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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, August 19th, 2005 - Comments Off on Surfacing the scratch: Chaos producers pony up to challenge Ebert
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Surfacing the scratch: Chaos producers pony up to challenge Ebert

The producer and director of a scabrous-seeming slaughter item ponied up a rumored $14,000 for a full-page rejoinder to Roger Ebert’s zero-star review; at the top of the front page and across page 4 of the newspaper (and at the link), the Sun-Times offers Ebert’s reply, which takes up an entire page of its own. Excerpts: “Your film does “work,” and as filmmakers you have undeniable skills and gifts. The question is, did you put them to a defensible purpose? I believed you did not… I left saddened and disgusted. Michael Mirasol, a fellow critic, asked me why I even wrote a review, and I answered: “It will get about the audience it would have gotten anyway, but it deserves to be dealt with and replied to.” Yes, you got a good review from the Daily Herald, but every other major critic who has seen the movie shares my view…. The line “why do we need this s–t” was not original with me; I quoted it from Ed Gonzalez at [slantmagazine.com], who did not use any dashes in his version. I find it ironic that the makers of “Chaos” would scold me for using “coarse” language and “resorting to expletives.” … If Chaos has a message, it is that evil reigns and will triumph. I don’t believe so… You use the material without pity, to look unblinkingly at a monster and his victims. The monster is given no responsibility, no motive, no context, no depth. Like a shark, he exists to kill… What I miss in your film is any sense of hope. Sometimes it is all that keeps us going… As the Greeks understood tragedy, it exists not to bury us in death and dismay, but to help us to deal with it, to accept it as a part of life, to learn about our own humanity from it… Your answer, that the world is evil and therefore it is your responsibility to reflect it, is no answer at all, but a surrender.
Sincerely,
Roger Ebert”

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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