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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

New Yorker anti-Normal?: Colleges screening pix without pay

Some college film societies don’t read the warning labels and don’t realize they need a public exhibition license to show DVDs, reports Dave Newbart in the Chicago Sun-Times. “All the students in the Illinois State University Cinema Society wanted to do was get together, watch alternative films largely absent from theaters in Bloomington-Normal, and talk about the movies afterward.” Distributor New Yorker Films found their listings on the internet, and sent along an $8,000 bill for 20 titles they hold shown since 2000. newyorkerfilms84578475.jpg “I would call it a shakedown,” said ISU English professor Curt White, the cinema society’s adviser [and publisher of alternative press FC2]. “The effect of what they are doing is, there isn’t going to be any alternative cinema here.” New Yorker Films, per Newbart, with DVDs available, has “to be extra-diligent these days in enforcing copyrights.” Chicago’s Columbia College can’t afford to run a film club, claiming “the cost of the permission rights are prohibitive.” The student coordinator of ISU’s program, William Barker, “said the group’s budget has never exceeded $1,300, and that went toward promoting events and bringing in speakers. He said the group can’t afford the so-called catalog rates for showing 15 movies a semester. “In good conscience, I couldn’t ask [ISU] for $6,000 to show films,” Barker said.


His group has stopped the showings… New Yorker Films, however, says the university should show that it values film and pay the money. Companies won’t take a risk of distributing alternative films in the United States if they don’t get paid for showings… “If these films aren’t supported, they aren’t going to be released in this country,” Newbart quotes a New Yorker Films rep. [You can download a PDF of New Yorker Films’ stance from their website here.]

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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