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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 - Comments Off on Harmony Korine, The Malingerers, the gold-scale fish and the imaginary dog: Hello, Harmony!
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Harmony Korine, The Malingerers, the gold-scale fish and the imaginary dog: Hello, Harmony!

Harmony_lesinrocks_6.jpgJames Mottram over at the Scotsman has a few piquant words with Mr. Lonely himself, Harmony Korine. “Korine, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was raised, admits he “wanted to disappear” during this bleak time. He took off to Europe, living in Paris for a while. It was here that he hit upon the initial idea for Mister Lonely, which stars… Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator. He recalls seeing the character’s real-life equivalent. “Nobody was paying any attention to the guy, there was no money in his hat… and it was just an interesting way to live your life,” he concedes… “I thought Michael was a symbol of identity and wanting to be other than who you are,” he says. Yet at the time, Korine was experiencing his own form of isolation. Living on a diet of sweets and McDonald’s, he “flipped out in Europe” and decided to fly and meet his parents – his father, Sol, is a former documentary filmmaker – who were living in the jungles of Panama. It’s at this point that Korine’s story takes a turn for the bizarre. He claims he fell in with a small cult known as The Malingerers, 70-odd men who devoted their lives to finding a rare, sought-after fish with gold scales. “They said only two had been found in the last 75 years. If you found this fish, there are three spots on the side on the gills that if you press, it sounds like a piano.” So adept is he at spinning yarns – he once claimed The Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll attended his birth and cut his umbilical cord – I’m beginning to wonder if Korine the trickster is back. “I spent seven months with them and we never found the fish,” he continues. “One day, I got in an argument with one of the leaders there. He started screaming at me and said I had no faith, that I didn’t believe it really existed. I never saw a picture of it and I think that they were all living in some kind of fantasy. Anyway, I was getting ready to leave, and this woman, who was married to one of the cult members, walked out with a dog’s leash, and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And she said, ‘I’m walking my dog.’ There was no dog there. It was an invisible dog. I took that as a sign.” [Believe it or not, more 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