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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 - Comments Off on How indie is it? Would you like to start writing for free?
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How indie is it? Would you like to start writing for free?

Over at indieWIRE, blogger Anthony Kaufman and editor Eugene Hernandez have a blunt exchange over how to keep the servers turned on. “One of the problems with the corporate media today is the blurred lines between content and advertis[e]ment, news and marketing,” writes Kaufman. “[A]fter seeing my story today in indieWIRE about Spring Festivals, which includes reporting on the San Francisco International Film Festival… I was… perturbed to see that the “coverage” was “sponsored” by the San Francisco Film Society, presenters of the San Francisco fest.” Kaufman’s “byline appears directly underneath—not the headline—but the phrase: “World Cinema coverage presented by San Francisco Film Society.” Normally, this would be called a conflict of interest. I’m not sure how to avoid it, because indieWIRE needs the money. But it just goes to show how dependent independent media is… Maybe no one cares. But I guess that’s just as bad. kauf87070345245.jpg. Hernandez posts a comment: “anthony, many of indieWIRE’s special sections are sponsored by companies, organizations or groups. for example, our doc section is sponsored by a festival, our awards section was recently sponsored by a popcorn maker, our short film section is sponsored by a car company, and our recent SXSW coverage was sponsored by another car company. this is how we raise the money to pay you to write for us. would you like to start writing your world cinema column for free?…


[A]s editors we take care to insulate our writers from such influence and pressures. same thing goes for advertisers.” In a similar vein, in the New York Times, editor Bill Keller answered a reader’s question a couple days ago about how this works in trad-media, after the Times accepted an ad from the government of Sudan: “My newsroom colleagues and I don’t control what goes into advertisements. (In turn, and more important, the advertising department does not influence what goes into the news coverage.) I know that the executives on the business side of The Times argued long and hard about accepting the Sudan ad. In the end, as I understand it, the prevailing argument was that the advertising space in the paper should be as open as possible to points of view, even those our editorial page and columnists vehemently disagree with.”

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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