MCN Columnists
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, September 24th, 1997 - Comments Off on Wednesday, 24 September 1997
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Wednesday, 24 September 1997

Manhattan is looking pretty dangerous these days. In the last week, Fox 2000 paid $3 million for The Cobra Event, a story about a killer who releases a deadly virus in Manhattan and the female pathologist who fights the airborne virus and catches the murderer. And Miramax Films purchased So Shoot Me, a comedy about two club-hopping hedonists, Kat and Kitten, who find happiness by catching the Supermodel Serial Killer of Manhattan. As though a virus could survive the New York air or kill a Supermodel.
The U.S. Postal Service has announced that Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, The Phantom of the Opera and The Frankenstein Monster will all be seen on stamps, starting Oct. 1. In Los Angeles, long-jaded to movie monsters, the classic creatures will be replaced by Christian Slater, The Implant, Charlie Sheen, The Phantom of The Mini-Mall and Steven Seagal, the bolt-knecked monster raised from obscurity by Dr. Michael Ovitz.
Producer Jason Kliot says he’s obtained access to shoot a film in Vietnam for the first time since the war. Three Seasons is expected to shoot in Nam in late October with Harvey Keitel as the star. The Vietnamese may not understand why a story about a naked pianist who seduces mute women, cleans up after hit men who screw up and grunts a lot, set in Brooklyn, New York, has to shoot in Vietnam. Huh? It’s not about that? It’s about a G.I. who returns to Vietnam in search of a daughter born out of a liaison with a Vietnamese woman? Oh well. I bet Harvey still grunts a lot.
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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