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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, February 14th, 1998 - Comments Off on News By the Numbers
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News By the Numbers

10. Burt’s Back: Oscar nominee Burt Reynolds will make a trio of cop movies for us here at TNT. Separate negotiations for Burt’s hair are ongoing.
9. Another Falling Star: Melanie Griffith is heading to TV in a new sitcom for CBS. Unlike ex-husbands Don Johnson (“Nash Bridges”) and Steven Bauer (“Wiseguy”), Melanie actually has a film career to lose by making the move.
8. Dead Dog: Buddy the Wonder Dog, better known to many of you as “Air Bud,” is dead. Wondrous to the end, Buddy’s last words were instructions to his owner to remove the stucco from his doghouse. To quote: “Ralph, rough roof.”
7. Comatose Web Site: Entertainment Asylum, a lavish Web site that tries too hard to be any good, is barely alive after AOL essentially pulled the plug less than six months after launching it. For any of you who have made the leap to rough cut, welcome.
6. Godzilla Takes Manhattan: Sony’s giant lizard in waiting was the hit of this week’s American International Toy Fair, but he kept a very low profile. If you weren’t buying, you weren’t seeing Big Green. The only hint Sony gave anxiously awaiting movie lovers? A giant banner proclaiming, “He’s as big as the Flatiron Building.” Well, duh!
5. Old Alliances: The team that ran Carolco Pictures into the ground, Andy Vanja and Mario Kassar, are planning a reunion tour. The dyspeptic duo, last seen together going bankrupt despite huge hits like Terminator 2 and Basic Instinct, have recently laid out $9.5 million individually for rights to projects that may never be made: Terminator 3 ($7.5 million) and a Joe “Showgirls” Eszterhas script that’s now in development hell at Paramount. Note to investors: Hide your checkbooks.
4. Scream Screwed: Someone is taking their boredom with making scary movies too far. Oh, well. She warned them. Neve Campbell told everyone who would listen that she would prefer something more challenging than Scream 3 as her summer hiatus project. She found it in Three to Tango, a comedy about a guy who pretends to be gay to win Neve’s heart. Now it’s Miramax’s turn to scream.
3. Settling’s Such Sweet Sorrow: DreamWorks and Barbara Chase-Riboud finally settled their copyright infringement case out of court with a tightly worded and information-free statement. But it was too late to help at the box office or at the Academy ballot box. Have I said that Djimon Hunsou was robbed yet?
2. Academy Awards: Leo, Djimon and Rupert weren’t nominated. Spike Lee is busy screaming that the Academy is racist even though his documentary, 4 Little Girls, was nominated. Meanwhile, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control was the latest documentary to be snubbed by the Academy for being too well-liked. Only one American was nominated as Best Actress. And Hillary Henkin got a screenwriting nod for a movie, Wag the Dog, that she didn’t write. Just another year at the Academy.
1. Titanic Suit: The latest explosion in the always tenuous relationship between Titanic co-producers 20th Century Fox and Paramount could get ugly. Turns out that the $30 million TV rights deal that Paramount made with NBC in December was a steal. Men In Black commanded $50 million and Fox paid $80 million for The Lost World. As a result, 20th Century may sue Paramount in an attempt to dump the now embarrassing deal. Gentlemen, start your lawyers.
Reader Of The Day: Rob S. on Leo: “Anybody who can make a line like ‘I guess you could call me a tumbleweed blowing in the wind.’ sound good and not laughable deserves to be at least nominated.”

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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