Old MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Now You, Too, Can Shill For Gore, Paramount Classics


Right on the heels of the news that Paramount Classics is officially an afterthought in its own organization, the distributor is putting the word out that we credulous, pajama-swaddled bloggers are indeed paramount to its marketing push for the new Al Gore/global warming doc, An Inconvenient Truth.
In fact, the folks at Technorati want you to know they are partnering with Paramount to run a live feed of Truth-related blog entries from around the Web, all of them zombiesquely positive, natch, with a few curious selections (the one-off post on this MySpace page, for example, or this appalling cry for help from one of the marketing newbies chained to her desk in the studio’s dank intern dungeon) popping up out of nowhere every now and then. The feed flows directly into Truth‘s own blog, theoretically allowing writers an instant audience with Al Gore and the few hundred hippies who have electricity.
Anyhow, the exciting thing here is that Truth has finally democratized blurb-whoring, making it easy for anyone with a blog to pare his adulation to one exclamatory adjective and a brief, hyperbolic sentence defining the film’s phenomenon–something along the lines of, “Warm! An Inconvenient Truth knocked my Birkenstocks off!” You get the idea, and if you do not, then practice–Paramount needs you.

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2 Responses to “Now You, Too, Can Shill For Gore, Paramount Classics”

  1. Stanley says:

    Nah… not an intern chained to my desk, and not affiliated with Gore’s film. Just a newbie blogger plugging a film I believe in. Thanks for the incoming link though, even if you thought it was appalling, your post gave me a good laugh.

  2. Anonymous says:

    And yet somehow you think you’re more qualified to opine than the blurb-whoring masses? What credentials do you have that allow you to suppose that the blogging world, nee the internet in total, is not made up of people just like yourself… looking to express valid opinions and thoughts and ideas in the hopes of furthering communication and the the free exchange of ideas? And what’s so wrong with Gore’s film in the first place? At least the guys actually doing something CONSTRUCTIVE with his time.

Quote Unquotesee all »

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