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
A literary re-issue offers novelist Barry Gifford the opportunity to rap quixotically about great, late producer of masterpieces of mood Val Lewton: “With films such as The Leopard Man, I Walked With a Zombie, The Body Snatcher, Bedlam, The Seventh Victim and Isle of the Dead, Lewton created an oeuvre unique in film history. Utilising shadows to disguise the grisly goings-on (always in black and white) and the power of suggestion—never revealing for viewers’ eyes the graphic activities we only hear or see reflected on walls or in water—Lewton’s terrifying formula set one’s imagination stumbling down a street where the light is always hazy, the black not quite black but with an opaqueness that forces the viewer to strain to see more clearly. The effect is like looking through a keyhole and being shocked by a cold fingertip on your neck.Before Val Lewton made movies, he was a novelist, producing nine more-or-less conventional works, plus one book of pornography, ‘Yasmine’ (or ‘Grushenskaya’). The republication of his Depression-era novel, ‘No Bed of Her Own,’ originally issued by the Vanguard Press in New York in 1932, gives those of us familiar with Lewton’s films an opportunity to experience his long out-of-print efforts at writing fiction; and brings again to light his fascinating work behind the camera.” [More revealing compare-‘n’-contrast at the link.]
