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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, July 23rd, 2007 - 9 Comments »
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When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman…

I’ll keep this brief.
One of the difficult parts of juggling a blog, a column, a news site, and a lot of time on the phone and in person with “the industry” is remaining clear on what I have actually said or written out loud and what has been conversation between the lines. Remembering what is on and off the record is clear. But sometimes I feel like I have been talking about something forever and then I have to really consider whether I wrote it down for your consumption.
I have had so many conversations about Par and DW in the last two years, on and off the record, with stories I have run or decided to let slide, I have lost my grasp of what page I stopped reading at “last night.” So I shall sum up…
Ron Grover’s Business Week story on Paramount and DreamWorks was, essentially, a four-month old look at the situation at the studios Though it did a nice job of tying much of it together, it missed some of the real and simple causes of friction.
Meanwhile, C. Nikki Finke is trying to claim ownership of the issue, almost none of which dropped for the first time on her blog, no matter how many times she tells everyone she had an exclusive. The exception, however, is that she’s been getting the real inside spin from Grey’s camp for the last few months, starting with the comedic piece about how DreamWorks now looks like a reasonable purchase by Paramount. The problem with that analysis is that it is all surface. Someday, Nikki will learn to do her math and not just take everything at face value.

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9 Comments »

9 Responses to “When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman…”

  1. bipedalist says:
    July 23, 2007 at 11:42 am

    Blah blah blah – what’s the new site?

  2. David Poland says:
    July 23, 2007 at 11:48 am

    huh?

  3. PMartin says:
    July 23, 2007 at 12:20 pm

    David, you wrote “juggling a blog, a column, a new site,” which was probably supposed to be “a news site,” right?

  4. David Poland says:
    July 23, 2007 at 1:58 pm

    ahhhhhhhh… thanks… fixing.

  5. Noah says:
    July 23, 2007 at 4:24 pm

    I just think it’s amazing that Dreamworks has already endured so many ups and downs and it’s only been a studio for 10 years. I remember being really excited to have a new studio out there, perhaps they would dare to make the films that the other studios wouldn’t. Unfortunately, Dreamworks doesn’t stand out from the rest of the studios, they don’t have a “hook” other than the cachet that the names of Spielberg, Geffen and Katzenberg bring. They are a studio, and have been a studio, without a personality and that is the fundamental flaw.

  6. Hoju says:
    July 23, 2007 at 10:56 pm

    I’m not being critical but I think it’s funny that the first sentence is “I’ll keep this brief.”

  7. David Poland says:
    July 23, 2007 at 10:59 pm

    Believe me… this is the short version.
    But, funny…

  8. anghus says:
    July 24, 2007 at 5:02 am

    good piece.
    Dreamworks, to me, was doomed to failure from the start, if only because anytime i hear about something new and ‘different’ existing within the same structure and system, you start to wonder how new or different it really is.
    it reminded me of the 90’s, when the trend in television was to pitch a new show with catch phrases like “from the creators of (INSERT HIT SHOW) and (INSERT HIT SHOW) comes the surefire hit of the fall season”
    And of course, that show was usually cancelled within 4 episodes.
    And it was always some massively popular shows cobbled together, like “From the Producers of The Simpsons and the Creator of Roseanne comes (BLANK)”
    There isn’t much new under the sun, or the Hollywood Sign, but the job of these guys is to convince people that what they’re doing was new and exciting and warranted attention and financing. In reality, it was the same dance with a different whore.

  9. R Scott R says:
    July 24, 2007 at 6:40 am

    An article on Variety says,
    “It’s hard to figure what would make the DreamWorks troica happy, since boxoffice success seems only to have made things worse.”
    http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/
    So, is there anything that Paramount could do to make the situation work, or is it out of their hands. If it’s totally up to the Dreamworks guys, then you can’t really blame Paramount if things fall apart.
    “And for Paramount, it is a crap place to be.”
    Hmmm.

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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