MCN Columnists
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

SECRET AGENT WEDNESDAY

The stories that Sony was in pursuit of the Bond franchise started last February. After a week or two of evasion, newly seated Sony Chief John Calley finally spoke to me about the situation and categorically denied that Sony was pursuing the Bond franchise. From all the tap dancing, it seemed that Calley had indeed been trying to leverage his relationship with Bond producer Barbara Broccoli (daughter of Cubby), with whom he had restarted the Bond engine at MGM/UA, the company he exited that is the long standing Bond rights holder. But the connection between Bond and UA was apparently too strong, legally or otherwise, to break. Story over.
But Calley was as smooth as Bond, stirred but not shaken, pursuing the back door entrance into Bondland, with producer Kevin McClory as the source of rights. McClory claims rights to the character based on his involvement in 1965’s Thunderball, which he produced and co-storied. In 1983, he delivered Bond to Warner Bros. with Never Say Never Again, which remade the Thunderball story and was the start (along with Time Bandits) of Sean Connery’s career resurrection. Guess who was head of production at WB when that happened. Calley!
The brewing legal bloodbath, centered around McClory’s rights claim to the James Bond character, as opposed to his previous remaking of the one Bond property he had a hand in, should make December’s Bond release, Tommorrow Never Dies, look G-rated in comparison. MGM/UA is, as it has been for years, in serious financial straits and Bond is the one plum in their pudding. In the meantime, call Calley Little Jack Horner, sitting in his corner with Men In Black winning last summer’s box office race, Godzilla likely to win the summer of 1998 and an Astin Martin warming up in the garage.
And in the category of “more evasive, less important,” Disney-based Interscope Communications will bankroll twin brothers Josh and Jonas Pate’s third film, Earl Watt, to the tune of $50 million-plus. What’s it about? The secret agent brothers won’t say. Coyness from the twins whose first film was the direct-to-cable The Grave, described by TNT’s very own Joe Bob Briggs as “Eleven dead bodies. No breasts. Bloody rabbit’s foot. Pill poppin’. Embalming-table surgery. Aardvarking. Up-chucking. Baseball bat to the head. The old chained-to-the-floor-of-the-swamp-at-low-tide torture. Massive marijuana use. Multiple gravedigging. One brawl, with pitchfork. Finger rolls. Gratuitous Eric Roberts. Electric-chair fu.” I’ll tell you what, guys. Match the Coen brothers’ first film (Blood Simple) or The Wachowski brothers’ cherry-breaking Bound and you can be as mysterious as you want. In the meantime, you’re just pissing me off.
If I have the same effect on you, email me. And you were all right. I am 67 percent possessed.

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Pride

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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