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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, August 24th, 2006 - Comments Off on Reeler Pinch Hitter: Lawrence Levi; Co-author, 'The Film Snob's Dictionary'
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Reeler Pinch Hitter: Lawrence Levi; Co-author, 'The Film Snob's Dictionary'

[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Lawrence Levi is co-author of The Film Snob’s Dictionary. He blogs at Looker.]
You don’t need a snobbery expert to tell you which films at the 44th New York Film Festival will appeal most to film snobs. That’s because, as every cineaste knows, the NYFF is the snobbiest film festival anywhere. That’s not to say it’s pretentious; it’s only that the Film Society of Lincoln Center pointedly, and unapologetically, makes no concessions to popular taste. And just because two of the five members of this year’s selection committee, John Powers and Lisa Schwarzbaum, are critics at glossy magazines doesn’t mean Casino Royale made the cut.

Among this year’s snob-worthy New York Film Festival selections (L-R): Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, David Lynch’s The Inland Empire and Manoel de Oliveira’s Belle Toujours
But Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette did. Ms. Coppola is NYFF’s idea of slumming: an Oscar winner who’s popular with the kids. Artsy college kids, anyway. Xenophobes, take note: there are just three other movies by Americans in the festival. Little Children, directed by Todd “In the Bedroom” Field, stars Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly. Far more tantalizing is David Lynch’s high-def video debut, The Inland Empire. Celebrating its 25th anniversary with a special screening is Warren Beatty’s Reds—which racked up 12 Oscar nominations but somehow managed to lose Best Picture to the now-forgotten-except-for-its-ironically-deployed-theme-music Chariots of Fire.
The centerpiece is Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, which stars Penélope Cruz in tight tops and is just as good as you’ve heard. Those peppy Brits whom Michael Apted has trailed for 42 years are back in 49 Up. Offside, the latest from Iran’s Jafar Panahi, concerns a group of girls who dress as boys to watch a soccer game. (Good luck getting a visa for the Q&A, Mr. Panahi.) Thailand’s cheeky master of the nigh-incomprehensible, Apichatpong “call me Joe” Weersethakul, brings his latest fractured narrative, Syndromes and a Century. South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho, who made the twisted police procedural Memories of Murder, arrives with a monster movie, The Host, and the Hong Kong wildman Johnnie To offers up Triad Election. Closing night belongs to the Mexcian horrormeister Guillermo del Toro and Pan’s Labyrinth (above), a gothic fairy tale set in Franco’s Spain.
Old-school film snobs won’t be disappointed. Alain Resnais, now 84, is back with Private Fears in Public Places, and Manoel de Oliveira, unstoppable at 97, offers something totally unexpected: Belle Toujours, a sequel—38 years later—to Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. (No, Catherine Deneuve’s not in it, but Michel Piccoli is.) And for snobs who find the 21st century intolerable, there’s the festival sidebar, “50 Years of Janus Films.” Tickets go on sale September 10; until then, please try to control yourselves.

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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