Old MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Bogart Gets Street, "Brass on a Wall" For Childhood Home on Upper West Side


I hate missing events like this, but I guess it was on the Upper West Side, and God knows why anyone goes there, even when some ambitious video store owner ropes the city into renaming a block of West 103rd Street after the stretch’s most famous native son, Humphrey Bogart.
Manny Fernandez had the pleasantly anecdotal story yesterday in The Times:

This city usually greets the naming of a street with a collective yawn. But the official unveiling of Humphrey Bogart Place was something else entirely, part block party, part film symposium, part history lesson.

About 150 people gathered for the ceremony, and a hush of nervous excitement fell over the crowd when, at 11:56 a.m., the chairman of the city’s Housing Authority, Tino Hernandez, politely asked the people standing behind him to make room for the woman walking up the sidewalk.

She was the event’s special guest, Bogart’s widow, Lauren Bacall. A cheer rose from the audience. She looked elegant in a black suit, elegant and dry, with their son, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, by her side.

“It certainly was surprising,” she told the crowd of the honor, standing in front of her husband’s boyhood home. “Bogie would never have believed it.” …

Ms. Bacall had tears in her eyes. “It’s emotional for me because I loved Bogie very much,” she said. “I was married to him and we had a very lovely life together. It was much too short. It’s emotional.”

“And we love New York,” her son added.

“But,” she replied, “we love Bogart more.”

The Associated Press, meanwhile, notes that Movie Place owner and fellow uptowner Gary Dennis lobbied the City Council after logging 1,000 signatures on a petition, finally succeeding in scoring “a piece of brass on a wall” (as Bacall described it) for Bogart’s childhood brownstone that is now a public housing site. Good on him, I say; at least this city film enterprise did not require mass car removal.

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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