Plus, how white filmmakers address (or avoid) whiteness onscreen.
Yesterday, news broke that the director Richard Linklater will spend the next 20 years shooting a movie adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical "Merrily We Roll Along," so he can realistically capture the leads Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein over the two decades the story takes place. This is an exciting, ambitious idea, the sort of thing that only the filmmaker behind "Boyhood" and the "Before Sunrise" trilogy would think to attempt … still, something about that 20-year time span inspired no end of melancholy, existential reactions online yesterday. |
After all, will we even recognize the movie industry in 20 years? (When I asked people recently whether the current model of the movie business could survive even one more decade, they were already panicked!) And even more important, will we have managed to fend off imminent environmental disaster? Jason Blum's company Blumhouse is producing the Linklater film, and in a tweet yesterday, they seemed to sum up the prevailing mood: "The most ambitious thing about this tremendous project we are undertaking," read the Blumhouse tweet, "is that we boldly assume there will be a planet in 20 years." |
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