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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, December 18th, 2009 - Comments Off on Report: film critic and scholar Robin Wood has passed
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Report: film critic and scholar Robin Wood has passed

RobinWood_456.jpgFrom Toronto International FF’s Cameron Bailey (@cameron_TIFF) comes a report that film critic and scholar Robin Wood, 78, is dead. Further news and obituaries should follow… Hitchcock was a specialty. Here’s Wood’s Criterion Top 10 (with bonus black cat). Wood’s books include 2002’s “Hitchcock’s Films Revisited”. Here’s his 2006 Artforum piece on Michael Haneke’s Caché. And, from an extended interview, “Robin Wood at 75”, come these observations. ON HITCHCOCK. “If I was going to write an attack on Hitchcock, it would be directed at the relative lack of any kind of positive drive in his films. You have a sense of this suppressed underworld of psychological horror, but it has to be kept down because if it erupts, everything will be destroyed. I think that beneath the jolly façade, Hitchcock was a very frightened person.” ON HAWKS. “Hawks’ weak point is that he’s so apolitical, which occasionally leads him into trouble. The more times I see Red River, the angrier I get with it. You cannot let the John Wayne character off the hook like that, because by the end of the film he’s become a fascist. He’s killed people in cold blood; he’s become a complete tyrant.” And: ON CANADIAN CINEMA: “I respect Atom Egoyan, though I can’t seem to love his films; I kind of admire them as exercises, but they don’t touch me somehow. There are certain small Canadian films that I’ve come to love, like Kitchen Party and Rollercoaster. I don’t think a serious filmmaker in Canada can raise the money to make a film. I always think of Ingmar Bergman, who was taken up by the head of Svenskfilm in the very early years. Film after film he was encouraged to make, and all failures. But they had faith in him; they saw something there, so they continued to finance his films. And suddenly, there was Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, and The Seventh Seal. The same thing could be happening in Canada, but nobody with money will get behind a director. There won’t be any great Canadian cinema until that changes.”

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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