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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Awaiting Waitress: a friend recollects

Read it and weep: Reid Rosefelt recalls the late Adrienne Shelley, whose Sundance triumph, Waitress, also sold for big money to Fox Searchlight. “For many years, Adrienne Shelly was my best friend. She was the one I turned to when my love life went awry—which was often—and I played the same role for her. We emailed and talked Wait-4689.jpgpretty much every day and saw each other every weekend, for F&B hot dogs and a movie at the Chelsea Cineplex. Our relationship was never romantic, though. Even though I had a big crush on her when I saw her in The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, it was different when I met the actual person. She wasn’t for me and I wasn’t for her. I quickly settled into playing the role of heterosexual gay best friend in her life, and as we all know from the movies, the gay best friend knows things that lovers never do…” Shelley acted in Rosefelt’s short, Tiger: His Fall & Rise, which he concedes, “The problem with Tiger wasn’t that it was silly; the problem with Tiger was that it was awful.” But there is this reward: “[T]he film will stand the test of time as a documentary on her poor eating habits. Many people were disgusted by the way she ate, but I’m a big slob myself and the way she nudged the food onto her fork with her finger just made me feel more comfortable. The truth is that I loved the way Adrienne ate so much that I had her eat all the way through Tiger: Chinese food, sub sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, you name it… [T]he truth is it gave me boundless joy to see her talking with her mouth full. I loved Adrienne a lot, but I can’t remember loving her more than when she had a giant burger in her trap. Choose your bliss; that was mine. I will be paying off that damned film for the rest of my life, but I’m extremely proud I had the opportunity to record her eating that burger for posterity. This is my contribution to film history.” [The rest, at the link, is a must-read.]

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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