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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, June 23rd, 2006 - Comments Off on Day of the Night: ungrateful Manoj Shyamalan dumps on Disney; craps on Manny Farber
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Day of the Night: ungrateful Manoj Shyamalan dumps on Disney; craps on Manny Farber

Pissing on Disney as well as the great film cricket Manny Farber in one fell swoop? That’s our Manoj! Rich, powerful, and with an ego apparently larger than the state of Pennsylvania, Malvern, PA’s leading auteur M. Night ShyamalanHarryFarber23_345.jpg lets rip with an authorized, as-told-to, 278-page epic of ingratitude, writes Claudia Eller in LA Times, one “that offers something very rare, indeed: a candid recounting, complete with tears and recriminations, of a messy divorce between a movie studio and one of the world’s most famous writer-directors. In “The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale,” the 35-year-old filmmaker whose name has become synonymous with spooky suspense thrillers crucifies the top executives at the company he long had considered his artistic home since his 1999 surprise hit The Sixth Sense: Walt Disney Studios.” The book, written by Sports Illustrated’s Michael Bamberger, is published July 20, the day before Shyamalan latest labor of labor opens, the $70 million dumpy-building-super-meets-sea-nymph fairy tale Lady in the Water. “Disney production President Nina Jacobson… and Shyamalan enjoyed a close, albeit sometimes combative, relationship. Over six years, she shepherded his four Disney films including Unbreakable, Signs and The Village… At a disastrous dinner in Philadelphia last year, Jacobson delivered a frank critique of the [latest] script. When she told him that she and her boss, studio Chairman Dick Cook, didn’t “get” the idea, Shyamalan was heartbroken. Things got only worse when she lambasted his inclusion of a mauling of a film critic in the story line and told Shyamalan his decision to cast himself as a visionary writer out to change the world bordered on self-serving… “Sometimes Night would close his eyes and see little oval black and white head shots of Nina Jacobson and Oren Aviv and Dick Cook floating around in his head, unwanted houseguests that would not leave,” Bamberger writes. “The Disney people had gotten deep inside his head, interfering with the good work the voices were supposed to do—and it would be hell to get them out.”… “Night really let me get inside his head,” Bamberger said. “He told me what he was thinking, and I wrote it.” … “You said [Lady in the Water] was funny; I didn’t laugh,” the book quotes [Jacobson] as saying. “You’re going to let a critic get attacked? They’ll kill you for that … Your part’s too big; you’ll get killed again … What’s with the names? Scrunt? Narf? Tartutic? Not working … Don’t get it … Not buying it. Not getting it. Not working.” In an interview for the article, Jacobson is reticent, but allows: “Different people have different ideas about respect. For us, being honest is the greatest show of respect for a filmmaker.” An anecdote about Harvey Weinstein and the recutting of the dreadful 1998 Wide Awake is included with the price of the link; Mr. Shyamalan’s limited exposure to pre-release interviews includes a fan, erm, phone chat with Harry Knowles, which contains this exchange: “H: … I’ve heard that you have a film critic-type character that’s living in this apartment complex. Is that true? tinycricket.gifM: Yeah, the movie’s about how we relate to this story that’s being told and there’s a very kind-of cynical person in the building who relates to it on that close-minded level. H: Somebody… told me that he’s somebody who’s always trying to second guess where their story is going, and it just sounded fun to me. The playful poke at some of your critics out there. M: (Japanese school girl-esque laughter) Well, let’s say this, I’m definitely not playing it safe in this movie (more laughing). H: Just out of curiosity, is that who Bob Balaban is playing? M: Haha, yes. H: OK cool… the guy I would have cast as a baffoonishy [sic] sort of critic type. I would have cast Bob Balaban.” In a shitty fit of philistinism, Mr. Shyamalan has dubbed the ill-fated cricket Harry Farber, an unfortunate, even unpleasant slam against the influential and gifted painter and film cricket Manny Farber, who turns 89 this year. [Click for an additional definition of the not-neologism “scrunt.”]

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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