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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, February 20th, 2006 - Comments Off on Candid Cuba and Other Good Signs of The Times
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Candid Cuba and Other Good Signs of The Times

Obviously, I’ve been a little bit out of the loop today, but I thought that before I choke to death on other work, I should at least point belatedly to Lewis Beale’s piece about Cuba Gooding Jr. in yesterday’s Times. In evaluating Gooding’s rise, plunge and makings of another rise, Beale captures a fairly stunning candor from a number of sources–not the least of whom is the subject himself:

“The studios don’t see me now,” said Mr. Gooding, speaking by telephone from the Los Angeles set of his latest film, What Love Is, an independently financed romantic comedy in which he co-stars with Anne Heche and Sean Astin.

“As a commercial entity, I know my stock is low,” added the actor, who is now 38. Recalling his heyday, Mr. Gooding said, “I was where Don Cheadle is now, where Terrence Howard is now. I was those guys three or four years ago.”

And then there is Gooding’s Shadowboxer director Lee Daniels–who calls the actor’s 1997 Oscar-acceptance speech “a Stepin Fechit performance”–and a little more generous Chris Fisher, who directed Gooding in the upcoming Dirty and said his star “saw himself as an actor who wanted to play characters, despite the fact the script wasn’t up to par, or the project wasn’t up to par.”
Wow. No pressure for Dirty, I guess. Gooding is not the only selling point of the Sunday movie section, either; although one would think Robert Altman would be kind of sore from that all that Terrence Rafferty hand-job action, Christian Moerk offers some long-awaited perspective on the making of the Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl.

All of this pales in comparison to the Magazine, of course, where it appears that Tom Ford’s unavailability to design the now-annual “Great Performers” issue meant falling back to Plan B: Drawing on Jeff Daniels (right). Or sticking cat-eye contact lenses on George Clooney. I mean, nothing says “I had a good 2005” like Charlize Theron spray-painted gold. But hey–she was naked. You knew the Vanity Fair touch had to sneak in there somewhere.
(Photo: Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin for The New York Times)

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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