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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Not in my name: another Chris Doyle's gay karaoke (plus Chris Doyle)

doyleviet_4957.jpgTwo Chris Doyles, and at least one’s a genius. First up, In Ottawa, Bradley Turcotte of Capital Xtra reports on some Canadian Idols: “Dog & Pony’s song “bible” lists tunes as varied as the Jackass soundtrack and Disney standards. The bible also outlines karaoke tips and techniques to aid the singer, so your voice is the only way you’ll be made into a fool. Owner and operator Christopher Doyle is the “Dog” in their company name while his wife, Danni, is the “Pony.” “I’m the dirty dog who gets to ride the pony,” Doyle chuckles.” But what of the genius? Yes, cinematographer Christopher Doyle is doing the journo crawl and dog-and-pony drinks show once more, this time with Mathew Scott from The Australian: “It’s 5.30 on a Saturday afternoon, but acclaimed Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, a self-confessed “madman”, enters the Hong Kong Fringe Club looking as if he has only just greeted the day. He is wearing crushed cotton shorts, a loose, grubby T-shirt and running shoes. His hair is a wild mop and his fingernails look as though he has not been hitting the tiles but scraping them clean. He orders a beer,


which he will hold on to for the next two hours as we go from the Fringe Club to a 40-minute photo shoot in a neighbouring suburb and back into town, where we part company at another bar… He can be an outrageous haam sup, the local slang for pervert, as the photographer’s young female assistants try to get him into position for the shoot and he threatens to pull down his shorts. “It’s all part of my game, isn’t it?” says the 54-year-old. “I won’t change who I am or how I am. It’s like when I work with directors either here or in the States. They know I am a madman, but for that period of time I’m their fucking madman.” And of why he and Wong Kar-wai have done so well over their history? “All great partnerships work this way, whether it be in the bedroom or on the film set. You don’t give a shit about that person’s faults if you know what you have is special.” But Doyle, as always, is unafraid of assailing what he finds less than special. “”Look, I could go on for about eight hours about Lost in Translation. [Coppola] took a nation and shat on it. The way it presents this American world view is perhaps the most insulting thing I have ever seen. Where is the humour in presenting Japan as a nation of freaks? And then you have Memoirs of a Geisha, a film basically put together by a speech coach… Why not try to give people something real?”

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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