MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, January 20th, 1998 - Comments Off on Titanic In Iceland
Be Sociable, Share!

Titanic In Iceland

It was a long, long weekend. Long enough for Titanic to rack up another $35 million. Fallen beat out Hard Rain, $10.4 million to $8.3 million, and Half Baked did better than expected with $8 million over the four days (You can just imagine how much popcorn they sold). Meanwhile, Gudmundur Breidfjord e-mailed me this perspective on Titanic‘s box office. “If you don’t believe your domestic box office, what about Iceland? (Don’t laugh) Here in this tiny island in the north, Titanic opened on Jan 1 and on the first five days on three screen in three theaters, Titanic took in $135,000! (That is close to 10 million Icelandic kroners!) Mind you, Iceland is a nation of only 260,000 people and has only seven movie theaters with total of 28 screens. This number is UNBELIVABLE! Snow or no snow! Rain or no rain! They will come.”
The family of William Murdoch, the Titanic watch commander who is shown committing suicide in the film, is ticked off. His nephew, Scott Murdoch, now 80 years old, says that the moment is “completely fictional,” insisting that his uncle “went down with the ship after showing great heroism.” No lawsuit seems to be on the horizon. No such luck for Steven Spielberg, who can’t seem to avoid litigation these days. The court is allowing Stephen Kessler to go to trial with claims that Twister was ripped off from his script, Catch The Wind. Kessler, who is based in St. Louis, says that he delivered his script to companies that represent Spielberg and writer Michael Chrichton. Sounds more like Kessler is passing the wind.
Not nearly as concerned about the bottom line, Sir Alec Guinness ( a.k.a. Obi-wan Kenobi) tells a story in his upcoming autobiography about meeting a child who claimed to have seen Star Wars over 100 times. Guinness told the child to stop seeing the movie so forcefully that the child burst into tears. “I just hope the lad,” Guinness writes, “now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.” Nope. He’ll have to wait until Memorial Day 1999, when the Star Wars prequel hits theaters.

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments Off on Titanic In Iceland

Comments are closed.

Quote Unquotesee all »

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