Movie News: Beat Writer’s Block; Wes Anderson Calls Saul; Plays for Zoom

In today’s Movie News Roundup: Wes Anderson offers a TV recommendation, young actors perform plays written for Zoom, and festivals get called out for “premiere games.” Also: A quick way to beat writer’s block.

Wes Anderson Calls Saul: The French Dispatch director told the French cinema agency CNC that Better Call Saul is “simply my favorite series,” which means we have something in common with Wes Anderson. He also recommended several films. If you don’t feel like reading in French today, Here’s an English dispatch.

Zoom Plays: Speaking of Better Call Saul: Alison Tatlock, one of the show’s executive producers, is among the writers taking part in a fantastic UC Santa Barbara presentation on Saturday, June 6, that will embrace the reality of our current situation and try to make the best of it. Because drama students can’t perform onstage, they will instead act out a series of plays specifically written to be performed on Zoom. The program is put on by Launch Pad, UCSB’s artist residency and performance program, led by artistic director Risa Brainin. We’ll share a link as soon as it’s available.

Seed&Spark Creates Online Forum for Film Festivals: The crowdfunding and streaming platform has enlisted top talents like Mark Duplass, Lena Waithe and Olivia Wilde to launch a new platform in support of film festivals which have moved online, Deadline exclusively reports.

Premiere Games: In this commentary for MovieMaker, Oxford Film Festival director Melanie Addington urges festival organizers to drop “premiere games” that she says are messing up filmmakers’ efforts to get their films seen at this extremely complicated time. “It is going to take real leadership and cooperation to make sure the ones who should matter most to us – our filmmakers — get through this,” she writes.

Writer’s Block Workaround: If you, like almost everyone, find yourself struggling to be creative now, Psychology Today has some interesting advice: Instead of writing, jot down what you would have written. Not-quite-writing has a way of turning into writing, as Dr. Elizabeth Emens explains.

The Trades: Former The Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy wrote a wild story for Deadline about the abrupt THR firings this week, which begins in the last way you would expect: “A month ago I was surprised, out of nowhere, to get a nice raise.”

Join DiCaprio and De Niro in a Scorsese Movie: If you donate to the All-In Challenge, which provides food to those in need, you may win a walk-on role in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon, as well as “acting pointers from Marty Scorsese,” “lunch with Leonardo and the cast,” and other things that sound pretty cool.

[Typed While Clutching Pearls]: Twitter takes no joy in informing us that today is “National Horny Day.” Let it be said that “horny” is one of our least-favorite words (see also: “dune”), but we happen to be reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s ferociously good novel Fleishman Is in Trouble, and the very page we are reading includes this superb riff on the age of sex apps: “Maybe absent mirror neurons and pheromones and other things that could not penetrate phone screens, all you had was a reflection of the intersection of your own horniness and your own availability, and the minute someone else’s horniness and availability matched up with yours, voilà and kaboom.” Writing like this is reminds us why we’ll always need novels — how do you translate something like that to the screen? — and yet FX will do its best with an upcoming TV adaptation that we suspect we, and Wes Anderson, will very much enjoy.

And now we leave you with a sweet little ditty we like to call “yesterday’s movie news.”