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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, February 10th, 2006 - Comments Off on Alexis L. Loinaz and The Great New York Film Adulation Takeover
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Alexis L. Loinaz and The Great New York Film Adulation Takeover

For eight months now, all I have wanted is to guard my turf and defend my NYC film-cheerleader authority against nefarious outsiders. And while I thought I had prepared for every possible breach and incursion, I obviously overlooked the Oscar-season assassin who is Alexis L. Loinaz.
Come on, you know him–Alexis? Alexis Loinaz? From the Phillipine Daily Inquirer, which Wednesday ran the most overreaching, anthemic New York cinema tribute since… Jesus. Since ever:

On Jan. 31, nominations for the 78th Academy Awards were announced. Of the major nominees, 10 are from New York. And although New Yorkers love to poke fun at the whole gown-and-bling-bling parade—“so tacky,” “so flashy,” “so LA”—deep down inside Manhattanites are rooting for the hometown’s bets. …

Best Actor nominee Heath Ledger and his fiancée, Best Supporting Actress hopeful Michelle Williams, live in Brooklyn. Their nominated Brokeback Mountain director, Ang Lee, lives in Manhattan and is a proud graduate of New York University’s film school. Another Best Actor contender, Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a West Village fixture. Fittingly, he is nominated for playing another famous New Yorker, author Truman Capote. …

As far as we’re concerned, New York celebs are just like the rest of us, and we like cheering for the hometown folks because we see them as actual people. We walk on the same sidewalks, pass by the same homeless guy sleeping next to the subway entrance, smell the same garbage stench, hear the same deafening ambulance sirens, and try to avoid the same mobs of tourists who insist on monopolizing street corners by walking side by side. …

And sc–w you if you pull some Hollywood power trip in New York! We have equal rights to that cab, that sidewalk space and that subway seat. Don’t believe me? A friend of mine once sat next to Susan Sarandon.

So where will I be on Oscar night, March 5? I’ll be home in Brooklyn watching New Yorkers step onto that West Coast red carpet with the effortless élan of an East Coast sophisticate. Whether or not the hometown folks win, here’s something New Yorkers already know: When it comes to time zones, Oscar winners or anything else, New York is always ahead of the rest. Now, the envelope, please …

And that is only a sampling of the Gotham cinema swagger Loinaz is throwing down over on the Inquirer Web site, leaving nobodies like The Reeler and David Carr broken in tear-streaked piles of quivering, also-ran shit. Although Carr seems to be rebounding all right:

The only way New Yorkers can possibly survive not being at the absolute epicenter of the universe for a week is to maintain a claim on the homies who are there. In this funhouse world, both Ang Lee and Heath Ledger are New Yorkers to the core. If they are, let’s hear ’em give a shoutout to Queens instead of their entertainment lawyers.

I am still too shaken to respond, but when I do, I only hope I can muster as fearsome and unequivocal a battle cry as Loinaz’s “Sc–w you!” I mean, he obviously means business.
(via The Carpetbagger)

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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