By MCN Editor editor@moviecitynews.com

Nick Ray’s WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN Goes To Oscilloscope

Posted Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 - Comments Off on Nick Ray’s WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN Goes To Oscilloscope
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NEW YORK (August 31,2011) – Oscilloscope Laboratories announced today that it has acquired North American distribution rights to Nicholas Ray’s WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN, the director’s pioneering last film, for release in honor of the centenary of his birth. A pristine new restoration and reconstruction of the film will make its world premiere at the upcoming Venice International Film Festival, and its domestic debut at the New York Film Festival in October.

Accompanying the film, Oscilloscope will also release a new documentary, DON’T EXPECT TOO MUCH, which explores in his own words and those of his student crew Ray’s vision for WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN. Using never-before-seen footage and audio from the Ray archive, as well as contemporary interviews, the full-length documentary reveals Ray’s unique approach to directing and examines the relationship between his life and art in the latter years of his life. The documentary is directed by Ray’s widow, Susan Ray, who also supervised the restoration of WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN in collaboration with The Nicholas Ray Foundation, EYE Institute Netherlands, and The Academy Film Archive.

Oscilloscope will continue to screen both films at festivals, in repertory houses, at universities and archives, and in special engagements around the country and will release them on DVD and multiple digital platforms next year. (Both films are also scheduled to air on Turner Classic Movies in late October.) Long shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, Ray’s final film is a groundbreaking work made with his students in the early 1970s at SUNY Binghamton in upstate New York. The film premiered as an unfinished work at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, and Ray continued to shoot and edit it until his death in 1979. In the film, we observe Ray undertaking the bold experiment of teaching collaboration and filmmaking to a novice crew while making a feature film. The film also aims to document the history, progress, manners, morals, and mores of everyday life at a critical moment in American history, through an expressionistic use of multiple image.

“Nicholas Ray is, quite simply, one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema,” said Oscilloscope Laboratories. “In his last film, he shows the same trailblazing spirit, bold style, and interest in grappling with contemporary social concerns that have defined all of his previous work. We are thrilled and honored to be collaborating with Susan Ray and The Nicholas Ray Foundation to get this important and landmark film out into the world at last. We feel this film, along with Susan’s illuminating new documentary DON’T EXPECT TOO MUCH, will be a delight and a resource for cinephiles and film professionals for many years to come.”

Quote from Susan Ray: Nick has been called an innovator and pathfinder, a visionary a good 40 or 50 years ahead of his time. This is never truer than in We Can’t Go Home Again. Now, 40 years after it was shot, this is a film whose time has finally come. The Nicholas Ray Foundation is delighted to join forces with Oscilloscope in offering this film to a new generation of viewers ready to receive it.

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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