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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 - 11 Comments »
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Funny What Gets Us Excited This Time Of Year…

Over the weekend, BFCA members got a note from The Angellotti Company explaining tha we won’t be getting Munich, King Kong, or The Producers screeners until after release. And this:
“Universal wishes to convey that there will be no press conference with Steven Spielberg of anyone attached to MUNICH as there will be no junket for the film. No other press group will receive an opportunity to interview the cast or filmmakers until much closer to the film’s release on December 23.
Also, we have just been informed that, sadly, Mel brooks will not participate in THE PRODUCERS junket in New York. Mr. Brooks will not be available to any other group or journalists either.”
Never occured to me that Spielberg not junketing Munich was news… since we all knew this was the case since early October. In fact, there was talk amongst his production team about actually releasing the film with no trailer, no poster and no screenings until the first public screening. That idea didn’t even get into meetings at Universal.
The history is that Spielberg doesn’t test screen and tends to say “no junket” until at the last minute they decide there might not be enough buzz and they throw something together. Spielberg had Tom Hanks dump a lot of media obligations to reshoot the ending of The Terminal less than two weeks before release. For a long time, there was to be no junket for Saving Private Ryan. And I wouldn’t be shocked if a small junket suddenly comes together either right before X-Mas or right after New Years.
Steven does what Steven wants to do. Period.
Anyway… if this is news, I guess Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh’s decision not to come to L.A. at all to promote Kong is news. Old news.
Meanwhile, Tom O’Neil is crowing about George Clooney moving to Supporting Actor for Syriana… where they obviously hope he can movie star his way to a nomination in what is the leading role in the film. Good luck to them. To me… still not news.

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11 Comments »

11 Responses to “Funny What Gets Us Excited This Time Of Year…”

  1. Scooba Steve says:
    November 23, 2005 at 7:24 pm

    “Munich” not having any Oscar campaign is very much news to me.
    Spielberg is finally seeing the bigger picture here… that his movies are more important than the Academy Awards.

  2. jeffmcm says:
    November 23, 2005 at 10:14 pm

    I never heard that story about The Terminal before. That may explain why the ending is so underwhelming.

  3. Nicol D says:
    November 23, 2005 at 10:25 pm

    It would be a great thing if more and more people of Spielberg’s calibre quit campaigning for Oscars. No ads…no nothing. Then more would catch on and the Oscars would begin to mean something again.

  4. Crow T Robot says:
    November 23, 2005 at 11:42 pm

    Well put Nicol.
    And after his (legendary?) cameo in “Austin Powers Goldmember” how could Mr. Spielberg ever take winning another Oscar that seriously again?
    That shit was heart attack funny.

  5. EDouglas says:
    November 24, 2005 at 6:36 am

    At the War of the Worlds junket earlier this year, I arrived in the morning to be told that Steven Spielberg wouldn’t be there since he went home after doing the TV interviews…later in the day, when everyone showed up for the ridiculously overcrowded press conference with Cruise, sure enough there were two chairs there and Spielberg did show up.

  6. PandaBear says:
    November 24, 2005 at 9:17 pm

    Munich doesn’t need a campaign at this point since it has been annointed leader.

  7. KamikazeCamelV2.0 says:
    November 24, 2005 at 10:45 pm

    This is news to me as well. Well, I heard about it a few days ago, not months.
    But it could be said that it won’t remain the leader if they don’t even publicise for it. The Academy could take it to mean that he doesn’t want any awards. He already has a bunch, so why give it to somebody who doesn’t want it.
    Similar to Woody Allen, except he’s been absent for ages, they’ll probably WANT to reward him.

  8. joefitz84 says:
    November 25, 2005 at 3:05 pm

    If it is as good as they say it is they won’t need to dump a lot of money into advertising for it for awards. What else is there for awards?

  9. KamikazeCamelV2.0 says:
    November 25, 2005 at 11:37 pm

    As good as who says? Nobody’s bloody well seen it.

  10. martin says:
    November 26, 2005 at 10:43 am

    kathleen kennedy says it’s great. she didn’t say that about war of the world, so she must be telling the truth. right?

  11. KamikazeCamelV2.0 says:
    November 26, 2005 at 9:53 pm

    Er… that’s one person.

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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