MCN Blogs
Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Los Olvidados' lost boys: DBC Pierre considers

As a print of Los Olvidados (aka The Forgotten Ones; The Young and the Damned) opens in London for a month’s run in the National Film Theatre’s Buñuel retrospective, Booker Prize-winning novelist DBC Pierre, who grew up in Mexico City, considers its impact in the Observer: “I was raised behind walls in Mexico City, but still ran the streets like a rat part-time, a beady-eyed troll among big-eyed statuettes glazed in snot. Coming from an affluent place, it doesn’t take many street beggars to thrust you into a moral crisis trying to rationalise wealth. If a mother begging with a dead baby in her arms doesn’t do it, the knowledge that her kin might also borrow the body for begging will… Surrealist director Luis los olvidados milk_213576.jpgBuñuel was the instrument it took to publicly articulate the truth about poverty in that city, that absence of love. When he came to live in Mexico City in the late 1940s, it was nearly 20 years since he had filmed his scathing Land Without Bread, amid what he saw as the peasantry’s filth and stupidity in his native Spain. It was as if the energy behind his art, already frustrated by years in exile, even after an extravagant start alongside Salvador Dalí, took the collision with Mexico’s Federal District as a challenge to his very ethos. The result was an explosion captured in a masterpiece of cinema… Los Olvidados took barely three weeks to make in 1950 on a shoestring budget, but hit the world screen like a fist through plate glass. Mexican officials of the day were rabid, critics stunned, and the work won Buñuel the prize for best director at Cannes the following year.” A key insight: “Despite not being one of Buñuel’s surreal works, its framework provided a vehicle for some of his most striking visual effects. After all, where does a surrealist turn when the cruelty he wishes to depict has itself reached surreal depths? Realism. He simply screamed a truth.” [A closer reading at the link.]

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments are closed.

Movie City Indie

Quote Unquotesee all »

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