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
What’s a nice little documentary about saving the world got to do to get a little respect these days? Think Progress unearths a “leading climate skeptic” makes a direct comparison in the Washington Post magazine between Al Gore and Adolf Hitler. 
“[M]eteorologist Bill Gray – one of the most prominent climate skeptics” writes, bizarrely: “Gore believed in global warming almost as much as Hitler believed there was something wrong with the Jews.” Opines the site, “It’s telling that so many of the attacks on Al Gore and his movie are ad hominem, not substantive. There really is no credible scientific rebuttal to An Inconvenient Truth, so people are forced to attack the messenger.” Last week, an ExxonMobil consultant on Fox made a similar comparison, and now it’s in the pages of the Washington Post, no less. What next, geriatric columnists getting damp over Hilary Clinton’s “lemon-yellow pantsuit”? I know, I know. Unthinkable.
Mars in undergoing global warming as well. There are no SUVs on Mars afaik. Perhaps the sun has more influence than we want to believe in our mememe-centered world. Perhaps this is much more out of our control than we’d like to believe.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age_031208.html
To compare Gore to Hitler is outrageous and ridiculous. I would imagine Jews, or anyone else touched by Hitler and the Holocaust, would find such a comparison sickening.
Regarding the validity of human-caused climate change – I wonder – how many scientists does it take to figure out that if you continuously use and abuse something, it will just wear out? I have designer shoes I treat with more respect than we treat our environment. A few small changes could improve things or at least slow it down – so why the fight against healthier living?