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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 - Comments Off on Jersey Pearl: The Contagious Festival's Sleeper Candidate
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Jersey Pearl: The Contagious Festival's Sleeper Candidate


I am sure that by now, you have probably heard, read or watched a thing or two about The Contagious Festival, The Huffington Post’s quasi-foray into independent film. Launched Feb. 1, Contagious hosts a batch of shorts for you to enjoy and pester your “friends” with, as though anybody wants another eighth-generation forwarded e-mail of an animated Dick Cheney shooting someone, or another wacky-as-all-get-out song parody about Dick Cheney shooting someone, or whatever. Meanwhile, the filmmaker behind the month’s most forwarded piece wins $2,500 and dinner with celebrity judges like John Cusack and Nora Ephron, which is like not winning anything at all. But considering what he or she is responsible for, the punishment appears to fit the crime appropriately enough.
Forget about the front-runners, though. What you should be interested in is the current 14th place film, Matthew Fogel’s Hello Dean (above, a k a Howard Dean: A Love Story, so titled for a little more first-glance context). From his base in Bergen County, Fogel has crafted a genuinely smart, funny and well-made short likening the futility of contemporary American politics to the futility of modern love. In a beautiful Dean campaigner, he meets who he thinks is his romantic match; like the Dean dream itself, however, the ideal implodes almost as suddenly as it took shape.
“I was hoping to capture just how immature presidential races have become,” Fogel replied after I e-mailed him about his film. “The treatment of the candidates by the media and public seems indistinguishable from an adolescent mooning over a crush, wildly vascillating between breathless infatuation and melodramatic heartbreak. How a bratty governor from a state smaller than my county in New Jersey became the Democrats’ candidate celebre is baffling, and I still wonder why Dick Gephardt wasn’t given a fairer shake. Also, I wanted to make fun of the Peace Corps.”
A subsequent e-mail summarized neatly, “We just wanted to make fun of anyone who cares about politics.” And a fine, refreshing job you did, Matthew.
So here’s what you need to do now, readers: First, watch the movie. It is good. Then forward it to everyone in your e-mail contacts and help Fogel make up that 384,619-point difference between Dean and Quail Hunting with Dick Cheney in the February standings. He only has a week to come from behind, which breaks down to a mere 55,000 forwards per day. I know you can help straighten this shit out, so get to it–we need to get somebody in there from whom Nora Ephron can actually learn something.

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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