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
You know, seriously: Just today, a friend and I were talking about Oscar contenders, and she raised a point so obvious that, of course, I’d never thought about it before: Maybe Frost/Nixon is a box-office under-achiever partly because not many Americans under the age of 35 know or recall who David Frost is. Reason No. 11, David?
I think we can safely conclude that the lousy performance of Frost/Nixon is overdetermined.
Joe: I am under 35 and would not know who David Frost is if not for the play and movie.
However, I think Frost/Nixon probably didn’t do very well because it’s not a very good movie. The performances are fine but just a bit too studied. But it’s the storytelling that falters: the movie doesn’t really know what its own message is and it’s so desperate to tell us the events it depicts are important that it actually resorts to on-camera pseudointerviews with its cast. Weak, weak, weak.
I’m over 35, and I didn’t know who David Frost is.
To me, the movie just look like something I’d enjoy, so I haven’t watched it, even though I’ve had a DVD screener sitting on top of my TV for over a month or so.
That obviously should say “the movie just DIDN’T look like something I’d enjoy”
“the movie doesn’t really know what its own message is and it’s so desperate to tell us the events it depicts are important that it actually resorts to on-camera pseudointerviews with its cast. Weak, weak, weak.”
Exactly right. If you have to have characters repeatedly espousing how important the story is, then it probably isn’t.
I’m under 35 and I’d heard of David Frost before seeing this but I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup.
To coin a phrase that’s around at the moment:
Maybe people just aren’t into these movies.
I am a hair over 35 and until hearing about this property as a play, I thought David Frost wrote poetry.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a commercial for this movie either. Maybe one.
The Weinstein Company DOES spend a ton of money … buying awards. Why else did “The Reader” get so much love from AMPAS?
As for the rest it’s not that hard to figure: “Milk” over “Gran Torino”, “Doubt” over “Twilight”, “Frost/Nixon” over “W.” The Oscar noms mean AMPAS thinks only of themselves and their cronies.
Doubt over…Twilight!?
Anyway, your grade in logical reasoning is an F-.
It may well be that the Weinstein Company spends a lot of money on campaigning for awards. I think it is. But the evidence for that is NOT “well, The Reader got nominated.” C’mon. SOMETHING has to get nominated. It doesn’t automatically mean that a lot of money was spent.
And a LOT of money gets spent trying to buy nominations that ultimately do not pan out. It happens many times every single year.
In other words, spending money is not a *sufficient* condition for getting nominations, even if you manage to successfully argue that it is a *necessary* condition.
In other other words, whether or not money is spent, there has to be something ELSE AS WELL to clinch the nominations.
You ask “Why else did The Reader get so much love from AMPAS?”
THEY LIKED THE MOVIE.
Wrong, Sam. Harvey Weinstein has a history of buying awards — in fact, he got called out on it one year at ShoWest. The awards-to-box-office ratio for Weinstein Company and for Miramax before that is very telling.
The other examples I cited: homosexual martyr/heterosexual martyr, Catholic/Mormon, dead politician/living politician. (For the record I was not aware Stephenie Meyer was Mormon until after “Twilight” was released.)
“The Oscar noms mean AMPAS thinks only of themselves and their cronies.”
So therefore, the AMPAS preference for the films you mentioned above – Milk, Doubt, and Frost/Nixon – mean that AMPAS and their cronies are mostly a bunch of dead gay Catholics?
Wrong, Chucky.
You didn’t even read my post. I wasn’t arguing that Harvey Weinstein doesn’t spend a LOT of money on awards. Certainly he did in Miramax’s days [though note that with the most infamous example, Shakespeare In Love, DreamWorks actually spent *more* money trying to sell Saving Private Ryan to the Academy and still came up short for the big one]. I wouldn’t contest that Weinstein still does today.
But here’s my point, which you totally missed: money isn’t enough. To “buy” a nomination, the Academy has to be agree to the sale. And yes, often they bite, but often they DON’T. There has been a lot of nominations that Weinstein and others have TRIED to “buy” but failed to secure.
So yeah, money was spent. But the nomination for The Reader couldn’t have happened unless a lot of individual Academy members ALSO genuinely liked the film.
—
jeffmcm: No, don’t be silly. AMPAS consists entirely of dead gay Catholic *political martyrs*.
“As for the rest it’s not that hard to figure: “Milk” over “Gran Torino”, “Doubt” over “Twilight”, “Frost/Nixon” over “W.” The Oscar noms mean AMPAS thinks only of themselves and their cronies.”
Making the claim that “Doubt” got a nom over “Twilight” as proof of an AMPAS bias is cashews, pistacchios, almonds, pecans and macadamians. There ought to be a Planters factory stalking you right now.
Y’all read everything too literally. To get an Oscar nomination thou shalt be Politically Correct.
You can take your tinfoil hats off now if you wish.
God, it’s irritating when crazy people pretend to be the sane ones.
So “Catholic” is now a “politically correct” category? Bashing George W. Bush is “politically incorrect”?
These kind of bizarre distortions typically occur when you try to backfill justifications into muddled and irrational theories.