April 26, 2024
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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” ā 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 ā 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 ā he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” ā and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging ā I was with her at that moment ā 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 namedā” “Yeah, sure ā 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 Iām on the phone with you now, after all thatās 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 didnāt seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. Thereās not a case of that. He wasnāt using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had ā if that were what the accusation involved ā 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. Iām not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, āYou know, itās not this, itās thatā? Because ā let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. TimesĀ piece, thatās what it lacked. Thatās 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
This article, linked to on the front page, can at best be called “clueless”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/fashion/noticed-movie-tie-ins-extend-to-beauty-products.html?_r=1
They’re trying to get Hunger Games fans to buy makeup products worn by the Capitol-dwellers, who could be considered complicit in the Games, therefore borderline evil.
Should Stephen king sue hunger games š
Maybe he could ask Neil Gaiman how that Harry Potter lawsuit turned out.
Sam – I don’t think you get cosplay. Villains just as much as heroes are chosen because of their “look” more than their character.
(And weren’t the designers shown as sympathetic characters? It was the Gamemakers who were “evil”)
ETA – Are you referring to the lawsuit that Neil Gaiman had no part in, except to explicitly say “I didn’t say Harry Potter plagiarized me”?
I believe you are thinking of something that never happened, Sam.
We should never forget that Troll inspired Harry Potter. Still one of the trippiest things ever.
The quote from him that I read years ago seemed to imply that he wasn’t quite so disinterested:
“It’s rather unseemly for a corporation to sue itself.”
Meaning that the comics arm of Warner which published “The Books of Magic” wouldn’t even consider suing the publishing arm of Warner that published “Harry Potter”, so Gaiman should just give up, bend over and take it like a man.
watched happpy feet 2 – average kids film ..
i haven’t seen the first one…
those penguins sure do sing a lot at least a dozen songs
but how did they hear the music – do the penguins have radios which probably don’t work and they don’t have
the internet …cartoon logic doesn’t work …
more cartoon logic – i want DP to use his awesome reporter skills to find out how wile e coyote bought all those things from acme so he could kill off that road runner ..
Well, Sam, given that that quote only seems to exist as something repeated by others (I cannot find a direct quote anywhere, just “Well Gaiman said this” repeated, and seemingly only on a single message board), I would point you to this one – from his own blog:
“I was surprised to discover from yesterday’s [Daily] MIRROR that I’m meant to have accused J.K. Rowling of ripping off BOOKS OF MAGIC for HARRY POTTER.
Simply isn’t true…. I wasn’t the first writer to create a young magician with potential, nor was Rowling the first to send one to school. It’s not the ideas, it’s what you do with them that matters.
Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.”
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/fair-use-and-other-things.html
ETA: Ooops, didn’t see that Foamy had already beaten me to it
Other than admiring Jennifer Lawrence’s figure for 2.5 hours, I was fairly bored with The Hunger Games. My daughter loved it, her friends loved it, and they all saw it twice over the weekend.
They must have money to burn if they’re going to see a movie twice on its first weekend.
I was planning on seeing “The Hunger Games” … until the day of release, when the newspaper ads featured Mr. Quote Whore himself, Peter Travers. The book is set in a police state and Lionsgate’s advertising agency brought out the right-wing hack who denounced “Rendition”.
Chucky, that’s some faulty logic, math, and everything all together right there.
i like this music video
Anne Marsen/ROYGBIV~ “Squeeze Me”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvVIkH44v8E
she needs a dp/30 – she doesn’t seem to have too many
interviews – so DP get the exclusive. she’s done some
tv acting .. it might take awhile for her to breakout
into a major acting star .
I followed the link on the front page to Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “reconsideration” of A.I., and he blows it in the first paragraph by calling the robots who revive David “extraterrestials”.
http://www.filmquarterly.org/2012/03/a-matter-of-life-and-death-a-i/
I don’t think there’s much point in reading any farther if he screwed that up.
just think this hunger games review does a better job
at explaining why all the hate for the movie than DP’s review …
Hunger Games Nauseating
“Maybe Iām just sensitive to it. But Iāll tell you what I will never understand, people who will stand in line for hours to see a movie about children killing children and call it entertainment, the best movie theyāve seen in years.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/karenspearszacharias/2012/03/25/hunger-games-nauseating/
i still want dp/30 – hunger games special – DP vs 4 teens who like the movie …can a movie critic change
people’s minds ..
it’s a few months away – battleship movie – really bad reviews ? or decent movie ?
Well, The Raid: Redemption I think was mentioned in some other thread. Holy cow! That movie was sooo freckin’ insane! Storywise, not too much there but the intensity was unsurpassed. I only hope Batman, Spidey & the Avengers can bring it like that. I mean, I know they’re different films and they can’t be wall-to-wall battle royale but if it’s just cg, explosions and quick cuts, they’re gonna look foolish by comparison.
Jane Fonda is going to play Nancy Reagan? Conservatives must be thrilled.
When am I going to be officially let back here or at Wells?
The LexG “brand” is dead on the vine with no place to shine.
How are you these days Lex?
Sober two weeks and just as miserable as ever.
Good luck with your sobriety efforts. I hope you’ve at least seen some good movies.
Had not heard the latest about Jane Fonda, but surely this should be some kind of cautionary tale to aging starlets tempted to make surgical adjustments to their faces: you may start out Barbarella, and end up playing Nancy Reagan! JUST SAY NO.
The brand may have lost its luster, Lex, but at least you can still get the likes of Glenn Kenny to respond to well-aimed shots at his ego. Does Soderbergh have outtakes from The GF Experience in his safe, or what?
The Raid: Redemption was also shot dead by Roger Ebert not just for having no story but for merely tagging characters at their introduction as “The Pregnant Wife” or “The Brother” to skip the need for any backstory at all.
Ebert didn’t have any problem with that when it was the driver, the cop, and the lady. As I recall that little opus had no backstory either.
Has Jane Fonda had a lot of work done? I honestly can’t always tell but when i saw her during the Globes I thought she looked amazing for her age.
Same thing with Streep. I think she was always considered quite a bit less sexy than her peers (Hawn, Lange, Pfieffer), but since she has avoided (or at least shown restraint) with the knife and needle she is luminous compared to others of her generation.
Nancy Reagan was only 59 when Ronald took office. Jane Fonda’s currently 74.
the nerdist people talk about their shows
the main guy from ain’t it cool news has a show on there
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SOir4aMu0vY
i’m impressed – Chris Hardwick gives a lot of different people freedom to do these tech / geek / comic / game shows…
more journalists should quit doing their thing and join
him …. doubt that nytimes people will jump in ..
the nerdist empire will grow just in 1 year – i hope
the business side of things gets better – it’s all about the
video / audio ads …
not sure if DP or MCN wants to join in somehow without
DP ranting they are stealing his content.
anybody else care about nerdist in any way ?
HC, she has had a lot of work done, but she had the money to have it look good. Unlike some folks her age, who no longer look like themselves.
Speaking of Fonda, I’m surprised her recent French-language movie (“Et si on vivait tous ensemble?”) hasn’t gotten an American distributer yet.
From what I’ve read, it’s surprisingly decent, and sounds like a natural for the majority of U.S. arthouses where seniors make up a good chunk of the weekday matinee biz.
hcat, if you’re talking about some other movie, Ebert in this review makes it quite clear that he’s had a nervous breakdown of sorts over The Raid, and can no longer give passes to movies just because they merely satisfy their genre requirements:
“I can’t take this much longer. I can’t function like a butcher’s scale. Is it enough to spend two hours determining if a film ‘achieves its generic purpose?’ Shouldn’t it do more than that? Perhaps provide some humor, humanity, romance, suspense, beauty, strategy, poetry. Not all of those qualities, but at least several of them. ‘The Raid’ didn’t even supply a single good-looking publicity still.”
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/03/hollywoods_highway_to_hell.html
I did kinda read over Ebert’s blog. I “get” what he’s saying but it’s still easy to hear “Hey, you kids! Get off my yard!” when you read it. If some political candidate wanted to make this Exhibit A for everything that is wrong with Hollywood or the media or the American appetite, you’d be hard pressed to argue against it. It is exceedingly violent. There isn’t much story there. It could be deemed as violent for violence sake. It doesn’t show responsibility, in and of itself. The thing is, if an adult wants to eat ice cream for dinner, why can’t he or she?
I would argue that among the blood and the gore there were tonz of creative uses of the environment and cleverness to the fast paced decisions that the characters were making. Does that make it “right”? Maybe not but does a film have to justify its existence in general?
How many times have we seen over the decades the man in battle’s main desire to return home to the wife and family? And how many times have we rolled our eyes at the derivative schlock? I don’t know if it fully works in The Raid: Redemption but it’s an identifier and maybe not by itself but there is also a vested rooting interest for the man with the pregnant wife at home. For me, it sure as hell worked a lot better than other films where I’m then putting a stopwatch until that character gets blown away, not caring if he makes it or not.
It has arguably more fight & battle scenes than any film that’s gotten a theatrical release but I wouldn’t call it action porn. There were sequences of events to continuously keep the suspense up. Many of the biggest budgeted American films have battle scenes that by their non consequential results of the fight could be labeled as unnecessary. They aren’t too bloody but they’re ubiquitous and are generally the culprits that drag down a film, even more so than forced faux emotion.
It does kinda remind me of the brouhaha over Married w/Children back in the day. Was anything off based with the complaints that it showed the worst of moral decay and degradation to the family unit? No but was the show just laugh out loud funny? Yeah. What’s wrong with that? I was so edified by the uniqueness and rate and intensity of the action of The Raid that any sort of nutritional value wasn’t needed nor missed. I get that too much of today’s cinema (and TV and music and art) lacks redeeming fortification. I’m not saying filmmakers don’t have to exercise responsibility. While I’m not saying The Raid is the greatest film of all time, I do think it’s fine that Lamborghinis are made without bumpers. That goes against what they’re designed for in the first place.
The stills in his blog emphasize the line “āThe Raidā didnāt even supply a single good-looking publicity still.ā” Non-stop action is fine, I suppose, as long as it’s artistically captured, but this looks like nothing more than 2nd unit work with no directorial hand providing the occasional beauty shot. Nothing, in other words, that makes you think “Hey, that looks interesting. This might be kinda cool.”
Sam – I was referring to Walter Hill’s The Driver which I recall Ebert liking. But by using the checklist that you reprinted, The Driver did contain Suspense and Strategy and in its own way Poetry and Romance.
I know I said I wouldn’t pimp my movie on here anymore BUT…it just landed on iTunes so….I lied.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/worst-in-show/id511124366
Michelle Williams Dating Jason Segel says US weekly tabloid . ..now DP has a way in on getting Segel a dp/30 since he got Michelle to do so many of them.
still waiting for Olsen twins to do a dp/30 and give out
acting secrets of full house …. they are still too famous aren’t they. just gotta settle with Liz Olsen until they give her an oscar …
DP got Emma Roberts – can’t get Julia Roberts …she’s been acting forever.
can’t get Tom and Colin Hanks . can’t get the Lohan sisters either . Ali Lohan wouldn’t be anywhere without
Lindsay …
actors in families seem super important when
they really want oscar .
DP has a lot of catching up to do.