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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, October 30th, 1997 - Comments Off on COUNTDOWN TO BOOGIE NIGHTS: BOOGIE MINUS 1
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COUNTDOWN TO BOOGIE NIGHTS: BOOGIE MINUS 1

Boogie Nights is ready to bring porn to a cable network near you. New Line is shopping a late-night series that would bring the antics of Dirk, Amber, Rollergirl and Buck into your house every week. HBO was the first cable net to produce original sitcoms with “Dream On,” the show that had almost every gorgeous up-and-coming actress in Hollywood sleeping with a short, average-looking book editor within 10 minutes of meeting him. In Boogie Nights: The Slut-Com, it won’t take 10 minutes. Watch Dirk as he measures his new apartment in the nude! Will Amber ever get her hair really clean? See Rollergirl face off against Suzanne Somers in a Thighmaster competition! Watch Buck read and use multi-syllabic words! (Someone has to be politically correct!)
Boogie Nights burnt up the box office charts in limited release last weekend, but from every second week, a pattern emerges. In Los Angeles, the film was dropping quickly in the big multi-plexes, while still growing in the smaller venues. Of course, even while dropping, the numbers were pretty damned good. In New York, there wasn’t much change on the Westside and downtown, but there was a drop on the Eastside. This is the first indication that Boogie Nights may have a hard time with the mainstream in the long run. But in the short run, it still looks solid as a… well, just solid.
Boogie Nights doesn’t have the exclusive on bare bodies. The Full Monty passed Four Weddings and a Funeral this weekend as the most popular British film ever in the U.K. It took Monty just eight weeks to pass the $45 million that Weddings took 22 weeks to acquire. The Pantless Ones have taken just over $25 million here in the US. But England’s dance with flesh is far from over. The Spice Girls movie, Spice World, is due on U.K. screens before the end of the year. It’s enough to make you drink warm beer.
Tomorrow, Boogie Nights leads the weekend preview . Meanwhile, check out the disco dancing on Rough Cut weekly.
Email is fun. And this week I tell you why I love L.A. Let me count the ways on The Whole Pictures in one!

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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