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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, March 26th, 1998 - Comments Off on Tour of the Titan-ick!
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Tour of the Titan-ick!

Can’t get enough of the Big Boat? Well, Oscar-winning composer James Horner will be touring the country this summer with his Titanic score and more, including a 30-minute suite of music that was cut out of the movie, “Titanic: The Composer’s Cut.” Guess this is kind of like the Shine tour last year only I’ll be the only one shaking my head and talking to myself as the music plays.
MOUSE DROPPING: Your husband just won three Academy Awards, you were in a $100 million movie last year and you’re still a blonde bombshell. What are you gonna do? Linda Hamilton is going to Disney’s world! She just signed to voice the evil demi-goddess Nemesis on Disney’s TV version of Hercules. Things are tough all over.
JUST WONDERING: Is Kevin Bacon doing a nude scene in Wild Things tat for tit?
KNIGHT AND DAY: Les Visiteurs is one of the highest-grossing comedies of all time in France. Yes, even bigger than The Nutty Professor. But when the film arrived in the U.S., seemingly predestined for remaking, nothing happened. Why? The film is based around two medieval knights transported into modern day. The argument was made that there is no tradition of knighthood in America, so the central premise was faulty for an American remake. But John Hughes sees it differently. No word on what the Home Alone creator will do to make the concept U.S.-friendly, but at some point, I expect to find the lost knights in a house that three burglars are trying to rob.
LOW-LITA NEWS: I have been critical of the censorship buzz around the distribution problems of Adrian Lyne’s Lolita up until now. I still say the biggest mistake the production made was making the film before having a domestic distributor. When a movie like Basic Instinct got into trouble, the director could take the heat. But if a studio buys Lolita, the finished product, there are no excuses to make. On top of that, the film demands a minimum of $15-$20 million in prints and advertising to launch. The commercial failure of sexually controversial films like Henry and June and Showgirls means even that minimal amount could be wasted money. All that aside, the refusal of playdates on pay-per-view by DirecTV, Request TV and Viewer’s Choice can be seen as nothing less than censorship. Hard to claim that Howard Stern and “His Many Lesbians” is OK to sell but a film based on a classic novel is not. A film that has already removed any nudity by the body double for the 12-year-old title starlet of the film. The one cable outlet still in talks with the producers is Showtime Networks, the exclusive cable home of The Red Shoe Diaries, Beverly Hills Bordello and the aforementioned classic, Showgirls.
READER OF THE DAY: From Geoff W: “While Stanley Donen’s speech may have been more gracious than Cameron’s, they both were the products of the pure joy that they each felt. Plus, Donen’s was rehearsed and planned. Cameron was king of the world and shouldn’t be criticized for saying it. That was how he felt and how most people would feel. Especially after spending three years of his life on the film and having to deal with all the criticism before the movie came out. Congratulations James.”

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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