When I first started the film [“The Master”] — when I first read the script — there was a great deal of flashbacks where we actually saw all these injuries and these were things we were going to shoot; but as the film progressed we didn’t end up shooting those things so I’d kind of […]
movies
Longreads Best of 2013: Here Is What Happens After You Write a New York Times Story About Lindsay Lohan
Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie Stephen Rodrick | New York Times Magazine | January 2013 | 31 minutes (7,752 words) Stephen Rodrick (@stephenrodrick) is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, contributing editor for Men’s Journal and author of The Magical Stranger.
David Mamet and the Art of the Closer
“When Greg Mosher directed Glengarry we had a lot of salesmen come in to talk to the cast, guys who were making five million dollars a year selling airplanes or industrial equipment. These people were super closers. There’s a whole substratum of people who are the closer, like the Alec Baldwin character in the movie […]
The Making of Citizen Kane
“I must admit that it was intended consciously as a social document. … [but] the storyteller’s first duty is to the story.” -From the 1991 documentary “The Complete Citizen Kane,” on the Orson Welles masterpiece. The film features interviews with Welles from 1960 and 1982, as well as an interview with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, […]
My Top 5 #Longreads on the Business of Film, Music and Books
Mark Armstrong (that’s not him above) is the founder of Longreads, and editorial director for Pocket. This past week’s Steven Soderbergh speech on “The State of the Cinema” isn’t as big a downer for film lovers as these choice quotes might have you believe: “Shouldn’t we be spending the time and resources alleviating suffering and helping […]
James Erwin, a writer for software manuals in Des Moines, Iowa, responded to a Reddit thread wondering what would happen if the U.S. Marines battled the Roman Empire. His comments lit up the Internet: The 35th MEU is on the ground at Kabul, preparing to deploy to southern Afghanistan. Suddenly, it vanishes. The section of […]
