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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, November 30th, 2005 - Comments Off on Tehrangeles: movies by Darius Khondji, Sam Nazarian and Bob Yari
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Tehrangeles: movies by Darius Khondji, Sam Nazarian and Bob Yari

“One day Hollywood will make an Iranian-American Gone With the Wind, writes Behrouz Saba, “All the epic elements are there. Extended, deeply rooted families in Iran become fabulously wealthy during the oil boom of the mid-1970s, only to see their lives shattered by the Islamic revolution late in the decade. Fleeing to Southern California in droves, they begin to carve out for themselves a niche of wealth and promise they proudly call Tehrangeles… Iranian-Americans are… gaining the capital, clout and skills necessary to become Hollywood players themselves, and to fashion their own screen images as earlier immigrants [did]… Tehran-born Sam Nazarian lives the flashy lifestyle [of] a reincarnation of an old-fashioned Hollywood mogul. The owner of the two trendiest nightclubs in Los Angeles, he is buying and restyling hotels and restaurants here and abroad while backing such films as The Beautiful Country, about the search of a Vietnamese-American for his father, and Waiting, a comedy about a staff of underachievers at a chain restaurant…. More circumspect but no less determined is producer Bob Yari. One of his earliest film credits is as an assistant in Checkpoint (1987), a work by the pioneering director Parviz Sayyad, who made low-budget, independent films about Iranians in America in the revolution’s immediate aftermath. Knowing that money speaks the loudest in today’s Hollywood, Yari went on to become wealthy in Southern California’s booming strip-mall real estate…. Yari is a backer of Crash, which depicts frictions among blacks, Latinos, Koreans and Iranians in Los Angeles. Its cast includes Sandra Bullock and Don Cheadle. Tehran-born actor Shaun Toub, who was discovered as he worked as a real estate agent in Los Angeles, plays an Iranian shopkeeper who is victimized when he is thought to be an Arab.” Also noted: cinematographer Darius Khondji .

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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