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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Director, Wrong Director

Today, two examples of hiring the wrong director. One, an excellent director in the wrong genre and the other, a director who should never be allowed to shoot a major motion picture again. You figure out which is which. (I don’t expect it to be difficult.)
First, with Sony breathing down their necks, MGM has decided to put Bond 19 into the hands of director Michael Apted. WHAT?! A great documentarian (Seven Up – 42 Up), a terrific actors’ director (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist) and a director who has failed every time he has taken a shot at a remotely action-based film (Gorky Park, Firstborn, Class Action, Thunderheart, Extreme Measures). What are they thinking? I mean, I admire this guy to the heavens, but as the director of a Bond movie?! This is one of the screwiest combinations of a director and a film since Castle Rock gave William Goldman’s great screenplay, Year of the Comet, to Peter Yates, who like Apted, is a great director (Breaking Away, Eyewitness, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Bullitt), but not the guy for a frothy romantic adventure comedy.
Oddly enough, I was having lunch with a director friend Tuesday and he opined, “Warren Beatty hired the wrong director [himself] for Bulworth and made one of the best failed films ever. Had the right director, maybe had Sydney Pollack, been on that film, it could have been one of the all-time greats.” I agree. We then talked about Bill Duke, a very talented director, who really set his career back by trying to do too wide a range of films (from his breakthrough Deep Cover right into the old lady comedy The Cemetery Club) and has barely recovered. Not everyone is meant to do everything. Very few can.
Oh, yeah, the other guy is Rob Cohen. For some unknown reason, Columbia has attached him to a big sci-fi project called After the Visitation (a future Earth that has some new secrets since an alien visitation). This is the same guy who managed to make Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story look pretty good, but he stunk up the planet with Dragonheart and Daylight back-to-back. And next, HBO will inflict the hideous The Rat Pack on all of us who have cable. (Great actors, a miscast Ray Liotta and a truly crappy script that matches the direction.) I guess Cohen is miscast too. See, he used to be quite a good commercially oriented producer (Mahogany, Bingo Long, The Witches of Eastwick, Bird on a Wire) and has devolved into a hack director. What I really want him to do is produce.
CANNIBAL SCORN: This is my favorite story of the year so far. Herb Cruse, a 77-year-old surviving veteran of Pearl Harbor, tried to get the Carmike Theater chain to pay him off not to reveal the fact that he had poured his aunt’s cremated remains in the popcorn at three of the company’s Charlotte, N.C. theaters. They took a pass, so he apparently papered the theater’s parking lot with fliers claiming that the theaters were serving “cannibal corn” and encouraging participation in a class action suit. Only one problem. He now says that he never did put his aunt’s ashes into the popcorn, just “some ashes,” presumably not human. He was ticked because a district manager didn’t let him sell on-screen ads. Don’t these kids ever learn when the joke just isn’t funny anymore?! Me, I just assumed that “cannibal corn” had something to do with a fetish based around Dr. Scholls.
MULAN MUHLAH: Early reports out of China suggested that Disney would have a hard time getting Mulan onto screen. Apparently payback for the release of Martin Scorsese‘s masterpiece Kundun last Christmas. (If you ask me, China should be kissing Disney’s butt for burying a film that should have been nominated for at least six Academy Awards.) But Disney now says that the coast is clear. But there is another little problem. China only accepts 10 international films a year. (That would be us Americans.) So, not accepting Mulan wouldn’t be the biggest offense ever. And, of course, if China wants to punish America, Disney is trying to get them to let Armageddon screen. All they have to do is say yes.
NOTE TO ARMAGEDDON FANS: I know, I know.
EARLY TREK SPEC: Well, Paramount has finally made the deal to distribute Trekkers (nee: Trekkies), the wonderful Roger Nygard documentary on the people who love Star Trek a little too much. Or maybe just enough. roughcut.com took the first peek at the film over a year ago. Guess who wrote it? Check it out right here.
Paramount hasn’t decided whether to release the film, which some feel could tick off a few Trek-addicts (geez, these folks get riled over whether you call them trekkers or trekkies), before Star Trek: Insurrection hits screens this December or sometime in the spring, hopefully riding the wave of Trek focus refueled by the new film. If the studio is smart, they’ll go for the earlier option. The core audience is never going to boycott a new Trek film and a little controversy could help bring some hip buzz to the series.
READER OF THE DAY: From Jeffrey Wells: “Ben Affleck’s rant re my July 2 Mr. Showbiz story about Dogma was pretty wild. Jeff Schwager of Mr. Showbiz posted a reply late Tuesday on Kevin Smith’s View Askew site, pointing out Ben’s inaccuracies and requesting an apology.
“That pretty much covers it, except for two points I’d like to make.
“One, the story I wrote was basically about a tip I’d gotten from a trusted insider that Michael Eisner isn’t too thrilled about the prospect of taking heat from the religious right over the film’s satiric content. If Ben had said, ‘Gee, I don’t know anything about that, but I sure like the script, blah, blah,’ there would’ve been no story. But he didn’t. He said that Miramax topper Harvey Weinstein (whom he knows) ‘has his trepidations about this.’ He also shared his suspicion that Eisner is ‘probably…nervous about [Dogma].’
“These quotes he didn’t argue with, and indeed partially supported what I’d heard earlier. What was I supposed to do, ignore them?
“Two, I’m willing to bet that Ben’s rant wasn’t so much about his own reaction to the story (he’d been shown a typed transcript of his remarks and said, through his publicist, that he ‘stands by what he said’), but about Miramax’s (i.e.: Harvey’s). I’ll bet 20 bucks that Ben was diplomatically reamed out by Harvey (or some Miramax flunky, acting on Harvey’s orders) for speaking candidly about Dogma, and was told to, henceforth, keep his yap shut. I’ll wager that the young fellow’s pride was tarnished by this and that he passed these feelings along last Monday when asked about Dogma during his now-infamous Internet chat.
“Young men of intelligence and a semblance of balls, like Ben, always speak their minds openly…at first. (Leonardo DiCaprio was like this back in the What’s Eating Gilbert Grape days.) Sooner or later their remarks cause a stir, which always results in their managers or publicists stepping in and telling them to wise up, or else. If Ben were Tom Cruise or some other heavyweight, no one would have dared caution him. But (and remember, I’m just using my powers of deduction here) since he’s young and just starting out, and since Dogma is a possibly troublesome film that may indeed draw the wrath of the crazies, and since Ben and Matt Damon have a housekeeping deal with Miramax (the L.A.-based Pearl Street Productions), and since Harvey and Bob have never been reticent about throwing their weight around, Ben (I suspect) may have had his fanny paddled.

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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