{"id":892,"date":"2011-01-10T10:19:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-10T18:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/01\/the-long-career-of-michael-medavoy.html"},"modified":"2011-01-10T10:19:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-10T18:19:00","slug":"the-long-career-of-michael-medavoy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/01\/the-long-career-of-michael-medavoy.html","title":{"rendered":"The Long Career of Michael Medavoy"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>NOT long ago, <\/span>Mike Medavoy<\/span><\/a> was hanging out with a bunch of other producers \u2013 most of them guys who had been too young to work in the business in the \u201870s but looked back with longing at its maverick glory. Medavoy, by contrast, had played a small but important role as a studio exec who\u2019d helped\u00a0<\/span>Rocky<\/span><\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>Apocalypse Now<\/span><\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest\u00a0<\/span><\/i>see the light of day.<\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cThey all said, almost in unison, that the best movies were all made it the \u201870s,\u201d Medavoy recalls from his Culver City office, dominated by a Persian rug and overstuffed furniture that make it feel like a comfortable living room. \u201cAnd I said, When were in the \u201870s, making these movies, I thought of the \u201840s as the era I was interested in \u2013 a combination of \u201840s movies and the New European movies coming out.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The one person who wasn\u2019t sentimental for that period, then, was the one who\u2019d really been there. Those were good years, he says now, but why pine?<\/span><\/div>\n

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Despite working during this blossoming of American film \u2013 which he saw undone, he\u2019s written, by \u201cfilmmaking by committee\u201d and corporate takeovers in the 1980s — Medavoy doesn\u2019t rail against the forces of history. He\u2019s old-school in his tastes, in many ways, but resists easy nostalgia. (He’s more recenty worked on Shutter Island<\/i> and Black Swan<\/i>.)\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/a>\u201cI don\u2019t despair of where it\u2019s all going,\u201d says Medavoy, who has thinning red hair and is dressed in faded jeans and a baggy black shirt. \u201cI can\u2019t change it. I never get emotional about things I can\u2019t change.\u201d<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The rest of <\/span>my story<\/span><\/a> on Medavoy runs in the new Hollywood Reporter.<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NOT long ago, Mike Medavoy was hanging out with a bunch of other producers \u2013 most of them guys who had been too young to work in the business in the \u201870s but looked back with longing at its maverick glory. Medavoy, by contrast, had played a small but important role as a studio exec […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[69,76,30],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-892","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-70s","7":"category-film","8":"category-los-angeles","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}