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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 - Comments Off on Why We Fight and David Denby has always been at war with Oceania
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Why We Fight and David Denby has always been at war with Oceania

why-we-fight.jpg Doc-maker Eugene Jarecki articulates a thing or two about Why We Fight to Rob Nelson in the VOICE: “There’s a tendency to lay all our problems at the feet of George W. Bush, to want to see him as taking a radical departure from the traditions of U.S. foreign policy. But Bush wasn’t born overnight: He’s the product of decades of movement by this country away from its origins and ideals, and toward something more aggressive, more arrogant, more imperial. The Iraq war certainly isn’t the first time that the reasons we were given to go to war have turned out not to be the real reasons why we went. Ultimately I think it’s a political distraction for us to be obsessed with Bush or any other single figure. The larger forces that the film examines are those—including the military- industrial complex—that are undoing the very fabric of the democracy we’re fighting for. It’s what Eisenhower meant when he said, “We must avoid destroying from within that which we are trying to protect from without.” It’s an articulate position, even before reading David Denby‘s pissy notice in The New Yorker: “Isn’t it time to retire the collage method of making documentaries? A phrase or two clipped out of some policy expert’s discourse, followed by a bit of stock footage of jet fighters lined up in rows, followed by some candy-sucking kids… and, wham!, you’ve got an indictment of American militarism and imperialism. Except you don’t; you don’t have much of anything but tawdry film-editing technique… Why We Fight argues that we are at war in Iraq because we have been at war, someplace or other, on some pretext or other, under every Administration since Harry Truman was President, and we have to be perpetually at war in order to stoke what President Eisenhower, in his famous 1961 farewell address, named the “military-industrial complex.” … In order to be great a documentary must discover something…. A documentary filmmaker, at the least, must be a journalist seeking to unearth, and not a collagist who assembles miscellaneous footage in order to support what he already believes.”

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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