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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, May 19th, 1998 - Comments Off on Leo, The Cut Up
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Leo, The Cut Up

Well, when Leo says he doesn’t want to be just another movie star, he isn’t fooling. He’ll get $21 million to star in American Psycho, the feature version of the incredibly controversial book by Bret Easton Ellis about a designer label-obsessed, serial-raping, knife-murdering stock broker in Manhattan, and that’s the tame explanation. The fee increases the budget on the film by a minimum of 400 percent (to $40 million), after the original casting plans were set for a $6 million budget film. For Leo, this choice is kind of like if Brad Pitt had done Kalifornia as a follow-up to Interview With the Vampire. Bloody, dumb and bloody dumb.
THE EDGAR WATCH: Looks like Edgar Bronfman Jr. will win the prize known as PolyGram with a bid around the $10.5 billion mark. Everyone else has decided the cost was a little too high. No problem for Bronfman. When this thing first hit, he was said to be willing to hit the $12 billion mark for the Dutch-owned company, so $10.5 billion is a bargain. (Did I leave out that Wall Street estimated the value of the company at $9 billion after the sale possibility became public?)
CANNES CANNES: The 50 minutes of Armageddon that Disney unleashed on the South of France had some mighty, mighty special effects, but the clip got laughs when it came to the tender moment between Bruce Willis and his daughter, played by Liv Tyler. In other news, Mimic director Guillermo Del Toro has found the $30 million he needs to shoot his next film. It’s called Montecristo and sets the Count of Monte Cristo story in 1870s Mexico. Now if only he can find a young actor who’s is in a movie that will make over a billion dollars a few months before his opening.
FAMILIAR FRIENDLY TERRITORY: Jennifer Aniston is attached to Something Wicked, the story of an evil exec who is out to destroy a corporate rival and instead, gets pushed in front of a bus. Wanna bet she comes back to life as Jennifer Aniston and learns her lesson? I can hear the “Friends” theme now, only this time Rachel is in the Monica role. Oooooh! Edgy!
CARRIE-ING THINGS TOO FAR: Anyone who had any high hopes for Carrie II should put them away. Semi-hack director Robert Mandel (School Ties, The Substitute) has been replaced by ultimate hack director Katt Shea (Poison Ivy, Strip To Kill). They blame the change on “creative differences.” Probably more like horrifying dailies. After all, this is a star-free film. There’s no one to fight with except the studio.
X MARKS THE FILM: For those of you who are wondering how “The X-Files” movie will perform, here’s a hint. About 9 million people tuned in for the season finale (aka the film set-up), up from the average 6 million or so who tune in each week. That’s about $50 million in box office if they all show up. And if you weren’t there for the finale? I’ll be there, but I don’t expect too many non-X-Files junkies to fill theaters.
ADDING UP TO SEINFELD: No, I’m not going to tell you about the ratings. Sony and Warner Bros. invested in spots during the closer of the decade. The consensus, confirmed by the NPD market research group, seems to be that Sony’s Godzilla ad was memorable and Warner Bros. multiple ads were not. In the meantime, there are complaints about the most recent spate of Godzilla ads (see ROTD below) and some real concern about the ads for The Truman Show, which even director Peter Weir admitted haven’t really gotten the spirit of the movie across yet. Ironically, the groups that liked the film best in test screenings were 18-24s, the same group who would be going to Jim Carrey movies featuring butt-talking.
READER OF THE DAY: From Krillian: “I’m pretty pissed at Sony for showing a commercial before the movie opens that reveals that [censored by David to protect those who haven’t see the commercial]. I know you’ve seen it, David, but I haven’t and I didn’t want to know that [now deleted reality] until I saw the movie! Please can’t someone get the message to studios to stop ruining movies for us before we get to see them? If I wanted to know the endings to movies I’d check out the spoilers at Aint-It-Cool-News where at least I know I’m choosing to ruin the movie for me. That Godzilla spoiler commercial snuck up on me and I couldn’t get to my remote fast enough. It’s like seeing a commercial for The Empire Strikes Back the week before it opened in 1980 with Darth Vader saying in the commercial, “Luke, I am your father!”

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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