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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

The 48 Hr Diaries… Week One

48nick.jpgWelcome to MCN’s new weekly series, The 48 Hrs. Journals, screenwriter Larry Gross’s contemporaneous diary from the set of the classic that launched the buddy/cop craze of the 80s. I expect you will find it interesting, frustrating, and thought-provoking. A glimpse…
“I don’t know what you’ve heard…I’ve been working this fella and while I like em I know it’s not gonna work out….”
That’s Walter referring to my predecessor on the project Steve De Souza.
“I been reading a few things…the script needs some things you do well I always think do less well. I gotta bunch of people standing my office wanting know whether to make the police cars red or blue…It’s brushwork on the script that’s needed…basically this things a pounder… a shaggy dog story. Defiant Ones plus chuckles…I’ll be honest with ya…with four weeks till we shoot you probably won’t get screenwriting credit…basically all you got time for is to do what I tell ya…are ya interested?”

The rest…

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3 Responses to “The 48 Hr Diaries… Week One”

  1. MASON says:

    Great stuff. Thanks for posting, DP.

  2. christian says:

    Holy shit, this is like mama’s milk for screenwriters. Great stuff. From Tolstoy to car chases!

  3. LexG says:

    THIS. WAS. AWESOME.
    Great anecdotes, great movie, great characters involved… great era in general.
    Maybe it’s just my Gen-X age range, but I always imagine how awesome it would’ve been to be in the biz in the early-to-mid ’80s, right when guys like Silver and Co. and Simpson/Bruckheimer were in their heyday, directors like DePalma, Hill, Milius and Carpenter were firing with guns blazing, the extended network of Brat Packers were first popping up in big movies… and Eddie Murphy was HUUUUUUUUUGE.

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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