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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, January 8th, 1998 - Comments Off on Hollywood's Hottest Director?
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Hollywood's Hottest Director?

Who’s the hottest new director in Hollywood? It could well be Jay Roach, who debuted with Austin Powers, and who has now been given Disney’s burgeoning non-animated summer “event film” slot for the year2000 with a long-anticipated adaptation of Douglas Adams’ TheHitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Roach will shoot the film early nextyear after he finishes Disney’s David E. Kelley-written hockey movie and presumably, Austin Powers II in the fall. For Disney, the Hitchhiker greenlight suggests that Disney will permanently move out ofthe pre-Memorial Day weekend slot that had produced $100 million hitsthe last two summers with The Rock and Con Air, and into the July 4th weekend slot which has the potential for even bigger revenues. This year, Armageddon takes the slot. Disney may back off the slot for ayear though with Sony’s Men In Black 2 and WB’s Superman Lives bothlikely to be gunning for the “Second Massive Summer Hit” position afterthe new Star Wars in 1999.
From the “So Few Oscars, So Many Movies” file: The Academy reports that275 films qualified for Academy consideration this year, the highest number in 25 years. Have you seen them all? Ballots go out next weekendand nominations will be announced on February 10. The Awards are onMarch 23. Let the partying begin!
Castle Rock, the once white-hot indie, has suffered since beingpurchased by Turner (Rough Cut’s parent company, and then later being folded into the massiveTime-Warner family. Since the success of The Shawshank Redemption, thestudio has released 13 financial misses and only one moderate hit — theSundance pick-up, The Spitfire Grill. The missed list includes such doozies as Striptease, Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Alaska, the ads for which made everyone think it was an IMAX travelogue. And company co-founder Rob Reiner hasn’t helped, contributing only the well-intentioned misses,The American President and Ghosts of Mississippi. But now, Warner Bros.and Polygram will split the costs for Castle Rock to make five movies a year for the next three years. First up, Tom Hanks does Stephen King in The Green Mile, a Hugh Grant thriller called Mickey Blue Eyes, the new Whit Stillman comedy of manners, The Last Days of Disco and “Seinfeld”co-creator Larry David‘s feature debut, Sour Grapes.

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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