By Other Voices voices@moviecitynews.com

LETTERS FROM LARRY

Posted Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 - Comments Off on LETTERS FROM LARRY
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..Sundance 2010
..Letters: On the Way
..Letters: Day One
..Letters: Day Two
..Letters: Day Three

DEAR DAVID:

Brian Poyser’s Lovers of Hate is the kind of tiny brilliant gem that low-budget indie films ought to be and so seldom are. Three no-name actors, (four speaking parts over all) star, half the movie shot on one practical set (located incidentally, in Park City, the action taking place in a three day period. The budget undoubtedly less than catering costs on a studio effects picture–the narrative combining elements of romantic-comedy psychological thriller, and slice of life character study, combining to produce a completely unclassifiable hybrid that is an authentically personal cinematic vision. Bravo!

Cooper and his programming team for finding this and if they could find five movies this good at this budget, in any one year’s program you’d know that American indie cinema was enjoying an artistic renaissance. I simply can’t start describing this film in detail without getting into damaging spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that you will think you’ve seen the set up and the situation before but I promise you that you haven’t. Every stock situation plays out in a quietly fresh and different way than you expect or assume If the multitudes in Park City know what is good for them, cinematically speaking, they will run not walk to the next screenings of The Lovers of Hate..

Quite a good deal more later.

Larry
Sent from my iPhone

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Larry Gross is a 25 year screenwriting veteran and Winner of Sundance’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his most recent release, We Don’t Live Here Anymore.

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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