‘Simply unworkable’: British film industry leaders aghast at Trump’s movie tariffs

US president’s call for 100% tariffs on films ‘produced in foreign lands’ comes under fire, with actor Brian Cox saying Trump doesn’t understand how films are made Leading figures in the British film industry have reacted with a mixture of wariness and bemusement at the prospect of tariffs announced by Donald Trump on movies produced in “foreign lands”. Rebecca O’Brien, producer of a string of films by Ken Loach including Palme d’Or winners The Wind That Shakes the Barley and I, Daniel Blake says that tariffs appear “simply unworkable given how intertwined and global the film industry is”. “I can see that Trump watches Hollywood collapsing and losing its jobs to the rest of the world but that’s because it’s a very expensive place to make films.” Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/roHIRbU via IFTTT

Tod Browning: the film-maker who brought the carnival to Hollywood

A new retrospective offers another chance to appreciate the daring and often deranged films made by a director who was once the centre of a moral panic

When a kid threatens to run away and join the circus, perhaps upon being forced to eat broccoli or go to bed, they’re fantasizing about more than just independence. The traveling carnival offered an alternative way of life that appealed specifically to those uninvested in the politenesses of the grownup world. No one can make a carny shower, wear a tie or go to church. This liberation from the strictures of civilized society was a must for an ethically spotty line of work reliant on a mix of trickery, hucksterism, prurience and morbid fascination, a low art form that attracted a certain kind of scuzzy personality. The tents of the sideshow provided a home to thieves, oddballs, creeps, chiselers, dope fiends, conmen, women of ill repute, leches, lushes and any other species of degenerate in need of a paycheck. If vaudevillians were the rock stars of the pre-cinema era, then circus folk were van-dweller punks cutting a swath of blithe misbehavior from gig to gig.

Just before the turn of the 20th century, at the ripe age of 16, a bricklayer’s son named Charles Albert Browning Jr decided that these were his people and abandoned his well-heeled family to join their grubby ranks. He would spend 10 years cutting his teeth as a barker, song-and-dance man, clown and contortionist before rechristening himself Tod, the German word for “death”, conferring a ghastly gravitas. Three years later, he’d take leave of the stage with sights set on the burgeoning silent film industry, but he’d carry the lurid spirit of the big top with him through the rest of an illustrious, disreputable career.

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