In this interview clip from a shelved Errol Morris project, businessman and now presidential candidate Donald Trump muses on the meanings of Orson Welles’ classic film, Citizen Kane. Trump doesn’t diverge from critical orthodoxy about the film, but it’s still interesting to hear him take away the standard lesson that money isn’t everything. Still, as Jason Kottke notes, Trump can’t just help himself from throwing in conversation-ending misogynistic aside. From Morris’s site: The Movie Movie, an aborted project, is based on the idea of taking Donald Trump, Mikhail Gorbachev and others and putting them in the movies they most admire. […]

At the 2013 Screenwriting Research Network International Conference, Larry Gross discusses narrative, knowledge and Kurosawa’s Ikiru. I want to begin by expressing my sense of unworthiness at being offered the chance to give this keynote address, given the stature of some of those who proceeded me in performing the task, and I want to express briefly my personal admiration for three of these predecessors. Here in Madison, Wisconsin, I don’t have to explain the importance of David Bordwell as one of the world’s greatest film scholars. I only want to mention that I first became aware of his work in […]

The folks at Cinemaminima pointed to this fascinating clip on Errol Morris’s website. It’s from one of Morris’s “aborted projects,” series or films that for whatever reason didn’t make it off the ground. In the Quicktime stream, Donald Trump discusses Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, riffing on the lessons the film has to impart on wealth, accumulation and happiness. As Morris does, Trump becomes a poignant, contradictory and very human ambassador from the director’s now readily identifiable universe of oddball dreamers and schemers. Check out the clip for some fascinating viewing, and click back to the page in the future. Morris […]