Old MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Screening Gotham: June 23-25, 2006


A few of this weekend’s worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:
–Indulge me for a second: Remember when Quentin Tarantino made transcendent cinema rather than just staple his brand name on any half-assed genre exercise or trash label that came calling? More specifically, remember Reservoir Dogs? Imagine (maybe some of you were there): He walks into Sundance pretty much penniless almost 15 years ago and blows up every screen in town with this insanely graphic, profane (and derivative, sure) macho-gunplay chamber drama. He gleefully alienates everybody but his peers and endorses movie violence to the good-liberal contingent that cannot believe what it just saw. He loses the Grand Jury Prize but gains almost instant cult immortality. His partnership with Miramax is born. For better or worse, we are talking about possibly the last seismic moment of the independent film movement–and it barely even made it to theaters. Now the Sunshine is bringing Reservoir Dogs back with midnight showings tonight and tomorrow, which, no doubt, will put that anniversary DVD to shame even as it conjures a wrenching nostalgia for the day when “Quentin Tarantino presents” meant something. All right, I am done.
–I hate having to put choices like this to you, but cruel fate insists: Film meets rock twice Saturday night as MoMA’s Douglas Gordon: Timeline exhibit features an appearance by Gordon and Chicks on Speed, while the Continental (near Astor Place) hosts Eamonn Bowles’s barnburning quartet The Martinets. Talk about tough calls: “Chicks On Speed urge you to come overdressed to this ‘living sculpture,’ where they will perform their new Eurotrash hit single ‘Art Rules’ for the very first time,” MoMA’s Web site tells visitors. Meanwhile, you know Bowles better as the boss at Magnolia Pictures, at least until his reckless, concussion-inducing stage abandon lands him in the hospital. I think you know where my allegiances lie, although I admit these decisions never ever get any easier. Now they are yours. Sorry.
–If you have not yet checked out the New York Asian Film Festival, quit fucking procrastinating and go. This weekends highlights include the Grady Hendrix-endorsed Funky Forest: The First Contact, the Ram Gopal Varma-produced Ab Tak Chhappan and the Miike-directed fantasy The Great Yokai War, and the festival finally goes multitheatrical with schedules at Anthology Film Archives and ImaginAsian Theater. Click will still be there next weekend, I promise.

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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