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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, October 8th, 2004 - Comments Off on The Way We Were
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The Way We Were

I’ve been watching the wonderful movie-loving documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession and it struck me how much things have changed in my 16 years here in Los Angeles.

The film tells the tale of this great entry into the early life of cable television, The Z Channel, which delivered so many great movies to the Los Angeles public before Cinemax and The Movie Channel were created to try to compete on a big corporate level. Of course, both of those channels eventually devolved into more of the same, perhaps with a bit more sex than their parent channels, HBO and Showtime.

I know many of the people who were part of the story and who are now in this doc. They were younger/thinner/hairier back then, but so was I. But what struck me personally was how flexible the world was back then. Clearly, the playing field for movies and cable has changed significantly. But has the “anything is possible” attitude of The Z Channel, as well as Henri Langlois, about whose Cinémathèque Française there was a documentary at Toronto, really changed or have I and my friend and colleagues who lived through those events just gotten older and less anxious to fight the fights that make those magical landmarks come to pass?

God knows, Movie City News has been, for me, my partner Laura and the writers involved as much about love for the cinema as anything else and we have been blessed with some success for our efforts. But I remember those days in Los Angeles when AFM was booming and Joel Silver was just getting started as a producer and Disney was just getting relaunched and Fox was just getting started as a TV network and $100 million domestic was a shitload of money. And things seemed simpler. Or maybe they were just simpler for me.

The punchline to all of this is that we really need to see a Z Channel happen again. IFC and Sundance both went right past the model and narrowcast themselves into something good, but something different. There simply is no channel with the consciousness that Z Channel had… where you knew just by tuning in that you were going to be compelled, if not impressed… that the world of movies had good and bad, and events that were about loving movies and not hype. You watch this documentary and you realize that so many of the films that Z Channel brought to TV for the first time are now never seen on TV anymore. Really… when was the last time you saw a Laura Antonelli movie… or a Sonia Braga movie… or a Costas Gravas movie… or early Dutch Verhoeven… or the four hour 15 minutes version of Heaven’s Gate… or a silent film… etc, etc, etc.?

The process of acquiring rights would surely be more complicated than ever. But how much can a screening of Hail The Conquering Hero or La Comunidad or Day For Night really be? And why can’t that business model work for someone… even if it is a local effort, expanding slowly if at all, major city by major city?

If the effort was sincere, the opportunity to have Tarantino Tuesdays and Friday Night In France and The Monday Musical seems obvious. You know, MTV used to show music videos. The ‘outgrew” music because there is more money in other programming. But wouldn’t it be cool to see a music video now and again? And wouldn’t it be great to have a quality film festival on your TV 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?

Hmmmm….

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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