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
First of all, Colbert _was_ funny.
Second, this is part of the crisis of communication in our country at the moment. Everyone just wants to be agreed with and nobody actually wants to listen, and nobody’s completely innocent. Certainly not me, but very few in any realm.
I heard over and over again how unfunny it was, but when I finally saw it I was laughing hysterically most of the time. I found it pretty damn funny.
I thought it was pretty funny too: since humor is pretty subjective, why does someone claim to objectively state “it wasn’t funny”?
Colbert wasn’t getting applause because he was saying biting, sarcastic stuff right to the faces of his targets. Anything else is trying to spin things.
None of this, of course, changes the fact that the people who tend to write angry emails are by definition extremists, so you get the wild shotgun blasts with no regard towards rationality or the bigger picture.
I don’t think anyone writing a column is objectively stating anything.
And I think that the position of authority that a columnist has, to whatever degree or appropriateness, is part of what spurs the rage. Those e-mails, it seems to me, are like fighting a machine, not a person.
In my case, I could bring the level down to something calmer with a response in most cases. On the blog, it sometimes ratchets up faster than can be dealt with. All different levels…
^^You’re absolutely right about that. When someone writes from a position of ‘authority’, that’s when I tend to get the most irritated and find it necessary to undermine said authority. When that person is themself writing to challenge some piece of conventional wisdom you’ve got a never ending cycle of “I’m smarter than you”.
Notice Cohen says “Truth to tell, I peeked into only a few of the e-mails.”
So how does he know they were all hate-filled?
If you read Cohen’s original column, it’s arrogant and more than a little scary. He actually wrote something like “Colbert insulted the president to his face and he’ll suffer no consequences” as if that’s a bad thing!
And yes, Colbert was very funny.
A political columnist who can’t take abuse? Tell me something new!
IT’s time for Cohen to take a sabbatical. 3,000 angry emails and he’s this upset?? Give me a break.
No offense, David, but you
Mr. Poland, now I’m truly blushing. Why I just feel like the pretty girl at the ball (in my Vivien Leigh voice)!
Colbert was funny (I’m a fan of the “repoar”), but it was not his audience. His schtick, taken out of the context of his fake O’Reilly show, did not play very well. One reason for that as Cohen points out is age…Colbert is funny to a newer generation that finds postmodern cynical comedy funny, not exactly the crowd at a stately White House dinner. He probably would have scored more points had he organized his barbs into a speech with some structure, you know, like a real speech.
“prettiest”
And just to be ironic:
How dare you call me wacky!!!!
I could not stand the uncomfortable silence when I watched it on video. I had to pause every few moments to stomp about the room.
Colbert was brilliant, as usual. Richard Cohen is a dickhead, nothing new.
Last year Laura Bush was the star, part of her routine included jokes about: Her husband (the President of the United States) jerking off a horse; She going to a Male Strip club with Lynne Cheney; and bumping into Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg *shutter* at the Male Strip Club…
And she killed. The rest of the week it was “look how funny Laura Bush is”.
Colbert used some old material from his show, but apart from that the guy killed.
I’ll never understand why the vacuous DC press corps laps this shit up so much. Why the hell does Cohen think that this non-event warrents TWO columns in the influential post? A comic bombs on stage…wow, some story.
Stop bringing up Brokeback Mountain in that way, ya jerk!
I’ve rewatched the Colbert segment a couple of times over the past week or so, and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while.
Then again, I’m Colbert’s target audience: a postmodern cynic.
The point for most of the liberal media about Colberts performance was not how funny or not funny it was, it was how it was initially almost completely ignored by the mainstream media. Now this surely had nothing to do with the fact that Colbert ripped into the Washington correspondant’s lapdog appreciation of Bush for the past 6 years and exposed just how craven they have been in asking him tough questions (or even demanding that he do more than canned appearances and rushed speeches with little Q&A). Colbert’s speech wasn’t hilarious, but it was incredibly radical in a lot of ways, and Bush and most reporters were not amused that a normally cpsey, backslapping affair was hijacked by somebody who forced them to examine their massive failings. It was only when people started realised how harsh Colbert had criticised their little cabal and how the media had effectively conspired to bury it that the fury was unleashed.
Maybe next year they can have Sarah Silverman emcee the event? Or Bill Maher? The days of Larry King softballs are over.
Would kill for Maher to play there.
Al Franken said that when he played for Clinton (twice) he had to read his entire speech over the phone to one of the secretaries, so I guess everyone thought Colbert was going to be tame.
I don’t know what interests me most about all of this. That Colbert never flinched. That the ‘liberal’ media ignored it. That it has become an internet must-see. That people actually tried to say he ‘wasn’t funny’. That C-Span pulled it from Youtube & iFilm, but kept Bush’s body double skit. It is an event filled with contradictions and an established media that can’t look itself in the mirror anymore.
This is from today’s Salon.com:
Cohen: Colbert was rude, and his defenders are dangerous
When we last heard from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, he was declaring Stephen Colbert “not just a failure as a comedian but rude.” Cohen has now heard back from those who disagree with him. He says that they’re rude, too.
In the sort of thin-skinned response we’ve heard from the Post before, Cohen says that the e-mails that flooded his in box after he trashed Colbert last week were nothing less than a “digital lynch mob” that was “egged on” by various liberal bloggers. The messages show that e-mail is “too often a kind of epistolary spitball,” Cohen says, and they prove that the Democrats are doomed in 2008.
How’s that again?
Maybe we should just let Cohen speak for himself.
“The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred,” he writes in his column today. “This spells trouble — not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before — back in the Vietnam War era. That’s when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.
“The hatred is back. I know it’s only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations. I can appreciate some of it. Institution after institution failed America — the presidency, Congress and the press. They all endorsed a war to rid Iraq of what it did not have. Now, though, that gullibility is being matched by war critics who are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies. If that’s going to be the case, then Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice — once because they couldn’t stop it and once more at the polls.”
We’re not suggesting that anybody e-mail Cohen today; it would be rude, it seems, and we wouldn’t want to be accused of “egging” anyone on. But in the hypothetical scenario in which a War Room reader might want to send a message to Cohen, one might want to point out — gently, of course — that Cohen wasn’t exactly a model of polite debate in the run-up to the war in Iraq. In a column on Feb. 6, 2003, Cohen said that there was no longer any room for argument about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Colin Powell’s U.N. presentation had established “without a doubt” that the WMD existed, Cohen said, and “only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise.”
— Tim Grieve
I can accept Cohen thinking Colbert was not funny. But Cohen makes a pretty silly assumption. He says 1 million people watch the Colbert Report, which is much smaller than American Idol. First of all, 1 million is a lot of people for a cable show that airs 11:30 pm. And second, he assumes that getting 3500 emails is not about Colbert. Well, I still remember some math and 3500 is well within 1 million…meaning it is quite possible that a meager 3.5% of Colbert’s nightly audience decided to defend him (in a style smacking of Ain’t It Cool posters) by emailing Cohen. Colbert does not spell political doom for anyone when he’s making C-Span the hot cable channel of the moment.
Watergate aside, the Washington Post has always been “a mouthpiece for the government in power”. Those words were uttered 2 years ago by a reporter at that newspaper.
That those overpaid hacks in Babylon whined about being made fun of tells you a lot about the state of journalism these days. Real news is breaking all around them while they genuflect before a wannabe Duce.