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
My prediction of $20.3 million for Are We Done Yet? was posted before the Weds numbers came in, unlike some of the others who posted predictions on Thursday. (I was travelling so I don’t know what time.) Chances are that it’s likely to be more in the $14 to 15 million range unless it’s like Johnson Family Vacation and has a huge weekend bump (including more business on Easter Sunday than some might expect).
By ‘major importance’ do you really mean “momentary importance’? I mean, I thought the Matrix was a good movie, but I really don’t think it’s even as important a movie to the genre as say, Die Hard.
I suppose you could use the Matrix as sort of a gateway to mainstream appreciation of Hong Kong style wire-fu but even that’s sort of gone out of style, and is mocked more often than not.
BTW I realize this is my second post knocking Poland about Wachowski stuff so to avoid seeming like I’m just doing it to be a dick, I’ll mention I don’t really have a problem with his being a fan of theirs, I like their stuff too mostly. It’s just it somehow managed to crop up a lot this week in his postings.
I’m not a Wachowski-dedicated nerd, but there is no doubt of that film’s singular importance.
It was an insanely popular surprise that somehow found its identity and place in pop culture in a time when the tidal wave of Phantom Menace was taking over the country.
It was, for many adults, what they hoped the new Star Wars film would be. It was steeped in the same Joseph Campbell mythology techniques. It also had some jaw-dropping action and film techniques not seen by 99 percent of the film-watching market.
It had a re-watch factor that carried over into the DVD market, where it became one of the format’s first true phenoms.
On top of that, it brought intelligent discourse back to action films. It had that, “Let’s go to the coffee shop and talk about what just happened” vibe about it.
Its legend grew for four years and made way for one of the most successful R-rated movies of all-time, Reloaded.
You can argue, pretty successfully, that the brothers got full of themselves and over their heads by making sequels (particularly Revolutations) where their storytelling faults were exposed.
There is no doubt, however, of Matrix’s spot in movie lore.
Well, Grindhouse looks to be the new “Snakes on a Plane”… lots of hype, seemingly a lot of people interested…but no one goes to see it. Early reports say that it might wind up third (or even fourth) for the weekend, thereby proving that 1 + 1 doesn’t always equal 2.
Pete. That’s silly. If you can’t see it’s relevance then you’re not looking carefully enough.
Dave. Is there a first meaning about the Scary Movie 4 thing? I just figured that that and Wolf Creek were Weinstein movies.
Doug, really? If this movie flops then that’ll be very strange. Or, it could be that Good Friday numbers are stilted. Still. This would be even stranger than Snakes.
It isn’t strange. “Grindhouse” tracking was so-so, Weinstein knew it.
http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/grindhouse-didnt-gun-friday-ticket-sales/
PS: Nikki Finke said that MGM is frustrated at distributing all those Weinstein Co. bombs.
9 million for Blades of Glory on Friday
5.4 million for Are We Done Yet
5 million for Grindhouse
Ouch.
You forgot the 7 million for Meet the Robinsons, putting Grindhouse in fourth place of Friday. Ouch indeed.
Oh, no…poor David. Another one of these films he “champions” won’t be living up to expectations.
I don’t think this qualifies as one of DP’s pet films – he didn’t even like half of it and he wasn’t trumping it up before he saw it.
The Matrix did well enough, but it has to be one of the most overrated movies of the last decade, both in terms of its critical and popular success. “Insanely popular”? Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Yes, Insanely popular, by no stretch of any imagination. Or more to the quote, an insanely popular SURPRISE. After all of the Star Wars hype, many were saying that The Matrix was more in tune with what they were expecting as a movie-going experience.
Sunglasses and trench coats and bullet time and wire-fu have saturated the market since, from movies to commercials to videogames. The impact was fully real.
The $27+ million opening was only 16% of the total domestic gross. It was the 4th biggest movie of the year with $460 million coming almost out of nowhere, and seven times its $63 million budget. Reloaded opened up to five times as much. The sequels went on to make nearly 1.2 billion, four times their $300 million budget.
I’m no Matrix apologist, and even I would admit that the original Matrix is insamely popular and, even more important, insanely influential.
As Tofu said, I was right in every way to say “insanely popular.”
Think back to late 1998/early 1999. Where was “The Matrix” on anyone’s radar? There was literally one film that being discussed for months and became a pop culture phenom, getting referenced in PG-rated cartoon smashes and everywhere else.
Somehow, it lingered on more in the film conscious than a movie that played all of the summer of 1999 and grossed $431 million, It went on to become a DVD revolution. It became so popular, discussed and dissected over four years that it spawned books duscussing it and a sequel that became an event film in May, a time usually reserved for lower-MPAA rated franchises.
The Matrix was a film that will stand for years, no matter how much Revolutions tried to bring the whole enterprise down.
Mary – Nikki doesn’t know shit about any of this… she is a bright woman, but on things like this, where she really doesn’t know what is going on, she is a monkey at a typewriter printing what others with their own motives tell her.
The Weinstein movies are the highest grossers of this MGM regime. MGM has had just one non-TWC film gross as much as $14 million, Rocky Balboa. Grindhouse will be Weinstein Co’s ninth in their time together.
Everyone in town knew that Grindhouse tracking sucked for the last month. But everyone also knows that tracking can easily miss the teen and ethnic audience and often does. The opening is a bit behind tracking and way below estimates, which assumed that it would do better in the untracked markets.
MGM has no effective marketing arm, though they have been hiring to try to fix the problem lately. The current MGM experiment will be over at the end of this year, when the Showtime deal ends. They just don’t have a business plan that works. There are too many chefs and at the same time, not enough sous chefs to get the job done. And financially, the responsibility for marketing budgets and for maintaining the quality of the materials is a blur that has caused aggravation on almost every film they have “released.”
There are all kinds of problems with The Weinstein Company and as I have been writing for months now, that experiment will also end sometime later this year. Harvey is too distracted, with other non-film focuses, and the Dimension business is solid, but they need a strong marketing and distribution partner to maximize the profits. Meanwhile, their pockets just aren’t deep enough to make it all work the way it did as Disney. The arrogance of their independence is costing the brothers tens of millions every year since they left.
So, if you are looking to Nikki for perspective, you are going to have a dramtically misshapen notion of reality. She’s like the beat cop on Law & Order who sees the dead body but keeps leaving her own prints on the crime scene. She KNOWS someone died (as does everyone else on the scene… pros who are investigating before talking), but she feels free to guess at motive and cause of death with very little actual knowledge. Read her for the circus act she does so well… but be wary of mstaking it for reality.
Why don’t you list the box office predictions that Box Office Psychics puts up?
David, I semi-agree with you… the tracking wasn’t great, but it was better than the other movies this weekend and you can’t really use tracking on a movie like this because of the way the research is done. If you ask 100 people if they’re interested in the movie and 20 of them are Tarantino/Rodriguez fans, then the results will be off. If you ask 100 Tarantino/Rodriguez fans, the results will be different. Not sure what happened that suddenly drove the interest down bu three weeks ago, of 7,000 people polled on our site, 47% had made Grindhouse their first choice.
To look to Nikki Finke for insight is asking a hell of a lot. She is nothing more than a wanna-be Drudge who sits in her apartment and goes through her rolodex everyday picking the brains of real insiders – most of whom have their own agenda.
I doubt she even sees any of these movies that she tries to write about with such authority.
The bizarre thing with her is she always says, “Like I told you the other day” or “like I reported the other day.”
I know she’s got a reporter’s background, but what reporter (or now blogger in this case) spends most of their posts telling people “I told you so”?
Why is she rubbing it in and who is she beating? It’s strange.
The original Matrix is still insanely popular. People who think otherwise are deluding themselves.
Nothing drove interest down, ED… but the people who are on your site answering polls are not Average Americans. I would bet that nearly every one of those 3290 people who said they wanted to see it will see it this weekend.
But as I’ve been saying for a while, Geek Opening is about $8 million and $20 million and change total.
300 was the first big teen movie of 2007. $70 million is not a geek opening.
Grindhouse found a reasonable number of people who were outside of the norm for that film. But the number suggests it just never hooked into the mainstream, like, say (ow!), Wild Hogs.
I never said the Matrix was not and is not a popular movie that had an impact. It was, is, and did have. But to say it’s of “major importance to film history” is nonsense. Even if only for the fact that there’s only been 8 years of ‘film history’ since it came out.
Yeah and look at what’s happened in those eight years.
I will agree that the popularity of The Matrix is insane.
“Yeah and look at what’s happened in those eight years.”
Many movies have come out which have been far more popular than The Matrix?
The Matrix is one of those movies whose influence is so pervasive, it’s hard to see at this point.