Another (Major) One Bites The Dust
And so, the LA Times is now a one critic newspaper.
Good times.
Carina Chocano is off the payroll, leaving only Ken Turan as a full time celluloid thumper. As usual, fame before beauty
April 26, 2024
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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
Unless Kenny Boy has a J. Egdar Hoover-like vault of blackmail pics featuring the Chandlers and Sam Zell fucking farm animals, I really have no idea how such a pompous, out-of-touch , middlebrow hack could keep his job so long. CC was a breath of fresh air, really one of the most insightful reviewers at a major daily. Turan, on the other hand, is like the Joe Lieberman of film criticism.
Of note, The Onion AV Club’s Tasha Robinson has been freelancing for the Trib for awhile now — so much that I wonder is she isn’t or wouldn’t fill that post-Caro slot if they were actually hiring.
Dietcock is spot on about OLD MAN KEN TURAN; I’ve ranted up and down about that tired, stuffy, pompous, squeamish, seemingly joyless SELF-PLAGIARIZING old grouch up and down here and elsewhere; It seems like very few Hot Bloggers want to go on record dissing Turan — understandable, I guess, since he’s INEXPLICABLY LAFC royalty, despite his LAZY WRITING the last decade, and the fact that he doesn’t seem to enjoy ANYTHING but Eastwood and the most etched-in-bronze Oscar bullshit anymore.
Guy makes MICHAEL MEDVED seems OPEN-MINDED, and his every goddamn review is a carbon copy of the last; Sample Turan Bullshit = Praise the cast, personify the movie (THIS MOVIE IS NOT AS (smart, funny, profound *****AS IT WANTS TO BE**** (he seriously uses some variation on this in 90% of his reviews), COMPLAIN ABOUT VIOLENCE, regurgitate the press kit, then COMPLAIN ABOUT VIOLENCE SOME MORE. Instant Turan review.
Many if not most (?) of us are Angelenos, and isn’t it a shame that the film capital, the place with the MOST MOVIE LOVERS PER SQUARE BLOCK, is saddled with this grumpy douche who never enjoys ANYTHING as “our” preeminent voice on film?
Does ANYONE in L.A. actually enjoy Kenneth Turan’s closed-minded, dated perspective on film? Does ANYONE enjoy when he wheels out one of those MEAN-OLD-MAN diatribes writing off an ENTIRE GENERATION OF FILMMAKERS? Does ANYONE enjoy when this sweatered stuffed shirt embarasses his FELLOW CRITICS AT LAT by pompously running a Sunday column rant to diss movies his peers liked?
IF ANYONE OF YOU ACTUALLY KNOW OR HAVE MET KEN TURAN, does he now or did he ever even LIKE MOVIES??????
Maybe a lot of Hot Bloggers (? Can we get t-shirts?) don’t write about Turan because, like me, they consider him insignificant.
THEY SHOULD HIRE ME FUCK YEAH THAT WOULD OWN.
Insignificant? Maybe. Just seems I’m able to “laugh off” a number of way more willfully strident critical “personalities” (Reed, Gonzalez, White, Lyons), but everybody complains up a storm about most of them.
I guess it’s the TM status of LA Times and its being the hometown paper of the world’s movie capital that makes me wish it had a chief critic who actually seemed eager to have new experiences at the cinema, instead of lacquered approximations of the Classic Hollywood template that increasingly seems to be his only interest.
DARGIS FUCKING OWNED.
“Junketeer out of Orlando?”
What do you base that on? I haven’t been on a “junket” of any sort in a decade. Even then, my papers paid my way. Done Toronto, NYFF, others from time to time, but “junketeer?” Aren’t you a junketeer yourself, Dave? Never noticed that you’d never met me at the free buffet and gift bag give-away? All those profiles, trend stories, etc., that I get on the wires? Gathered by doing individual interviews and doing the homework. You might want to try that.
Roger Moore in Orlando
Are you nuts, Roger? Are you actually suggesting that his highness Poland would ever do some legwork and produce an actual, original, reported story? Do you not read this blog?
Even though he loves to call himself a “journalist,” Poland’s style is to just sit back and wait until other people have done the hard work, then swoop in and piss all over it and point out how wrong and stupid they are. That’s the Hot Blog style! Kinda like the caveman pissing on the wall drawing in History of the World Part One.
Cranky, cranky.
I’m sorry, Roger, if I have misstated the work you do. That reference was, obviously, not central to what I was writing. You might want to grow a little skin around those nerve endings.
Had you just dropped me a note – even an angry one – I would have been happy happy to run a correction. As is, I will correct unhappily.
And no, Roger… don’t do junkets. Haven’t for years, though ironically, I did show up at the Bond international day last week to do a sit with Marc Forster.
And for the record, there is nothing inherently wrong with being a junketeer. There are people who abuse the system, but most of them are actually just trying to do and keep their jobs.
For me, their work is a nightmare. Did it for roughcut.com when we were trying to make a place for the internet at the print/radio table. It’s brutal. And I didn’t do it every weekend like most of those folks do. The hotels are lovely, but that much travel time and that much time considering more room service or a hotel bar… sucks.
The system is very retro. And it is being slowly dismantled by studios who don’t want to pay the bill anymore. As I have written before, I expect the individualism of all of this to be squeezed out of it before long, replaced by 4 or 5 outlets doing interviews that are then distributed through the wires and online. Individual interviews in NY, LA, and maybe Chicago, followed by a more extensive world tour for talent, as so much more money is in the overseas markets now.
As for The Tribune Company position on paying for travel… a thing of the past, as you well know. If you wanted to cover a junket or to come to LA or NY to do a 1-on-1, they might well sign off on a studio paying for it about now. And if not, unless it was one of 3 or 4 films a year that the paper feels will actually generate major reader interest. But even then, unlikely with the ability to have a TribCo employee do the interview in their own town and to feed it to you.
Do you want to get into all the internal cutbacks that now have TribCo reporters NOT paying for their own lunches… not being traveled… fighting to get even to Toronto and Sundance? Those standards were great… and always for those who could afford them… and it’s not just the web that had short budgets.
Finally, welcome to you, boltbucket, long time lurker, first time sniper. If you know a movie journalist who works as hard as me, point them out. But then again… you don’t seem to have a handle on what I actually do or how I choose to process information.
And do you really think that calling studios and being told what they want you to publish is “hard work?” I mean, like junketeers, it is work. And it is time consuming. But you probably should do a real inventory of what you are reading and analyze what “work” really went into it. It might shock you.
Lex, I know Kenny Turan. I read Kenny Turan. And you, sir, are no Kenny Turan.
Hell, you’re not even Kenny from SOUTH PARK.
I also feel that the Turan pile on is excessive.
I feel Turan is an honest, conscientious critic whose perspective on film, it seems to me, is getting a bit long in the tooth.
But we all have people who love us, hate us, and dismiss us.
And older critics get too much shit. They have real, long view insights and, ironically, are better suited to the blog concept than most of the younger people doing blogs. A straight review format can be a straight jacket.
If you know Turan is harder on violent movies (which indeed he is), take his opinions on violence with a grain of salt. The job of a critic is not to always share the reader’s opinions, but to articulate their own and lay their biases out.
So, er, David: That wasn’t you I saw hanging out at my table at the Daredevil junket?
Yes, Joe. I went to the Daredevil junket almnost 6 years ago. It was one of those circumstances where a studio went through the dance of not wanting to show me the movie unless I was doing the junket.
I think the last time I did a roundtable turned out to be mini-press conferences for Troy, a movie whose set I had visited. The only reason I was there was because I had been promised an extended sit with Wolfgang Petersen… which never materialized. The brutal worthlessness of those “roundtables” was a part of what made it clear to me that I was no longer achieving anything in the work I am interested in doing by being in attendence.
But that doesn’t mean that these events are worthless for everyone. Mainstream entertainment coverage is all about Brad wanting kids (the revalation of that day, when he was still with Ms Aniston) and some quip by Peter O’Toole. It business… just not my business.
I went to The Departed in NY, at my expense (they may have picked up a hotel night), to do a sit down with Scorsese, who decided the day before the junket not to do his full press schedule.
I really don’t do “print interviews” at all anymore. I might, occasionally, do one as a favor or to take advanatge of the only opportunity to meet someone with whom I REALLY want to discuss a movie.
None of this is a secret. My work is a wide open book.
But thanks for playing “Gotcha!” See ya next time!
Cranky, cranky. I’m sorry, David, if I have misstated the work you do. You might want to grow a little skin around those nerve endings.
Again, Joe… thanks for playing, “Gotcha!”
Do you want to defend Roger or just take shots at me?
Do you want the answers the questions you ask… or do you just want to take shots at me?
You asked a question with full sneer. And I answered it rather directly. But you don’t seem to care about the details. You just seem to want to slap at me.
I am not a fan of people who argue via innuendo. It’s slimy. And I don’t think you think of yourself as slimy, Joe. I don’t think of you that way, usually. But you get get into “eh, uh, hee hee” gotcha mode and you are just another troll when you go there.
You want to call me out about something? Just fucking do it, man. I can take it. But I really don’t cotton well to the backdoor bullshit.
And in terms of my response, I don’t have the luxury you do of shrugging and leaving it. You throw a “gotcha” accusation on my blog and I feel compelled to speak to it with clarity and depth. And you then trying to double down by calling me hypersensitive is just more bullshit.
What’s the good answer? Silence? Don’t you think that suggests guilt of some kind?
You want to play snarky chess with me, play it on the same board I play on or ask me to play on your board. Then it’s a fair game.
Gosh, David: You, John McCain and Sarah Palin, moaning about the gotchas. Here’s a little advice, sport: That’s probably not company with which you want to be associated right now.
But seriously: You really are too easy sometimes. You have this over-inflated sense of self-importance that makes you feel entitled to take cheap shots at other people (as you did at Roger — and please don’t bother to deny it), and then makes you all pissy when you get called on it. I do admit, I do enjoy needling you from time to time, if only to deflate you just a bit. But instead of deflating, you explode. No one dares question the great god Oz.
To once again toss your own words back at you: You might want to grow a little skin around those nerve endings.
David’s arrogance is exceeded only by his hypocrisy.
He knows full well, for example, what it means in this industry to be called a “junketeer,” then calls it a “minor, minor” mistake when he’s forced to retract it.
He has no problem claiming this site draws more readers than variety.com (a ridiculous boast that requires jumbo-sized balls or a jumbo-sized ego), yet doesn’t back up his claim with any numbers whatsoever – something he’s constantly admonishing other journalists for doing.
He claims he went to NYC to attend The Departed junket at his expense, in the process tossing off the fact that the studio “may” have paid for his luxury accomodations in a parenthetical aside, as if to say it doesn’t matter. Guess what? It does.
And by the way, if you don’t obtain your video interviews with filmmakers at studio-sponsored press events (i.e. mini-junkets), then where and when do they happen? And why do they all seem to have been filmed inside hotel rooms – you know, where most junket interviews take place?
David Poland is free to create his own pond and rule it as he sees fit. That’s his right. But when he starts fucking with the work and reputation of other journalists, he’s simply AGHAST that they dare fight back and immediately resorts to his catchphrases of “rage” and “snark” and whatnot.
You’re tired, Poland.
It seems we’re well into “it’s all about David and not about what he is writing about” season in here.
Yawn.
And boltbucket… let’s guess… which “Oscar blogger” are you?
David, it’s your blog – specifically, your _opinion_ blog – and as a result it’s always more-or-less justifiable to talk about you and what your motives and subtexts might be.
Please note, I’m not necessarily agreeing with Joe or ‘Boltbucket’.
“It seems we’re well into “it’s all about David and not about what he is writing about” season in here.”
Not at all. Every single point that I raise is based on things that you have written on this blog.
But I really didn’t expect you to address my points. When anyone ever calls you on your shit, you always pull a “I’m above this childish bickering” act and simply run away and ignore it. Kind of like your non-review of “Matrix Revolutions.”
Enjoy that yawn. It’s pretty much what your nonsensical, illiterate garblings on this blog generate.
“Frank Langella just gets better and better as the movie moves along, as he did on stage. A remarkable piece of work and a sure nomination to go with it.”
“Sean Penn gives an Oscar lock performance of power and subtlety that ranks with the best of his career.”
“Of course, in the end, it always comes back to the story. And it just isn
Again, Bolt… you seem to have a problem with me and my work and not with any of the crap you are throwing at the wall.
Do you really care where I do my interviews? 80% or more are not on press days. I’m not going to bother counting. When we do an interview on a press day, we almost always set up somewhere away from the junket rooms they are working in.
Do you like me any better now?
You don’t care for my “nonsensical, illiterate garblings?” Great. So what I do… stop reading stuff you find irritating or irrelevant.
Or spend your time hiding behind a made up name, knowing that you don’t have the courage to step up and risk anything in backing up your rage.
David: What the fuck are you talking about? Seriously. Have you really considered the ramifications of what you’re saying? You and other so-called New Media types have made your bones based on a system in which people can post the worst sort of anonymous slurs while hiding behind aliases. But now, when someone “hiding behind a made up name” disses you, you complain that he/she doesn’t “have the courage to step up and risk anything in backing up your rage.” Excuse me, but unless you’re willing to start demanding that no one can post here unless they do so under her/his own name… Look, if you are playing the game, sport, you have no right to complain when someone else plays by the same rules. If you’re not part of the solution…
“You and other so-called New Media types have made your bones based on a system in which people can post the worst sort of anonymous slurs while hiding behind aliases.”
Uh, Joe… what are you talking about? When have I EVER suggested that blind quoted slurs are okay? When has my work or business been about running anonymous nastiness of any kind? You must be thinking of someone else.
David: Are as you delusional as Sarah Palin? Or in denial? Take a look at this blog for Christ’s sake… Read what people have posted about you, me and dozens of other folks while hiding behind aliases. You are part of the system you revile. You help sustain it. Your livelihood depends on it.
My livelihood depends on what?
I could shut down the comments in here tomorrow and never make a dime less.
As for the rest
Told ya you’d whip out the “rage” word!
Love the way you pretty much ignored all my questions and just went back on your tired old soapbox.
You love to call other journalists on what you perceive are their faults, but you’re not so good at responding to people here who question you about your own stuff. You just ignore them and move on to your next victim.
For someone who’s constantly admonishing other people about their “rage” you sure do love your bully pulpit. And it draws more readers than Variety!!!
Wait, was that uncivil or whiny?
No, bolt… just desperate.
Just wondering where your defense of Roger and your attack on me is in the Bolt thread?
Looks like I victimized poor Roger so badly that he vanished the entire entry.
I would expect an apology, except that nothing you were writing really had anything to do with defending Roger, I suspect… just an excuse to obsess on me.