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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

The Postman, Minnie Driver and More

As I find myself longing never to write about Titanic again, I think that I can get The Postman almost all the way out of my system today. There’s no actual news or anything, but in L.A. it’s become very fashionable to cleanse your body and soul of unclean thoughts and other waste by force. So, here goes.
KUNDUN UNDONE: After a lackluster release by Disney in the U.S., Australia’s Village Roadshow, Disney’s normal distribution outlet down under, has passed on the distribution of the film. Is it a coincidence that A.V.R. is negotiating multiplex deals on mainland China and Hong Kong that might be complicated by the totalitarian depiction of the Chinese in Martin Scorsese‘s small masterpiece? Demonstrators who camped out in front of their offices last week didn’t think so. A.V.R. execs claim that it’s just business, but that hasn’t kept The Postman from hitting Aussie screens. Village Roadshow hasn’t spindled or mutilated Scorsese’s film, but they’ve definitely folded.
MOD UPDATE: A couple of week’s ago (link to: http://www.roughcut.com/today/hot.button/980319_thu.html), I told you about Aaron Spelling‘s search for two young co-stars to star opposite Claire Danes in the feature version of The Mod Squad. Well, they found a Pete in Giovanni Ribisi, a very talented comic actor who you may remember as Frank, Jr. on “Friends” or from his starring role in Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia. Or, as the theme column continues, from his role in The Postman, which co-starred the original Julie, Peggy Lipton. I love when an item goes full circle.
THE MARRYING MAC: I know this will send all of you away in tears, but Macaulay Culkin is tying the knot (and not around his dad’s neck). At the ripe old age of 17, Mac is engaged to Diary of Anne Frank star Rachel Miner. His publicist tried to get him engaged to the real star of Anne Frank, Natalie Portman, but her ring finger is committed to a publicity stunt in which she gets engaged to Leonardo DiCaprio. Can you imagine the cat fight? (Not between the women, between Leo and Mac). Almost makes you want to make a $100 million movie about a post-apocalyptic world whose primary remnants of the past seem to be made up primarily of product placements. (I know, there was no connection. You come up with a Postman reference that fits and e-mail it to me!)
JUST WONDERING: Kevin Costner will certainly survive The Postman, but does the film’s failure give an excuse to people who don’t want to make Larenz Tate a movie star?
THE MINNIE WATCH: After a month or so of worrying about Minnie Driver‘s love life, here’s a little work news. She’s picked her next film. It’s called An Ideal husband. Oh, Minnie! You deserve the perfect husband! That Matt Damon! He’ll pay for dumping you! With God as my witness, I’ll avenge you! Uh, did I get off track? Driver will co-star in the film which is being adapted from the Oscar Wilde play and directed by Oliver Parker, the guy who adapted and directed the Laurence (“Don’t Call Me Larry!”) Fishburne Othello that burned and crashed a couple of years ago. No one from The Postman has been cast yet, though Olivia Williams would fit nicely, I think.
DATING YOURSELF: Ready for the next “Why Did Everyone Make The Same Movie This Year” phenom? It’s dating schools. Yes, we insane people on the coasts are paying others to tell us how to date. (And when that doesn’t work, some of us are paying for sex. Right, Charlie?) DreamWorks is adapting an article from Mademoiselle magazine (kind of like adapting a political philosophy from a three-fold pamphlet) called I Went to Date School. That dating legend, Danny DeVito and his Jersey Films has purchased rights to the story of the company the Mademoiselle article focused on, First Impressions. And the guy who brought us Wild Things has a script in the market called Date School, about a nerd who gets a date he didn’t expect to get (with the hottest high school hottie) and decides he needs a lesson on how to date. Of course, in that version, everyone ends up naked or dead or both. Much like in, you guessed it, The Postman.
READER OF THE DAY: From Loyd Movie: “Glad you’re as interested in the ‘missing’ Oscar winners as I seem to be. But you left off a few — just a few — like Olivia De Havilland, Art Carney, Joan Fontaine, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, Goldie Hawn, Eileen Heckart, Wendy Hiller, Katharine Hepburn, Kim Hunter, Glenda Jackson, Lila Kedrova, Sophia Loren, Dorothy Malone, John Mills, Tatum O’Neal, Liza Minnelli, Jason Robards, Anthony Quinn, George C. Scott, Beatrice Straight, Peter Ustinov, Loretta Young, Jane Wyman, Maureen Stapleton and Paul Scofield. Yes, I know many of these stars are close to 90, but 88-year-old Luise Rainer made it! And she’s only one year older than a certain Best-Supporting-Actress-Oscar nominee who should be a winner now and her movie would’ve beat that chariot race movie.”

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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