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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Seven true Lives of Others

Real-life stories of how the East German Stasi, or secret police, recruited informers, amplifying the story in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others, is the subject lives of others_2467.jpgof a lengthy piece by Hannah Booth in the Guardian. “It’s more than 17 years since the Berlin Wall fell, that chilly night on November 9 1989. To the sound of car horns and cheers, East Germans fled to the west in their thousands. Those skinny teens in stonewashed jeans and leather jackets dancing on the wall will now be approaching their 40s; those boxy Trabants streaming through the Brandenburg Gate, now Audis and BMWs. But the past hasn’t been entirely forgotten. In fact, Germany is currently experiencing a resurgence of interest in what life was really like in the German Democratic Republic. After years of silence followed by sugary nostalgia (“ostalgie”) for kitsch food brands and clothes, former East Germans are taking a harder, more critical look at life under the constant gaze of the Stasi… Both East German citizens and West German politicians were spied upon by the Stasi, who recruited an extraordinary one in five of the civilian population to act as unofficial informers. Little surprise, then, that even with the archives open, a national paranoia remains over who was victim and who collaborator.” [Seven victims of the former communist state tell their stories at the link.]

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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