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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, March 8th, 2008 - Comments Off on [True/False 08] never a mistake to open with a punk circus marching band through town
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[True/False 08] never a mistake to open with a punk circus marching band through town

Painted family

IT’S HALF-TROT, HALF-RUN UP PARADE-BLOCKED, PEOPLE-CHOKED BROADWAY in Columbia, Missouri in Leap Day’s springy dusk a couple hours west of St. Louis or east of Kansas City along I-70, the grand march opening the fifth edition of the fantastically smart, town-transforming True/False documentary film festival, led for the second time by the event’s semi-official punk circus marching band, Chicago’s Mucca Pazza. (The festival’s red and white logo is painted on the faces of the mother and daughterabove.) I tarried at an overlapping event, scooping up visiting journalists and bloggers and consultants and doc-makers from the altar of an open bar, urging them toward the rural drag to witness the hijinks of Chicago’s very own, and now it’s a gallop to get in front. Police cars with blue lights flashing block the cross-streets. The sidewalks stream thick people, a few figures bent to scrawl, drawing from the many buckets of fat sticks of multicolored chalk.

Mucca Pazza trumpeting

The band’s stopped in front of a church with a tall white steeple that from most angles resembles Donald Duck and the sound grows louder as the crowd clusters. Later that night, a small club will throb with a Gypsy-inflected wall of sound. But now the more than dozen players in customary mismatched ragtag marching band uniforms tear into something unrecognizable but utterly rhythmic: sousaphone, trombone, trumpet, an electric guitar wailing from a loudspeaker on a helmet atop the red-white-and-blue jacketed player’s head. A light breeze of clear cool air moves, but the assembling stands in place, swaying or jumping, a couple hundred celebrants. A hundred fifty yards ahead, a Stephens College overpass is draped with festival banners and photographers and cheering figures. Marching forward to the college’s commons where fire twirlers await in a roped-off area, placards dance: turbaned swamis in memory of a locally-born mystic of the 1920s; Diane Arbus’ eerily calm twin girls. Scattered around the mushy field, it’s tough to keep count: no one’s standing still long enough. Three drummers? Two trumpets? Saxophone, cymbals, trombones, sousaphone, bullhorns, the big thumping drum with the crude sketch of the band’s iconic grinning Mad Cow on the side. The single cheerleader, barelegged, Docs-booted, shakes her pompoms in an ironic frug. A Ken-sized band member crests the shoulder of one of the band members. Scattered details like that put a grin on faces in every direction. A whistle shrills. The march resumes, crowd trickling back to the center of town. Atop a newly restored hotel, the neon letters “Tiger” are burning bright in the falling blue. Drums roll. Traffic resumes. The weekend begins with one last trumpet blast.

Music man

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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