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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

The Junkman cometh: thinking about Gone in 60 Seconds' H. B. Halicki

Andrew Tracy does some smart looking at the delirious output of the late H. B. Halicki: “To claim that gone in 60 Seconds is all action and no story is to miss the radically reconfigured narrative it tells to perfection: the interaction of two machines, man and vehicle, independent of any reason apart from their functional compatibility.
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Halicki’s colourless Pace is the inadvertent symbol of that symbiosis: both investigator and thief, his heists carefully restricted to vehicles insured by the very companies that then hire him to investigate his own crimes, Pace is not between two worlds (as the ad copy would say) but at the heart of a ceaselessly functioning mechanism. Gone’s narrative is a systemic, not a dramatic one. The final chase is not an outburst of defiance; there’s none of the requisite cop-baiting of the good ol’ boy car-chase cycle to follow. Pace’s escape has all the outlaw triumph of an accountant’s tabled report, nothing more than the completion of a process that, we can only assume from the “open” ending, will begin anew with the next commission. Speed leads inescapably back to stasis, to a ceaseless recurrence masked by the spectacle of bodies and machines in motion, by the chimera of conspicuous destruction.” [More smart but not pretentious stuff at the link; from Cinema Scope 24.]

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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