Conan’s 60 Minutes Interview.
It’s a relief to see him clearing the air a little bit after the debacle from earlier this year.
Leaving the Tonight Show was an awesome thing for Conan to do. The corporate, lowest-common-denominator attitude exhibited by NBC clearly isn’t ideal for someone in Conan’s wheelhouse. While it’s upsetting that NBC put the show’s talent and staff through hell and killed many of their jobs, it’ll end up benefitting Conan and his fans in the long run.
Even though Conan’s been on late-night TV since the early 90s, he’s still very hip in his style and sensibilities. Leaving the old-hat network TV market to pursue newer avenues for himself will be better for people like me. I’ve loved Conan’s work for a long time, but haven’t seen as much of it as I could have if he was in a more “modern” segment of entertainment.
I predict that within a few years Conan will be doing so much more cool stuff online now that he’s broken free from the network TV chains.
The composer talks about working with Aronofsky, scoring Moon, and a little about his ideas for Aronofsky’s next picture, Black Swan:
“Well it’s all really embryonic at the moment, one of the main ideas we’ve got is building the entire score out of elements from Swan Lake. I mean it would have to be vastly screwed with, but that’s a starting point. Sometimes we’ve had ideas in the past and you put them into practice and they just suck, so we’ll see.”
I’m so happy that there are artists still pushing boundaries with creative ideas like this.
The New Yorker profiles James Cameron.
I love what the man has done for cinematic technique and process, but I don’t think he’s the God of Cinema that many would have you believe.
1994 interview with Quentin Tarantino after the release of Pulp Fiction.
He was a lot more humble and a lot less cocky back then. Regardless of his personality, Inglourious Basterds was incredible.
GoodReads interviews Chris Anderson about his new book, Free. It is, appropriately, free in electronic form (the link above) for two weeks before and after its release.
Orson Welles’ final public appearance.
He died 2 hours after this interview on the Merv Griffin Show.
George Pelecanos interviewed by the WSJ on their new culture blog, Speakeasy. He talks about his new novel The Way Home and his job as a writer on David Simon’s new post-Katrina series, Treme.
I read his novels The Night Gardener and Hard Revolution. Most of his work, or maybe all, is set in DC. He’s definitely got a knack for capturing the inner city experience, and I can see why Simon called on him (along with Boston and New York crime novelists Dennis Lehane and Richard Price) to write on The Wire.
Interview with the creator of Scrubs and Spin City, Bill Lawrence:
You’re gonna be hard-pressed to be successful if you’re on a network and not partially owned by them, because they have no financial incentive to support you. The only creative changes I noticed… I tell everybody, but The Todd is not allowed to wear his thong anymore, because it’s the Disney company. Sorry man. So even like, in the Bahamas episode the other week, there’s a shot of him on the beach flexing, and they made us cut the shot in half. I’m like “Are you sure? This guy’s been in a thong 900 times.”
The Creative Screenwriting magazine podcast is fantastic. Includes roundtables and interviews with feature screenwriters.
Highlights I’ve heard so far: David Hayter and Alex Tse on Watchmen, Andrew Stanton on WALL-E, Rob Siegel on The Wrestler, John Patrick Shanley on Doubt.
David Milch, interviewed by Salon.
On the lawlessness of Deadwood:
Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a study of the common law, said that the law develops out of society’s need to minimize the collateral consequences of the taking of revenge. What that means is, if I kill your horse, and you come and kill my horse and my family and burn down my house, the disruption to society of the collateral effects of the taking of revenge, which is justified, is such that society is gonna be disrupted. So what law does is say, “If you kill a horse, you will be subject to this much punishment.” To the extent that that stabilizes the process of taking of revenge, that’s how laws get developed.
