MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

The Hot Blog has moved…

The Hot Blog is finally moving onto MCN turf.

The new URL is…

/columnists/poland/

I’ll be posting to both sites for a short while, but the sooner you start commenting over there instead of over there, the sooner the smooth transition will be complete…

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3 Responses to “The Hot Blog has moved…”

  1. L&DB says:

    Are all of our comments going over there as well?
    If not, time to write about Lucas yet again!
    HUZZAH!

  2. Dwight Brown says:

    How about updating the links at http://www.thehotbutton.com/ and http://www.moviecitynews.com/ to point to the new location? Right now, they’re still pointing at typepad.

  3. Allan says:

    There is a real potential for enhancing the movie going
    experience if 3D stereoscopic films are allowed to entered the mix. Robert Rodriguez is offering up his
    “Shark Boy & Lava Girl” kid’s flick in anaglyph 3D on June 10th. The term, anaglyph refers to using contrasting color gel filters to see the seperation of the left and right images. The glasses are mounted in paper and pretty much are a turn off. Note that “Polar Express” did an un-heard-of 15 times as much per screen in 3D as in 2D, using plastic glasses. Those glasses
    were polarized, and costly IMAX 3D equipment was needed.
    There is a pilot program that is offering a few hundred thousand plastic glasses to theaters running “Shark Boy”. These better glasses really provide a better experience and only cost a couple of dollars or so. If
    this advanced anaglyph approach were to be used, “Polar Express” could come back at Christmas in hundreds of regular theaters in addition to the 60 or so IMAX houses that are planning the re-screening next X-mas.
    Any computer generated animation, a-la PIXAR & DREAMWORKS could also have wide release in 3D. Much has been made of the requirement for digital 2K, 3K or 4K
    projection to run 3D effectively. A much cheaper and better choice would be to install the low cost 6 perf
    projection kits for existing 35mm projectors. The Chinese made kits start at about $3,000 and can be changed in a couple of minutes back to standard 35mm 4
    perf. The basis of the frame is the identical layout for
    each panel of Cinerama. (fifty year old technology)A good, bright digital system can cost way over 100 grand!
    This approach allows either anaglyph or polarized glasses to be use. Imax3D is great, but it is like water skiing with a coast guard cutter!

The Hot Blog

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