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
While I’m awaiting a Wednesday night second viewing in IMAX before frying my bacon over the ultra-crispy V for Vendetta, James Wolcott offers a tart aside to the most goombah of early reviews, with the New Yorker’s august David Denby partaking in the aborning controversy over the movie’s mere existence: “It’s been awhile since we’ve had a truly critically divisive movie, and V for Vendetta is shaping up to be it. As David Poland writes in The Hot Blog, the next week or so promises to be an interesting ride for this film, with reviewers already declaring their opinions as “facts” as they try to dampen down expectations and excitement. Beware of professions of boredom when the subject and execution are this controversial. I anticipated that my Upper West Side neighbor David Denby—such a trial for him, bumping into me wherever he goes—would render a negative verdict on V for Vendetta, and so he does, rapping his gavel with stern monotonony… With this review and his pan of Why We Fight, I fear David is drifting toward neoconservatism, a doctrine more congenial to the sort of principled stands he likes to take, offering more room for rhetorical heroism. I pray I am wrong.” [It’s probably important to recall that Mr. Denby was making such invocations as far back as Do The Right Thing from his elevated step-stool at New York magazine. Of that movie’s incendiary finale, Denby wrote, “Lee appears to be endorsing the outcome, and if some audiences go wild, he’s partly responsible.”]
Denby’s one of those sensitive and astute critics who realized that in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, Mookie tossing a garbage can through a window was far more tragic and incendiary than the cops’ killing of Radio Raheem.
Property Damage > Human Life
That’s why he’s a legend!
In the late 90’s I managed the foreign film section of a video store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Denby was one of our members. He stopped in the day after he went to the preview of Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” and said that the film was irresponsible and would cause Black people to riot in NYC. Now, this was at a time when cops were beating and shooting Black people quite regularly and there hadn’t been any riots so I asked David, “do you really think that considering the state of relations between Blacks and the cops in NY that Black people need a movie to make them riot? Aren’t the current state of affairs more than enough?”. He stared at me a moment, took his rental video (I wish I remembered what it was) and walked out. We didn’t talk much after that. Interestingly, all of the racial violence from that summer was directed towards Blacks…especially a few instances that occured in predominantly Italian sections of Brooklyn…and there were no riots from Blacks about it.