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
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Steven Rea talks to Robert Towne about the $19 million Ask the Dust. “Towne wrote his… adaptation in 1993, and tried to get it off the ground with Johnny Depp… But the money was never there… Both Towne’s screenplay and Fante’s novel…became the stuff of legend.” Why was it shot in South Africa? “There were pockets of Los Angeles in 1971 and 1972, when I first read the novel, that could still be exploited as the 1930s… but that was 1972,” explains Towne…”But by the time I’d written the script in 1993, there wasn’t much of it left. People were saying you couldn’t shoot in L.A. because it was too expensive, but it was equally true that you couldn’t shoot in L.A. because there wasn’t that L.A. to shoot in.” So they “re-created downtown L.A.’s Bunker Hill neighborhood on two football fields in the shadow of the Cape Town hills. “There were unexpected benefits of shooting in South Africa… The quality of the air and the sky was so much like Los Angeles, and it wasn’t just that we were able to afford building downtown L.A. The location we found for Laguna Beach was more like Laguna than anything that’s left in Laguna today. And the desert: three hours from Cape Town, there is desert that looks like the Mojave. There are occasional baboons out there, but you keep them out of the shot.”
I’ve posted my thoughts about Ask the Dust over at my blog Mere Words at http://chidder.livejournal.com.
On a semi-L.A.-location-shooting-related note, does any one know if and when Los Angeles Plays Itself is gonna hit DVD? If copyright issues do indeed make an official release an impossibilty, does anybody know of a bootleg floating around? I’m going to be flying out to CA from the east coast at the end of April, but couldn’t find any information on whether or not screenings for the film are still going on. If any are, please email me with info! ohsweetsatan@yahoo.com
[I’ve talked with people about licensing everything. I think it might be an issue for television. I don’t know. We’ll see. I’ve been surprised that people who are part of the film industry like my movie and don’t seem to object to it. It might make fun of a few movies, but I think it does so in a fairly sympathetic way. I haven’t run into hostile responses yet. Maybe down the road I will. says Thom Andersen in this interview.]