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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, October 9th, 1997 - Comments Off on Thursday, 09 October 1997
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Thursday, 09 October 1997

Roman Catholics in Chile are organizing a boycott against film festival screenings of Abel Ferrara’s Black Out because of its explicit lesbian sex scenes featuring German Ÿber-model Claudia Schiffer. Jewish-American groups are also upset that the film helps us imagine the nausea-provoking, reality (I guess) of the sexual relationship between Schiffer and David Copperfield (nee’ Kotkin). Oy!
“Shall Ve Kill? (dum-dum-dum) Shall ve blow them to bits-kies? Shall ve bomb? (dum-dum-dum) Ve can haff lots of fun, ya, if ve only had a gun-ya. Shall ve kill? Shall ve kill? Shall ve kill?” For those of you whose parents never took you to dinner theater, that’s “Shall We Dance” from the musical The King & I, as performed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Huh?,” you say? The rumor around Broadway is that the Austrian Alp is going to be hitting the boards in a Broadway revival of the show that made Yul Brenner’s head famous. Another hit: “Getting to Broadway, trying to sing songs in English. Getting no retakes, working almost for free. Getting to Broadway, playing a lost King, It’s nat’ral, Cause I am actual’, A Kennedy.”
Dan Haggerty is back in Grizzly Mountain, which hits theaters on Oct. 17. Well, part of him. In a story more grizzly than his most famous character’s name, or his beard after three bowls of vegetable soup, Dan explains where he’s been. “Three and one-half years ago, I’m on my motorcycle and I’m 1,000 feet from pulling into the driveway when in front of me a van makes a u-turn. Next thing I knew, I’m wedged underneath the van, and it tore both of my legs off, and broke my hips.” Ouch! Haggerty credits his recovery to 50,000 pieces of fan mail, including a note from the Pope. In the great Hollywood tradition, divorce is the ultimate punchline. “I’d rather this pain then the pain I went through married to my first wife.” Ba-dum-dum! Take my legs, please!
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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