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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, March 19th, 1998 - Comments Off on Chat With Aaron Spelling
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Chat With Aaron Spelling

Got to chat with Aaron Spelling yesterday. He offered up a couple of movie-related tips.
1. He has an hour-long pilot at NBC called “Odd Jobs” with Roger Avery, who won an Oscar for writing Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino. Spelling says the humor is great.
2. I asked him what he thought of Claire Danes choosing to do the feature version of his series, “The Mod Squad.”
“I’m thrilled, thrilled, thrilled. This girl, who I loved in Romeo and Juliet, is doing Mod Squad? I’m thrilled.” What about the rest of the troubled teens turned cops? “The others are tough, especially in matching Claire’s age. Captain Greer could be [played by] a star, but probably not the other two young people. But Claire Danes with a gun. I love it.”
Spelling will be hands-on with the film. “I had a meeting with the writer and director Monday night at my house for two and a half hours, exchanging ideas.” Will the film go camp or ultra-serious? Spelling wouldn’t really say, but he closed with, “It’s much more rambunctious than the original.” What does that mean? He wasn’t sure either, laughing, “Is rambunctious even a word?”
THE PAPER TRAIL: Christine Lahti hit just the right note at the Golden Globes when she was caught with her dress down in the ladies room when she was announced as a winner. But leave it to Kaopectate to take it a little too far. The company is sending Kaopectate Oscar Relief Baskets to all 20 of the acting nominees. Kaopectate’s press release says they hope the baskets will give everyone a “solid performance” during the awards. Gross!
BACKLASH: One of the ongoing conversations in town is that Jack Nicholson and Jim Cameron could have knocked themselves out of their sure-bet Oscar wins with their performances at The Golden Globes. A lot of people seem to feel, including none other than insightful veteran William Goldman, that their smug attitudes that night could be as damaging as an iceberg. We’ll see on Monday night.
STICKING UP FOR THE PREZ: It’s nice to see Alec Baldwin taking the President’s side against the media barrage over the current sex scandal in Washington. He’s right. We should stay focused on real problems. Like cocaine overdoses and hotel rooms destroyed by the least successful member of a certain set of acting brothers. What was that name again?
NEXT!: On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the ad campaign for I Know What You Did Last Summer was misleading because it referred to the film as “from the creator of Scream,” which, for Sony, meant writer Kevin Williamson and for Miramax, the producers of Scream, meant director Wes Craven. My question is, “Who cares?! This is old news! Why are these idiots still spending money on lawyers?!” Hmmph!
CONTESTS, WE HAVE CONTESTS: OK, boys and girls. Here are two roads to cool stuff. One is the Oscar road. Click here to see all the Academy nominees and send me your picks by Monday afternoon. The winner gets his or her pick of ShoWest stuff. The other road is to send me your picks for this weekend’s Top Five at the box office including the dollar amounts. You have until Saturday at noon to get me your entries. (By the way, the new films this weekend are The Newton Boys, Wild Things and Primary Colors.)
READER OF THE DAY: More harsh words from Denise: “As a Mel Gibson fan, I am making daily burnt offerings for Lethal Weapon 4. The production pace is scary, but I think it is their best hope to break their major losing streak. I can’t stand those buffoon studio heads, Daly and Semel! What has happened to their decision-making process? I read that they were skeptical about using Chris Rock to help bring some youthfulness to the cast of LW4. I find that unbelievably idiotic! The presence of Chris will do nothing but help the film.”

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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