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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 - Comments Off on "The Best Shot": What Vachon *Really* Wrote About the Angelika
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"The Best Shot": What Vachon *Really* Wrote About the Angelika


You likely recall the skulduggerous scandal implied by last week’s Page Six item about producer Christine Vachon’s intense dislike for the catacombs-with-popcorn that is the Angelika Film Center. You know: How dare she smack the theater that undergirds her success, someone call the mayor, etc etc.
Well, I finally got my hands on a review copy of Vachon’s upcoming book A Killer Life, from which Page Six excerpted her criticisms. And because every morning should start with a healthy, balanced bit of context, please find below the entirety of Vachon’s single paragraph about the Angelika:

Frankly I hate the Angelika. I won’t see movies there. The seats are uncomfortable, the sound is crummy, you can hear the 4/5/6 train rumbling underneath you, and the film projectors are terrible. (Don’t even get me started on how the Technicolor Far From Heaven looked on their screens. I couldn’t watch) But it’s the kind of movie theater that other movie theaters play [sic] close attention to because it triggers tsunamis of word of mouth. The people who see movies at the Angelika like to talk about the movies they’ve seen at the Angelika. I remember when The Crying Game opened there in November of 1992, they had to put signs up telling people “Do Not Talk about the Movie” as people walked out, so as not to ruin the twist for all the hordes queued up outside. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Angelika was like a Grauman’s Chinese Theatre of independent film–back when Grauman’s actually meant something and wasn’t just a placeholder between the David Hasselhoff beach towels and star maps on Hollywood Boulevard. Playing at the Angelika meant you had the best shot of entering the conversation. It was as close to the red carpet as you could get.

Indeed, this leads into the story of how Poison achieved “unprecedented” box office success at the theater, subsequently providing the momentum that got Vachon and director Todd Haynes’ careers going in earnest. Not as bad as you thought, is it? Perhaps it is no wonder why Angelika publicists had no comment at the time; besides planting the item, they can now even blurb part of Vachon’s quotes for Angelika promotional materials. Anything to finally shake off that New York Press readers’ “Best NYC Theater of ’04” attribution, right?

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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