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“The Silence of the Lambs” executive producer Gary Goetzman has been a major player in Hollywood for the last four decades (especially after he followed that Best Picture-winner by co-founding Playtone with Tom Hanks in 1998), but many in and around the film industry were unfamiliar with his story until Paul Thomas Anderson made a movie about it. “That was some version of my story, at least,” Goetzman chuckled when I asked him about “Licorice Pizza” during a recent Zoom interview from his office in Los Angeles, where he’s putting the finishing touches on “Masters of the Air,” a high-altitude Apple miniseries in the tradition of “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” “So many events in ‘Licorice Pizza,’ are true, but everything around it is kind of not.”

Specifics notwithstanding, Anderson’s coming-of-age comedy — set in the San Fernando Valley circa 1973 and starring Cooper Hoffman as 15-year-old “Gary Valentine” — certainly...

Alex Hofmann is back with a new app.

The tech entrepreneur, who was previously the President of TikTok precursor Musical.ly, has launched his first new venture since exiting that position. It's called Spark, and it's a personality-driven dating app that does away with Tinder's familiar "swiping" model.

Spark is being rolled out by 9count, a tech company led by Hofmann and Joe Viola. Rather than pairing people who choose to swipe right on each other, the app makes connections between lovebirds who have shared interests. To enable those matches, users fill out their rankings in common categories (e.g. "top three favorite drinks") while also answering pointed questions about their personality traits.

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Jonathan Demme, who won an Academy Award for directing The Silence of the Lambs, has died, according to Indiewire and other sources.  He was 73.  When he was making a film in England, Roger Corman hired Demme as a unit publicist, per Corman's book How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. Needing scripts, Corman offered Demme the chance to write a motorcycle movie, which Demme did with Joe Viola. The result was Angels Hard as They Come (1971), and Demme was off and running.  Corman gave him a chance to direct. Caged Heat and Crazy Mama were exploitation movies, but they had a little something extra, and as Demme continued to hone his talents, he applied them on a...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

As the most telling quote of Machete Maidens Unleashed! exclaims, “The stories are 10 times better than the actual films”. The anecdotes and memories of those involved in the Filipino exploitation genre of cinema are an amazing account of a period never to be repeated. Screening at the New York Asian Film Festival, Mark Hartley’s documentary opens our eyes to what went on in order to make some of the infamous cult schlock from the 1970s. Starting with Hemisphere Pictures and continuing into Roger Corman’s shingle, New World Pictures, the Philippines are shown as the jungle haven chock full of cheap production and expendable stunt men it was. We become privy to tales of directors, producers, and actors involved as well as a bevy of clips from their films to understand how the three B’s—blood, breasts, and beasts—created a sensation at American drive-ins across the nation.

He gave life to teenage cavemen and candy-stripe nurses. Crab monsters and humanoids from the deep. T-bird gangs and towns that dreaded sundown. His name is Roger Corman. And on Nov. 14, he will receive an honor that no one would have predicted: an honorary Academy Award. The 83-year-old B-movie titan has made nearly 400 films as a director and producer. From the start, Corman was a magnet for hungry young actors, writers, and directors who would work for slave wages for the chance to make their first film. They called it the "University of Corman," and the alumni include Francis Ford Coppola,...