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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, March 17th, 1998 - Comments Off on From The Readers
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From The Readers

After a week in Vegas, my Hot Button has been pushed so many times that it’s worn out. (Worse, there’s almost no really interesting news out there to comment on.) So, while I regenerate my passions for tomorrow’s rant, I’m turning the column over to you once again.
From Mary H: “I have a theory about the Titanic box office numbers. Without having seen Iron Mask, I would still hazard a guess that those going for the next ‘Jack Dawson experience’ are going to be left wanting, and, of course, the only cure for the Louis/Phillipe image is another dose of Jack. So, it’s back to Titanic for one more viewing (‘There, THAT’S better!’), and the numbers are once again bizarre and ‘unbelievable.’ Unless a bigger movie is coming next week, I predict that Mask will drop to No. 2, and Titanic will be back in the top spot next weekend.”
From G Martin: “I look for John Travolta to have a strong spring. He has Primary Colors and the always cool re-release of Grease, so Hollywood, watch out! He’s about to explode and knock Titanic out of the water.”
From JOEY: Take One: “Quite a few of the diehard DiCaprio fans decided to do a ‘DiCaprio Double Feature’ kinda thing. At least two people I know did it, and it doesn’t seem like an outlandish possibility to me.”
Take Two: “I think that one of the big reasons that you didn’t get a lotta e-mail last week was because humans are selfish and if they think that a response is unlikely, they (we) won’t e-mail.”
And Take Three: “Godzilla will be big (another “all style/no substance” flick from the overrated Devlin/Emmerich team), but no Titanic. The only movie that may come close to beating out Titanic will be Star Wars: Episode One.”
From Steve Chien-Wei Weng: “Subject: Nightmares on Oscar Night: 1.Jack Lemmon wins another Oscar, because the winner insists so.
2.Robert DeNiro is arrested by police again because the attorney needs him as a witness in the White House scandal.
3. Christian Slater arrives just after being released from jail, so he doesn’t get the Leonardo punchlines.
4.Leonardo shows up, has nothing to do but sit there and cause fans to yell his name.
5. Sharon Stone shows up with her new husband to find out that half of the other men there used to be her boyfriends. The other half of the men are lined up to chat with Madonna. And Madonna‘s desperately seeking Leonardo and Leo is sitting in Demi Moore‘s lap.
6. Barbra goes to the powder room again when Celine sings.
From Akiko: “I have worked with DiCaprio on a film before, and guess what? He is much more than a teen idol; he really has talent. Whether these films recognize it, or even show it, is another question. He is not just a pretty face. He knows what he is doing.”
From Martin C: The Man In The Iron Mask was terrible. John Malkovich did his usual performance, which means that he screamed and gritted his teeth. That’s what he calls acting. Leonardo Dicaprio was struggling to act. There is a scene where Leo’s playing Philippe, looking out the window at the moon, and it looks like he’s trying to cry. I can see him thinking about something sad to make himself cry, and he doesn’t even succeed. But the acting wasn’t the biggest problem with this film, the script was. The big secrets of the plot are not secret, and anyone with half a brain cell can, and will, figure them out in the first 10 minutes, except for the guy sitting right in front of me, who thought he was a genius when he figured it out.”
From Ryan J: “I’m a loyal fan and supporter of Leonardo DiCaprio. And I thought The Man in the Iron Mask was good. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t embarrassingly awful. What I thought was interesting was that Leo really isn’t the star attraction, it’s the musketeers. It’s thanks to Titanic that the media is pushing it as Leo’s film, and it’s not. He made it long before anyone could have seen how successful Titanic was going to be. Therefore, I don’t consider this his follow-up by any means. His true follow-up — and the one the media should have reserved all its rabid scrutiny for — is the one he chooses to make post-Titanic. The one he chooses from his endless stream of unsolicited scripts. The one he could command up to $20 million for. That’s the one where he really has to prove he’s worth it.”
READER OF THE DAY: I guess that’s me. Thanks for all the great mail on Monday. And Happy St. Patrick’s Day to those of you who celebrate the holiday. And for those who don’t, watch out for green puddles.

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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