By MCN Editor editor@moviecitynews.com

Oscar Winning Screenwriter Ronald Harwood To Become "Sir Ronnie"

Posted Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 - Comments Off on Oscar Winning Screenwriter Ronald Harwood To Become "Sir Ronnie"
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Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood has just been honored with a Knighthood.
He comments: “I was truly surprised and greatly delighted to learn that I was to receive this honour. I arrived in England in 1951, at the age of 17, from South Africa where I was born in the hope of making my way in the great world. So it has been a long, fruitful and immensely enjoyable journey, crowned by this splendid reward for which I am deeply grateful.”
Ronald Harwood is one of the most highly regarded and celebrated playwrights and screenwriters in England. His credits include the film The Pianist, for which he won the Oscar in 2002, as well as The Dresser and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, also nominated for Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay. He received the BAFTA award for his screenplay for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. His most recent theatrical productions include the critically acclaimed West End productions of “Taking Sides” and “Collaboration”. Other theatrical works include; “An English Tragedy”, “Mahler’s Conversion”, and the original stage production of “The Dresser”.
He is currently writing a biopic about Martin Luther King, Jr. for Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks, and his other upcoming films include Quartet, a comedy based on his successful play about 3 once legendary Opera singers living together in a retirement home that will star Maggie Smith, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay; and The Kitchen Boy, a period piece about the final weeks in the life of Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, during their captivity in Siberia, told from the point of view of a household servant.
Sir Ronald is also writing his autobiography.
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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