MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, April 1st, 1998 - Comments Off on Rants and Raves for April Fools
Be Sociable, Share!

Rants and Raves for April Fools

I just have to get this off my chest. The weight of these insights has simply been too much for my soul. And I like to do this kind of thing at the beginning of a new month. It clears the palette.
Sources at Paramount and 20th Century Fox admitted to me last night that they will lose hundreds of millions on Titanic. As it turns out, the entire $1 billion-plus box office story was a hoax financed by Universal Studios, which was angling to get James Cameron to convince Arnold Schwarzenegger to make Junior II for the studio. In actuality, Titanic has grossed $3,797.25. The studio executives who, after being plied by a round of crème de menthe shooters openly blamed former Warner Bros. marketing guy Chris Pula for the idea, also admitted rigging the Academy Awards®, intentionally leaving Leo out of the studio-controlled nominations because, to quote one deeply placed source, “That punk is getting all the chicks. Even the hookers I pay for can’t concentrate when Leo is on the lot!” As for the Gloria Stuart loss, the same exec said, “Cameron actually decapitated Gloria by mistake during the shoot in Mexico. We were able to cover the flaw digitally until now, but we had a scare when the digitally created Fay Wray malfunctioned early in the show and so we went with the animatronic Kim Basinger instead.” I stated my disbelief, but then he convinced me of the truth of all this by adding, “What? You didn’t actually believe a real woman could look like that, did you?”
I think it’s terrible that As Good as It Gets co-writer-director Jim Brooks is trying to get the studio to make the hit film into a TV series that would be a kind of prequel. Christian Slater would take over the Jack Nicholson role in Before It Got Good, to premiere on the newly forming Sony/Disney/Viacom/Warner Bros. World Domination Network next fall. The Helen Hunt role in the series would be an aspiring 15-year-old waitress whose mother keeps getting her to “go out,” leading to the second season story line that has her getting knocked up by an asthmatic drunken sailor. She’ll be played by Anna Paquin. The Greg Kinnear role, ironically, will be played by Rosie O’Donnell, the mediocre movie star turned major TV star. This, of course, will follow the character before his sex change and will allow O’Donnell to sing show tunes in every episode.
Studios are fighting over a spec project that has already attached Jennifer Lopez, Angela Bassett, Eddie Murphy, Gregory Hines, Whitney Houston, Denzel Washington, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, Graham Greene, Edward James Olmos and Damon, Marlon, Keenen Ivory and Kim Wayans in a project to be co-directed by Forest Whitaker and Bill Duke called We’ve Made All The Movies With Ethnic People That We’re Going To Be Making This Year So Go Protest Somewhere Else: The Movie. Word is, the studio that eventually gets the project will replace Eddie Murphy with Matthew McConaughey to add some star power.
Roland Emmerich, Dean Devlin and Paul Verhoeven have teamed up to make a mega-budget effects extravaganza/hard-core pornographic remake of The Full Monty called The Full Monty 2000. Apparently, while rehearsing for the big strip act, the boys were exposed to some gamma radiation that made their genitals grow to the size of office buildings when let loose on the unsuspecting crowd. When the penises cross the ocean to destroy New York, Will Smith and a 5-foot-tall, spunky black woman with a name that ends in a vowel helps him save the world. The studio has already passed on Jada Pinkett Smith for the woman’s role claiming that she has no chemistry with Smith.
Finally, I saw Leo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, Richard Gere, Eddie Murphy and Brad Pitt buck naked in a local park last week, playing on the jungle gym. They were accompanied by two transvestite hookers, three prominent supermodels (who are also secretly lesbians) and a gerbil. I shot the entire thing on video and it was going to be released on the ‘Net for $17.95 a viewing, but Pamela Anderson is suing to stop it since she didn’t get to have sex on the tape with anyone except for the gerbil, which explains the new rodent tattoo she is sporting on the lower northeastern quadrant of the right side of the her bionically enhanced left breast.
Reader Of The Day: Burt R. writes: “I want my Academy Award® or I’m gonna kill this hairpiece. I swear! Don’t push me! I want an Oscar in a brown paper bag along with that video of Loni having sex with Prince that I left in the guest house. Do you know how much that’s worth now? And I want someone to take me as seriously as I take myself! And I want someone to beat up Barbara Walters for asking about my bald spot. Everyone knows my hair is as real as my smile. Signed, Anonymous.”

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments Off on Rants and Raves for April Fools

Comments are closed.

Quote Unquotesee all »

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