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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

What's Labor Day all about? Theme-itis hits The Hot Button!

GOING INTO LABOR
Oliver Stone‘s novel, A Child’s Night Dream, will hit bookshelves soon. Stone says that the story, about someone named Oliver Stone, is not autobiographical. Let’s hope not. He writes about he and mom being “entwined like snakes of desire…” And of dad? “I hate you, I’ve hated you from the day I was born!… I’d like to kill you.” Come on, Ollie, light that fire!

LABOR PROBLEMS

WGA West presidential candidate Lynn Roth on unfairness to screenwriters: “They wind up writing a first draft, second draft, studio draft, network draft, director draft, actor draft,” she said. “Same pay, too many drafts.” As usual, the most important draft is forgotten. The good one.
WORKING STIFFS
Vivid Video had its first-ever critics screening recently, promoting it’s latest opus, the XXX rated, Bad Wives. Vivid deleted all the sex scenes in order to emphasize the storylines, plots and dialogue. They also went mainstream with their lavish Hollywood after-party, featuring whore d’oeuvres, music by Axel Hose and 25 cent actress rides.
THAT JERRY LEWIS WEEKEND
The spirit of Jerry lives in Hollywood. Someone is actually going to produce a movie called Flying Tigers vs. Flying Saucers, about the WWII Flying Tigers’ attempts to shoot down a Nazi-recovered alien spacecraft carrying Adolf Hitler. No word on whether Jerry will make this a sequel to his infamous The Day The Clown Cried, about a clown in a concentration camp. Hey Naaaaazzziiiii!

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon