Old MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Screening Gotham: July 21-23, 2006


My scarcity around these parts culminates in a few heavy deadlines Monday; I hope to return next week with something resembling regularity, or at least utility. Meanwhile, as per Reeler custom, here are a few of this weekend’s worthwhile cinematic goings-on around New York:
–BAM continues its Great Villians in Cinema series with about as disparate a trio as you can conjure. James Cagney stars today in White Heat (right), the crime saga showcasing the actor’s turn as sneering, wretched gangster (and unapologetic mama’s boy) Cody Jarrett. For anyone who missed A Clockwork Orange earlier this month at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Kubrick retrospective, you’ll have an encore opportunity Saturday to see Malcolm McDowell’s eyelids peeled back in the name of rehabilitation. Finally, Sunday brings Michael Powell’s voyeuristic lady-slayer Peeping Tom. And if all that unrepentant nastiness is just too much of a karmic burden, you can always check in on the more lovable puzzle nemesis Will Shortz in Wordplay, also now playing right in the same building.
–I swear I am not on Celebrate Brooklyn’s payroll; the Prospect Park arts series just has that much going for it in consecutive weeks. You will remember Yo La Tengo chiming and shimmering last week over the underwater films of Jean Painlevé, and tonight, the Alloy Orchestra takes the Bandshell to perform its score to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 silent-film swan song, Blackmail. Probably most famous for its British Museum chase sequence and its concurrently made talkie version, Blackmail is even more notably the dynamic, accomplished work of a master director barely 30 years old. As I prepare for my own 30th while flailing away on a fucking blog, I will try not to be too resentful.
–Catastrophe, camp or classic? You be the judge as misunderstood genius M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water opens with all the grace of a picnic on a shooting range.

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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