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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Last Word on Harry Knowles

Plenty of ink on this issue. One reader smacked me hard in a letter which was memorable for a subject line of “Go cry to momma” and a threat to dump my bookmark. After we exchanged less aggressive mail, I think his last letter summed up Harry (and me) almost perfectly. Sam S. gets the last word: “I think you are a little combative and defensive. Your points are well taken, but I disagree with the kernel of your problem with Harry. I read Harry for fun, not for the truth. I also read Variety and The Hollywood Reporter for the facts on the biz. If an insider does not supplement the trades with a daily dose of fan sites, they’ll never get the pulse of their audience. Harry, Corona, Dark Horizons, etc. are required reading, but complementary reading. You underestimate your readers if you think they go to fan sites for the definitive truth on the film world. They go for the excitement of a good rumor, or a humorous take on an insider event. They DO take it with a grain of salt. It’s insulting when you tell them how to read journalism. Give your readers some credit! And I’ll be reading again now, for a little while, at least ;-)”
HELL OF A LOT OF MONEY: Adam Sandler continues to focus on nontraditional families. After signing on at Sony to play a single father in Guy Gets Kid, New Line coughed up a mammoth $12.5 million contract for Adam to play the rebellious son of Satan in an untitled comedy. Turns out that Adam just doesn’t want to take over the family business. Obviously, the film is not set in L.A., where satanic lifestyles are a dime a dozen.
TAKE MY LIFE, PLEASE : Henny Youngman, king of the one liners, died at 91.
A STRONG VOICE: This week’s Village Voice offers up a couple of really interesting items. Check out The Return of the World’s Hardest Movie Quiz. It’s too hard for me, I’ll tell you that. And their review of Dark City is pretty much in agreement with my take. I may have liked the film a little bit better than the Voice, but their take on the unusual style of the film is dead on.
GLOVE AND MONEY: With the Muhammed Ali biopic in development hell waiting for a free moment in Will Smith‘s schedule, Denzel Washington is eyeing a two hour round in the ring for director Norman Jewison’s real-life story of middleweight Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. This project, if it comes together, will emerge from its own developmental troubles after more than five years of waiting around. Carter himself waited around for a long while after his fighting days, serving a long stretch in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Meanwhile, the women’s boxing biz is getting the big-screen treatment in Knockout, the story of Latina boxer Isabelle Alvarado. It’s in production already, so she will beat the boys easily. To the screen.
READER OF THE DAY: Trish The Dish wrote: “Wag the Dog is a great movie? Please. Hoffman should have confined his Evans impression to a 10-minute sketch on ‘SNL,’ and we all would have been happy. I’m sick of media-obsessed films about media-obsessed types made for media-obsessed types congratulating themselves about their omniscient Vision. NOTHING HAPPENED in this movie, and it wasn’t funny, except for Hoffman. Anne Heche is as big a zero as Woody Harrelson.”

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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