James Frey's Blog, page 24
February 22, 2024
It’s Beginning
BY MARCIA DUNN
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A private lander on Thursday made the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years, but managed just a weak signal back until flight controllers scrambled to gain better contact.
Despite the spotty communication, Intuitive Machines, the company that built and managed the craft, confirmed that it had landed upright. But it did not provide additional details, including whether the lander had reached its intended destination near the moon’s south pole. The company ended its live webcast soon after identifying a lone, weak signal from the lander.
“What we can confirm, without a doubt, is our equipment is on the surface of the moon,” mission director Tim Crain reported as tension built in the company’s Houston control center.
Added Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus: “I know this was a nail-biter, but we are on the surface and we are transmitting. Welcome to the moon.”
February 9, 2024
Coyote vs. Warner Bros.
Warner was seeking $75 – $80 million but rejected offers from Netflix, Amazon and Paramount, insiders tell TheWrap
by Drew Taylor
An exclusive image from “Coyote vs. Acme” (Warner Bros.)In early January, “Coyote vs. Acme” producer Chris DeFaria got a startling phone call from a Warner Bros. executive. “They just want to get this behind them,” the executive told DeFaria. “They want to close the books.”
In the words of the Roadrunner: Meep.
The movie, a live-action/animated hybrid that stars Will Forte and the “Looney Tunes” gang, had been earmarked for demolition on Nov. 9. But following the announcement that the movie would be canceled, a firestorm of outrage and indignation erupted. It was heightened by a friends-and-family screening that had already been planned before the cancellation announcement was made. The screening brought more goodwill and an even louder public outcry.
“What was so exciting was that it felt like the film captured the voice of the Looney Tunes that we love in a way none of the other feature versions have ever done,” Paul Scheer, who was at that screening, told TheWrap. (The last movie to feature the characters, 2021’s “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” was pilloried by critics and lost money.)
February 2, 2024
Carl Weathers Gone
The beloved actor, who also had roles in “Happy Gilmore” and “Predator,” died in his sleep, his family said.
By Diana Dasrath and Antonio Planas
LOS ANGELES — Carl Weathers, the actor best known as Apollo Creed in the “Rocky” movies and more recently for his role in the hit “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian,” died Thursday in his sleep, according to his family.
He was 76.
Weathers got his big-screen break in 1976, when he landed the role of Creed in “Rocky,” according to his bio on . He continued his role in three other “Rocky” movies. Weathers also landed parts in 1987’s “Predator,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, in Adam Sandler’s “Happy Gilmore” in 1996 and on the small screen in “The Mandalorian.”
Weathers also was the voice for Combat Carl in “Toy Story 4” and other shorts in the beloved Disney-Pixar franchise.
He also earned comedy cred by playing a bizarro version of himself in the cult sitcom “Arrested Development.” Other TV acting credits include “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” “Magnum P.I.” and “Chicago P.D.”
February 1, 2024
January 31, 2024
Battle of New Canaan
by Rachel Lampen
This year’s Battle of the Bands finalists includes – Pretty Nasty (top left) Mind The Gap (top right) Rock Paper Soul (bottom left) and Herman & Company.Gates Restaurant is celebrating 5-years of championing local music and raising money for Meals on Wheels – in 2023 they presented a check for $4.3k. This highly charged production consists of 4-weekly heats and an electrifying final, hosted by radio presenter Jon Kamal.
The ticketed final on Saturday, February 3rd, will see 4-bands play a 20-minute set from 8pm. Special guest judges have been recruited to decide their fate. This year it is Brooklyn based Paul Green – Founder of School of Rock, PG Academy. His wife Kim France, editor, music writer and author. Renowned international author James Frey and local musician Michael Louis-Smith. Organizer Rachel Lampen says: “The competing bands work so hard and it’s an important time of year to raise money and encourage community spirit. It’s a huge production and I want to personally thank Todd Grosberg for sound, the judges for giving up their time and to Jen and Jay, Owners of Gates Restaurant for putting their trust in me five years ago. Everyone plays an integral part.”
January 22, 2024
Norman Jewison Gone
By Tom Tapp
Norman Jewison, who directed Best Picture Oscar winner In the Heat of the Night and nominees Fiddler on the Roof, A Soldier’s Story, Moonstruck and The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, also producing the latter four, died peacefully Saturday, January 20. He was 97.
Jewison’s film career spanned more than four decades and seven Oscar nominations — three for Best Director (In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck) and the four for Best Picture. His films received a total of 46 nominations and 12 Academy Awards. In 1999, Jewison was honored with the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award at the Academy Awards. He also collected three Emmy Awards for his work in television.
January 2, 2024
January 1, 2024
Production Bowl
Months of preparation, hundreds of staff, convoys of cutting-edge gear: inside the machine that crafts prime time’s most popular entertainment.
By Jody Rosen
One of NBC’s’ production trucks outside Arrowhead Stadium. Credit: Brian Finke / New York TimesArrowhead Stadium, the home of the Kansas City Chiefs, the N.F.L.’s defending champions, is a very loud place. Players say that when the noise reaches top volume, they can feel vibrations in their bones. During a 2014 game, a sound meter captured a decibel reading equivalent to a jet’s taking off, earning a Guinness World Record for “Loudest crowd roar at a sports stadium.” Chiefs fans know how to weaponize noise, quieting to a churchlike hush when the team’s great quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, calls signals but then, when opponents have the ball, unleashing a howl that can even drown out the sound of the play call crackling through the speaker inside the rival quarterback’s helmet.
There are others whose work is complicated by the din. Around 11 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 7, Brian Melillo, an audio engineer for NBC Sports’ flagship N.F.L. telecast, “Sunday Night Football,” arrived at Arrowhead to prepare for that evening’s Chiefs-Detroit Lions game. It was a big occasion: the annual season opener, the N.F.L. Kickoff game, traditionally hosted by the winner of last season’s Super Bowl. There would be speeches, fireworks, a military flyover, the unfurling of a championship banner. A crowd of more than 73,000 was expected. “Arrowhead is a pretty rowdy setting,” Melillo said. “It can present some problems.”
Melillo was especially concerned about his crowd mics — three stereo microphones intended to catch the ambient oohs and aahs of fans, mounted atop 16-foot-high painters’ poles that he and a colleague had secured to the railing separating the seats from the field. These needed to be kept at a distance from exploding pyrotechnics and angled away from the blare of the stadium’s public-address system. A perhaps greater hazard was overzealous fans, who are prone to shaking the poles or even pulling them down. “You’ll get people who’ve been tailgating for five hours,” Melillo said. “I might have to bribe some people to stay off those poles.”
December 31, 2023
December 28, 2023
Social Divorce
by Ross Barkan
‘The 19th-century romantics feared an inhuman future – hence their rebellion. Today’s romantics, still nascent, sense something similar.’ (Painting: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.) Photograph: IanDagnall Computing/AlamyEmpiricism, algorithms and smartphones are out – astrology, art and a life lived fiercely offline are in.
Cultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a period, reordered existence as we knew it. It marked, perhaps more than any other crisis in modern times, a new era, the world of the 2010s wrenched away for good.
What comes next can’t be known – not with so much war and political instability, the rise of autocrats around the world, and the growing plausibility of a second Donald Trump term. Within the roil – or below it – one can hazard, at least, a hypothesis: a change is here and it should be named. A rebellion, both conscious and unconscious, has begun. It is happening both online and off-, and the off is where the youth, one day, might prefer to wage it. It echoes, in its own way, a great shift that came more than two centuries ago, out of the ashes of the Napoleonic wars.
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