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By DP30 david@thehotbuttonl.com

Posted Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 - 5 Comments »
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DP/30 @ Sundance: Reagan, Eugene Jarecki

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5 Comments »

5 Responses to “DP/30 @ Sundance: Reagan, Eugene Jarecki”

  1. Hopscotch says:
    February 3, 2011 at 5:20 pm

    Monday night on HBO. I’m there.

  2. Not so badcounter-strikeresource says:
    February 7, 2011 at 11:17 pm

    Quite a good article. Thank you very much!

  3. LexG says:
    February 8, 2011 at 1:13 pm

    Hey, how was this? Anyone watch?

    The Reagan show, I mean, not the DP, which is good.

  4. Paul MD (Stella's Boy) says:
    February 8, 2011 at 1:22 pm

    Recorded it. Watching it soon hopefully.

  5. LexG says:
    February 8, 2011 at 1:28 pm

    Re: Reagan, I gotta cop to something; I was like 7-15 when he was president. I’m sure if he were in charge today, I’d think he was BUSH-level AWESOME, all 80 years old with the full head of hair just bulldozing through every situation with utter certitude. And he’s regarded now as a Mount Rushmore level great and as a burgeoning Republican, sure it’s like REAGAN POWER!

    Buuuuuut man, I remember being like 8 or 9 and ALL you’d hear about was NUCLEAR WAR! and WarGames and Day After and that NOSTRADAMUS movie that said the world would end in 1999, and then I’d see Reagan on TV talking tough and the face of being GUNG HO against the Russians…

    … and in my child brain, I seriously SERIOUSLY thought that dude was going to get us straight-up killed. I would write papers on how LIFE IS MEANINGLESS BECAUSE RUSSIA IS GOING TO BLOW US UP, and we’d have to do drills in school about what to do in case of a RED DAWN attack or something.

    Who knew back then it was the greatest time in the history of the world to be a kid. And I was moping around thinking I’d be dead by 30 because Reagan was gonna get us blown up.

    I always assume the worst.

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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.”
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“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