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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, December 5th, 1997 - Comments Off on Box Office – Nowhere But Down
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Box Office – Nowhere But Down

This weekend the box office is all trussed up like a prize turkey with no place to go but down. There are no new wide releases due this week. Everyone was scared off of the date by Flubber and Alien: Resurrection. Oops! Scream 2 should do stellar numbers next week, but could have had clear sailing for two weeks, pushing the new Alien out of the ship early. Oh, well. Soft word-of-mouth should drop the three-day weekend total for Flubber by 40 percent with $16 million, still enough to take first. Alien: Resurrection should keep the two spot, despite what I’m guessing will be a steep 50 percent drop to take in $8.2 million. As stable as it is slow (though I liked the film), The Rainmaker should drop about 25 percent, still enough to pass Anastasia for third with $8 million. Thus, Anastasia, dropping a reasonable 35 percent, should be in fourth with $7.7 million.
The Jackal is likely to be on the other side of a wide b.o. gap, dropping to fifth with a 40 percent drop to $4.5 million. Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil should skulk about with a 25 percent drop to $4 million for a sixth place finish and no hope of surviving the mid-December onslaught of serious films. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation should hit the skids to the tune of 60 percent, kicking up another $2.7 million for seventh. The bottom four of the Top Ten gets the benefit of Disney’s withdraw of The Little Mermaid. Her disappearance (authorities are questioning Roman Polanski) allows Bean to take eighth with a 50 percent drop to $1.5 million. And Starship Troopers moves up a notch to ninth with another 50 percent drop to $1.4 million.
The Ten Spot will likely offer a three way tie, with I Know What You Did Last Summer (dropping 35 percent), Eve’s Bayou (dropping just 20 percent) and The Wings of The Dove (suffering its first drop with 15 percent) all camping out around the $1.2 million mark.
Will Alien: Resurrection rise from the dead box office week to take top spot? Will Flubber flub its box office break and drown under The Rainmaker? E-mail me what you think.

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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