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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

The So Beautiful Season

Adam Gopnik wrote a piece in January 8, 2007 edition of The New Yorker titled, The Unbeautiful Game. It was about the issue of football stats and why they haven

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9 Responses to “The So Beautiful Season”

  1. martin says:

    Dave are you high?

  2. Blackcloud says:

    Never in a million years would I have expected to see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht mentioned on this blog.
    http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/gumbrecht.html

  3. Lota says:

    “self-indulgent orgy can not be fought”
    ick. not a nice image Dave.
    well I watch them to see the clothes, especially the men’s suits for sinister reasons of my own, swig out of a hip flask, then wait for the vicious partygoers around me rip on the pageantry.
    I actually rather see Prince’s halftime show again. At least there was some element of surprise in that!

  4. David Poland says:

    Why high?
    Please grace us with an idea, Martin.

  5. Blackcloud says:

    Wouldn’t this work better as an argument for why we watch movies? I’m not sure how it fits with the Oscars, which don’t seem to fit the criteria that Gumbrecht is applying. Those criteria being, as far as I can gather, the categories of aesthetic experience established by Kant in the Kritik der Urteilskraft.
    I never thought I’d see Kant discussed on this blog, either.

  6. David Poland says:

    Movies don’t really have winners and losers. The Oscars, like sports, do. No?

  7. Blackcloud says:

    That is so, but I don’t think the “happy absorption in someone else

  8. jeffmcm says:

    While the idea that fandom is an extension of connecting to the art/artist sounds understandable and very human, there comes a point where it’s not really productive anymore. You wouldn’t treat Beethoven or Mozart as racehorses and we shouldn’t be casting great directors like Scorsese and Eastwood into this kind of competitive drama either. Of course, we all do it anyway, but…it strikes me as problematic.
    Martin, every few months DP gets all contemplative-like.

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