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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Column Corrections

As sometimes happens, there are some stats that I got wrong this morning

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7 Responses to “Column Corrections”

  1. jeffmcm says:

    Annie Hall’s lack of an editing nomination is particularly egregious because it was essentially rewritten in the editing room, and for that Allen and Marshall Brickman won an award for Best Screenplay.
    Just goes to show how impossible it is to judge Best Editing when you don’t can’t see what pieces the editor had to start with.

  2. Joe Leydon says:

    Would Ben Hur qualify as a remake that won the Oscar for Best Picture?

  3. Sam says:

    3. Wings and Grand Hotel also won Best Picture without a Best Director nomination.

  4. The Best Editing category wasn’t introduced until 1934, so Grand Hotel didn’t stand much of a chance there.
    However, since 1934, nine movies have won Best Picture without an Editing nomination:
    It Happened One Night (1934), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Hamlet (1948), Marty (1955), Tom Jones (1963), A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Godfather: Part II (1974), Annie Hall (1977) and Ordinary People (1980). But that’s it.

  5. Chucky in Jersey says:

    In the year of “Star Wars”, the reactionaries in Oscar Land gave Best Picture to “Annie Hall”. Never forget that.

  6. jeffmcm says:

    Annie Hall is a better movie than Star Wars – and I don’t see how a Jewish New York comedy is in any way ‘reactionary’.

  7. jeffmcm says:

    If you want to talk ‘reactionary’ look at the year prior, when Rocky won best picture over Network, Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, and Bound for Glory; four politically engaged, aesthetically charged films beaten by a solid but routine boxing movie.

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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