond the casting-call stage of life. But rather for anyone who still has the nerve to endure the almost always disappointing, sometimes humiliating, process of being screened, interviewed, tested and most probably rejected for a role in show business. Or journalism. Or politics, wherein the final
If any good is to come of the coronavirus outbreak, and just now it is hard to see even a glimmer of good, we might consider this: The media will have a shot at redemption. Japan is closing its schools. Saudi Arabia has put Umrah on hold. Cruise ships are dead in the water. And
Having brain-screamed at yet another driver blowing through a stop sign at 30 miles per hour in my quiet, child-filled residential neighborhood, I got to wondering: Whatever happened to Garp? Released 37 years ago, on in the summer of 1982, George Roy Hill’s film version of John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp seemed to