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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, September 9th, 2006 - Comments Off on Mutual deprecation: it just kind of depends on where I’m standing at any moment
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Mutual deprecation: it just kind of depends on where I’m standing at any moment

“Just ’cause a lot of people write about me on the internet doesn’t mean that anybody in the world actually cares,” Mutual Appreciation‘s Andrew Bujalski tells Vadim Rizov of NYU’s Washington Square News. So, which is it: realism or extreme emotional repression? Mut App bed 2.gif“Maybe it’s passive-aggressive filmmaking—I don’t know… But I feel like … the real conflicts in the world usually do happen on a much smaller level than we’re used to seeing in films… Obviously I come from a certain kind of specific background where stability and these things are valued pretty highly… [There might be] an equal amount of unpleasantness in that world as there might be in a world where people yell at each other all the time. But I just find it much more interesting—the negotiations and the hesitations and the pregnant pauses and all this kind of stuff where there’s a lot of drama taking place. We just kind of need to know where to look for it.” … Between the awkward romantic encounters and spells of drunkenness that comprise the film’s… plot, [musician-lead actor Justin Alan] plays a riveting solo set at [Williamsburg’s] Northsix, taking on songs from [his band’s] first album, “Charm School”… Bujalski lets Alan get through one and a half songs before cutting away. Rice’s electrifying performance is met with a seemingly lackadaisical response from the small crowd; Bujalski’s camera and editing don’t indicate whether to be excited or bored. “We showed the film at a festival in Portugal,” Bujalski [says]. “One of the festival jurors came up to me one day and said, ‘I’m on the jury. I’m not supposed to talk to you, but I have a quick question. I don’t know anything about pop music, so I just wanted to know—in that performance scene, is he supposed to be good or is he supposed to be bad?’ And I couldn’t answer his question. I told him, ‘It’s really up to you.’ It’s not a scene about the triumph of a performance, it’s not a scene about the failure of a performance. It should be—it’s the way that I feel if I go to a rock show, a lot of times it just kind of depends on where I’m standing at any moment, whether I think they’re good or bad.”

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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