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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Sunday, February 19th, 2006 - Comments Off on Taylor made: Charles Taylor post-Salon
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Taylor made: Charles Taylor post-Salon

At The House Next Door, Jeremiah Kipp talks with critic Charles Taylor about what reviewers do (and ought to do) today: “I’ve heard people say that if a critic has a professed dislike for someone’s work, someone else should review it so the artist gets a fair hearing. Well, we already have that. It’s called publicity. It’s not a critic’s job to go in concerned with being positive. But news people are trained in that journalist’s way of thinking, “You get the facts. You report them. You provide evidence to support the position.” Critics take imaginative leaps, they employ] hyperbole and that makes the reportorial mindset very nervous, and they don’t get it. It all comes back to that line Truffaut said about how no one at a newspaper has less respect than the movie critic. No one is going to tell the dance critic or classical music critic how to do their jobs… salon_94858.pngNo one is going to say to a reporter who has been on the scene he or she is writing about, “Oh, you don’t know what’s happening there.” … Like a reporter, the critic is the one going out day after day, seeing movies, thinking about how they fit into the culture. Editors, for the most part, sit behind their desk saying they heard buzz on this or that.


But all that usually means is they heard publicity from somewhere, often from publicists who are calling to pitch them on getting coverage for their movies, or from other editors who’ve been pitched by publicists, or in magazine pieces which resulted because some editor was successfully pitched to by a publicist. They’re not relying on the people who are actually out doing the footwork. That’s a real problem. The critic should reflect the culture as honestly as he or she can. If you’re a regular critic and you’ve got that weekly outlet, you’re essentially writing a diary of the culture, and not in the stupid think pieces sort of way. You’re reflecting the tone of what’s going on week in and week out. A portrait of the culture you’re dealing with can’t help but emerge from that. If you’re honest about what your response is, you’re serving your reader whether they agree with you or not.” [More at the link, including why he’s no longer at Salon.]

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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