MCN Columnists
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Weekend, 18 October 1997

Jenny McCarthy and her boyfriend-manager Ray Manzella are squirming more than a buck naked blonde in a Playmate of The Year video these days. (Oh yeah, that was Jenny.) Now that Jenny’s sitcom is breaking the wrong kind of ratings records, they are setting their sights on feature films, which has set off my Hot Button. Running out of media tricks (two weeks ago it was Manzella fighting for Jenny’s equal opportunity to pass wind on network TV. Last week it was Jenny on every magazine cover proclaiming her new sophisticated self. Make up your mind, Ray!), they’ve dragged poor Dick Zanuck into their circus. “We are crazy about Jenny,” Zanuck was quoted as shouting to Variety. “She’s smart, funny, unaffected — and, needless to say, good-looking!” The only problem with this move is that Dick’s nose for talent is broken, as evidenced by a string of six straight flops, from Rush to Chain Reaction, since his Miss Daisy drove him to the Oscars in 1989. In actuality, I do think that Jenny has the star stuff, but she has to take a year or two off, find a boyfriend who doesn’t take a percentage of anything but her body, and then come back calmly. Calmly.
In other crossover news, “The Drew Carey Show” is going The Full Monty with male cast members stripping to “Free Ride” for an upcoming episode. With this homage and take-offs of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert under its belt (so to speak), plus a new dance number seemingly every fourth episode, Carey’s show is becoming the biggest purveyor of gag gimmicks since Ellen DeGeneres faked that whole lesbian thing. Oh? That was real? Ah. Then it’s just her new breasts.
Elisabeth Shue is in talks to play Molly, an autistic girl who becomes a genius after receiving radical medical treatment, much to the surprise of her caretaking brother. Sounds like Rain Man with breasts and a happy ending. (This is becoming a theme column!) In real life, of course, Shue is a radical who’s surprised people don’t think she’s a genius, taking care to let us know that medical treatment won’t help her acting-autistic brother, Andrew.
If anything hits your Hot Button, Email me and let me know.

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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