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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, January 10th, 1998 - Comments Off on Sequels & More
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Sequels & More

Laurence Fishburne will turn actor/producer when he plays Detective Pharoah Love, the black, gay detective hero of A Queer Kind of Death. With all those titles with which to address the actor nicknamed Fish, only one will get him really riled. Don’t ever call him Larry.
P.J. Hogan, who directed last summer’s smash hit, My Best Friend’s Wedding, is about to sign on the dotted line to do a biopic on one of the most important figures in American history. Chuck Barris. Yes, that Chuck Barris, producer/creator of “The Dating Game,” “The Newlywed Game” and “The Gong Show” (which he hosted). Barris already directed and starred in The Gong Show Movie, a pseudo-biographical mockumentary in 1980, but that one didn’t cover Barris’ supposed career as a CIA assassin who knocked off Soviet agents while traveling on Dating Game trips with the winners. His method must have been to make KGB agents watch his shows for hours until they begged for death.
When “Taxi” star Andy Kaufman died in 1984 at the age of 33, people were pretty sure it was an elaborate joke. It wasn’t. Now, the men who brought The People vs. Larry Flynt, Ed Wood and That Darn Cat to life on screen, writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, have the green light to make the Andy Kaufman movie, Man In The Moon, with Milos Forman as director. Danny DeVito will produce and co-star as Kaufman’s manager. Reports of potential leads include superstars Carrey, Cage, Hanks and Cusack, but my bet is on Edward Norton, who would fit into the role and not over it. And what is it with the 33rd year of a great comic’s life? Belushi, Kaufman and now Farley all died at 33. I’m 33. Good thing I’m not that funny.
United Artists is following the rest of Hollywood by going back to the well — probably too many times. The 1998-99 slate includes a sequel to Basic Instinct, starring Sharon “Damn, I Need A Hit” Stone without Michael Douglas or screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. Also, a follow-up to The Birdcage is in the works, with a screenplay by Bruce Villanch, one of Hollywood’s best joke writers (he’s an Academy Awards writer every year). Robin Williams and Nathan Lane aren’t even in discussions yet and look for the studio to find a director much easier to deal with than Mike Nichols this time around. Unless Williams demands him.

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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