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
the slapstick tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the Keystone Cops. When approached to star in it, actress Magda Szubanski thought the idea was so wacky it just might work. “At best it will be brilliant… At worst it will be a brilliant experiment.” … Dr Plonk is a return to innocence, he says. “In terms of subject and feel, there’s an innocence about it which I suspect a lot of people really enjoy. They’re just not used to seeing it any more. It has to work as a film and as entertainment but if there’s anything that’s going to get people to enjoy it on a level beyond that, it’s this innocence from back then. Cinema on the whole has lost that. And I think we’ve lost something by losing that.” … Very little about the enterprise was conventional in contemporary filmmaking terms. “It isn’t a 1912 silent film,” de Heer says. “It’s a 2006-2007 contemporary film but there’s no real precedent. And it’s comedy, and comedy is harder to pick than most drama as you’re doing it. Those two things together mean you’re going on a wing and a prayer more than normal.” [A fair bit more at the link.]
I wonder if anyone has a review now that the film has actually had a showing? And, does anyone know what kind of release the film might get in the United States? I think this is a really fantastic experiment in film. I suppose experiment is the right word, since this isn’t exactly a “new” idea. However, one of the things that has happened in the past twenty to thirty years is that we have become increasingly interested in what McLuhan called the medium’s power to be a message. This only makes sense, since the advent of the computer has made all of us hyper-aware of how new technology shapes the way we think and communicate. The result has been interest in earlier mediums and how they too changed the way we think. It makes perfect sense then to return to the earliest mode of film in an effort to understand how those first forays into this new medium changed our world. The only thing I can really compare it to is an experiment Stephen King undertook when he wrote The Green Mile, bringing it out in monthly installments in an attempt to recapture just how the old Victorian serials were received in their time.
My sister who loves vintage films and Charlie Chaplin recommended me this file. She said it’s a silent, black and white comedy about the end of the world. It’s really funny because this low class inventor with a deaf and mute assistant, Paulus, who also became his guinea pig, Dr. Plonk calculated that the world will end in 101 years. Are you serious? In 101 years???