April 25, 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” — 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
Universal owns January again.
Really impressive for Hart who is essentially carrying “Ride Along” on his own as Ice Cube has never been an opener in his own right.
“Lone Survivor” could hit 120m and is one of the few movies about the 21st century American wars to hit. I think there’s an earnestness to what Berg and Wahlberg are doing that works as both entertainment, and as a tribute to those who enlisted and gave so much when most of America had checked out long ago from these campaigns. Good on them. As someone who is not at all behind what the U.S. is doing over there, I think it’s refreshing to see something come out of Hollywood about the American military that’s not awash in cynicism and 20/20 hindsight.
Not true. “Are We There Yet,” “Barbershop,” “Next Friday” — Ice Cube has opened plenty of movies.
Beam me up, Scotty! I figured Jack Ryan would not do well considering the underwhelming tv ads but doing half of what Sum Of All Fears did a decade ago leaves mud on the face of everyone involved.
Today’s obsession with tech gadgets seems to be a conundrum for producers of spy action movies. They want the tech like in Bond or Bourne so willfully ignore any possible stories set in a pre-smartphone era, which leaves Clancy’s popular novels featuring Jack Ryan in the dust and a reboot done instead. Just like cellphones have put tremendous obstacles to writing horror movies – how can someone be in danger when they can always call 911?
Big bad wolves is one of a kind … elements we’ve seen in everything from Reservoir Dogs to Hostel to Prisoners …. but unlike anything you’ve really seen
Ice Cube is a way bigger star than Kevin Hart, who while an up-and-comer hasn’t had as much of a track record. So yeah, you better check yo self…
Whoa now, I wouldn’t go that far in terms of box office at this point. Cube hasn’t had a respectable opening in 6 years. Hart carried his standup film to $32 million domestic last summer, no easy feat. It’s just a genius pairing.
Tell you this much, I haven’t heard laughter like that in a theater in a very long time. Movie is authentically funny.
Kevin Hart is the biggest black comedian of the moment. His audience doesn’t see him as an up-and-comer. He’s already arrived.
This opening is a culmination of what has been Ice Cube’s strength for the last two decades, playing the straight man. It may have been a while since his last big hit at the box office, but his franchises constantly air on TV, so its not much of a stretch for people to perceive him as a star when he’s in this type of movie.
The problem with the Jack Ryan film, besides everything, is that if you’re not familiar with the character it just looks like every Bourne movie over the last decade, with a little Casino Royale sprinkled in. Pine isn’t enough of a draw to differentiate, and there is nothing in those trailers that looks more than “adequate.”
If you are familiar with Jack Ryan, there’s nothing familiar about it. That character isn’t a spy. This looks like they simply took a somewhat well known character (I can’t imagine in 2014 Jack Ryan is still much of a thing) and decided to make him into a superspy.
If they wanted a superspy type with relevance to today’s global tensions, I’m not sure why they didn’t just go forward with the John Clark character who plays a prominent role in all the books. Navy Seal dude who assassinates terrorists. Done and done.
Well the title alone should be a warning sign, Clancy films always had strong intriguing titles, this was simply generic title: more generic title. They might as well kept calling it Untitled Jack Ryan. If they put that little effort into naming it, how much did they put in the rest of the movie?
I will have to be satisfied with having last years World War Z which was quite a decent Jack Ryan film in its own rite.
and while I don’t know if its a scheduling or PR triumph but someone at Universal is an absolute GENIUS. Look at how Sony and Disney had to go through the spanking machine again at the end of the year over After Earth and Lone Ranger. Not only did Universal change the perception of 47 Ronin (which lost the same if not more than either of them) from infamous to forgotten, but here we are less than a month after they released the biggest financial disaster in their history applauding their box office savvy.
And the lesson to take from this is one they should have learned long ago as the $32 million Bridesmaids offset Cowboys & Aliens, the $50 million Ted greatly outperformed Battleship and now a $25 million Ride Along trounce Ronin. Universal should concentrate on Universal movies and leave the strastopheric budgeted fantasy action films to Warners and Fox.
“I will have to be satisfied with having last years World War Z which was quite a decent Jack Ryan film in its own rite.”
That…is perfect.
Ice Cube is basically an institution in black community. And his recent 21 Jumpstreet appearance certainly helped. As with most of the movies it’s the package that causes them to break out big. Hart is on a hot streak, no doubt about it, but the pairing was sort of old school/new school so it was an attractive sell. If 2013 was unofficially the year of Melissa McCarthy, then it looks like 2014 may be Kevin’s. He has some other hot properties coming up, and maybe the heir apparent to Eddie Murphy if he plays his cards right. If there is ever a Beverly Hills Cop redo, can you think of anyone else at the top of the list? Though I’d like to see Michael B Jordon get a headlining role in a cash cow some day.
The fact that they could sell 47 Ronin internationally is just mind blowing. Talk about a failure on all levels.
Bulldog, you might appreciate this: Back when Ice Cube made his directorial debut with The Player’s Club, I reviewed the film for Variety. I was especially impressed with the performance by supporting player Bernie Mac — but had no idea the guy was more famous as a stand-up comic. In fact, I almost referred to him as a promising “character actor.” Glad I saved myself some embarrassment.
ice cube is pretty classic as the captain in ’21 jump’, somehow his (brilliantly) delivered line, “there’s rumours…in the ‘twittersphere'” has become a meme in our house, something to say when there’s suspicion/or someone is unclear about what’s going on (no actual tweeters in the house). kind of related, the other night ‘trespass’ (walter hill one) was on cable and my boy walked in and proceeded to freak out on the Ices Cube and T being all young and shit (and ‘hudson’ haha), and i realised ’21 jump street’ is how he knows ice cube, so weird.
re: jack ryan and chris pine, i haven’t seen the movie but the other night i came across a promo snippet on tv with Pine being interviewed, and he mentioned how he ran into alec Baldwin and asked for his advice on playing Ryan, and then pine proceeded to do a dead-on, pitch-perfect impression of Baldwin, nailing his voice and mannerisms, and i thought – that’s what he should do, a dead-on impersonation of Baldwin as the original jack ryan, it’s the only thing that could make the new movie interesting (my impression was it’s supposed to be another prequel, that might be wrong)
Joe don’t worry about your black street cred. Still looking for evidence of your eminem karaoke though. Hehe.
Jack Ryan promos looked extremely generic like we were supposed to care it was JR. And the Russian angle is just so cold war. The one smart thing is the budget though, it doesn’t have to be a world beater to come out okay.
FROZEN is 3 million away from becomming not only the biggest non-sequel animated movie of all-time (not counting FINDING NEMO’s re-issue), it’s also about to become Disney’s biggest original movie of all-time. Incredible.
HUNGER GAMES needs $5 million more to top Captain Jack and enter the Top 10 all-time and also become the 2nd biggest non-superhero movie of the last 9 years (AVATAR). I think it’ll eke it out eventually.
It’s just too bad women won’t ever go to movies.
And people over 49.
Or white people to movies with African Americans as the stars.
Not that it takes anything away from ride along but I remember reading that first night or weekend demographic was only about 12% Caucasian. Which has got to be encouraging knowing there is a whole other mass audience to cross over to.
Yeah, Hcat, I saw it in a pretty mixed theater and it played to everyone. Like I said before, giant laughs throughout. It doesn’t surprise me that it is going mainstream.
So when a black guy, say Eddie Murphy stars in Beverly Hills Cop with a mostly white supporting cast, is he in a mainstream movie? Or when he stars in Coming to America, is it a black movie that has crossed over to the mainstream? Just asking.
Great question. I don’t know. What do you think? I would say the “lack” of a white co-lead, in modern Hollywood conventional thinking, equals a so-called urban or niche film, and that affects ad buys and release patterns. I think that thinking and those cultural assumptions are being proven wrong and that’s a great thing.
Of course, Eddie’s films broke the mold. And Bad Boys is another great example.
Eddie Murphy was already a box office draw when Cop was released, just from SNL he was a household name and all us little white kids could recite Delerious verbetim so it was hardly crafted and pitched only for an African-American audience. The stat suprised me because I didn’t think of Ride-along as being niche either simply because it has non-white actors. It seems like a pretty straight across the plate light action comedy, The Hard Way for the millenials.
The success of the Fast & Furious franchise is a great example of a multi ethnic cast with a strong sense of family at it’s core that is really it’s most enduring and lasting quality. And they play to it.
Not saying the lack of diversity caused it’s underwhelming box office, and I haven’t seen the film, but Jack Ryan seems to be a complete whitewash. At least with the others you had James Earl Jones, and Morgan Freeman waiting in the wings. Hell, Freeman was even on the Sum of all Fears poster.
It was the lack of any visible identity that killed the Jack Ryan movie.
Freeman had to be a way for paramount to hedge their bets since Affleck wasn’t a bona fide movie star. Neither was Baldwin at the time but you also have to remember that October was sold on Connery’s star power ( I’m not sure Baldwin even appeared on the poster).
I will check out the new one when it hits video but yes there was nothing that stood out in any marketing that I saw. October and Danger felt like BIG EPIC tales, tight scenes, high stakes, I couldn’t eve decipher what the plot of the new one was from the trailer, it looks like a television pilot.
Poor Paramount here they are already through 20% of their releases for the year and nothing is sticking.
It’s Thursday, and still no Weekend Estimates?
You also have to take into account that “Hunt For Red October” came out when Tom Clancy’s books were at their most popular and not decades after that.
“Freeman had to be a way for paramount to hedge their bets since Affleck wasn’t a bona fide movie star.”
Aren’t we talking about “The Sum of All Fears”? Because that came out after a bunch of high profile movies including Pearl Harbor, Armageddon and Good Will Hunting (not to mention his high tabloid profile). Maybe he wasn’t box office gold, but Affleck was definitely a star by the time his Jack Ryan movie came out.
Don’t cry too hard for Paramount, at least if the budgets vs worldwide grosses for JACK RYAN and PARANORMAL LATINO are to be believed.
On the other hand, Fox has this record in the last 6 months: PERCY JACKSON, RUNNER RUNNER, THE COUNSELOR, THE BOOK THIEF, WALKING WITH DINOSAURS, WALTER MITTY, DEVIL’S DUE. Every one a likely money loser aside from possibly THE BOOK THIEF.
On the other other hand, they have a stronger upcoming slate no doubt.
i say this as a massive fan of ‘THFRO’, but the thing that made the Alec Baldwin interpretation of Jack Ryan so interesting and unique and weirdly endearing was his unabashed nerdy bookworm-ness with this enthusiastic fish-out-of-water intellectual quality underpinned by just a hint of steel forged from being a (badly-injured) former marine in his youth – an idiosyncratic character and played with such verve and earnestness by Baldwin, none of the subsequent Ryans have came close. i don’t know that the character/story of Jack Ryan has any further mileage in him – blood out of a stone and beating a dead horse come to mind – but unsurprisingly the further the character has evolved – or better yet devolved – away from Baldwin’s distinctive, a-typical Ryan, the more insipid the movies have become. ford got away with his version of Ryan powered by his stoic, quiet everyman charisma, but he was too old and stodgy for the role, really; if Jack Ryan is to have some sort of resurgence in the modern post-Bourne era i think they’ll have to get back to something far more out-of-the-box and unique, like Baldwin’s sublime nerdy Ryan.
(one of my favourite Baldwin JR moments is the terrific soliloquy he delivers in his quarters on the aircraft carrier, thinking out loud as he tries to figure out what Ramius’s plan is – “Russians don’t take a dump without a plan”; i mean who does that anymore, tackles film exposition with a main character soliloquy, that’s a hard sell and Baldwin pulls it off rather brilliantly… just one of the unique even daring touches that sets Red October and balwin’s Jack Ryan apart)
http://moviecitynews.com/2014/01/the-weekend-report-76/
Totally agree Leahnz. And while I like Chris Pine as an actor, I don’t think he could pull of that nerdy bookworm look well. Maybe his Star Trek costar Zachary Quinto might have been an interesting choice. He’s not box office but it would’ve been interesting.
That was intended as more of a slam to their lassiez-faire attitude toward making movies than to the actual success or quality of them. I can see how Disney can justify 10 films a year since many of them are a quarter of a billion dollar investment each, but if your studio is pumping out micro budget horror, Katy perry concert films, jackass entries, and sixty million dollar thrillers, I would think you would be able to produce at least a dozen of them annually. Part of the frustration is I’ve really enjoyed Jack Reacher, Flight, WWZ and Young Adult. Now that they have the recipes down let’s work on the size of the portions.
Totally agree with Leah’s assessment of Baldwin, but would say that Ford did pull back on his matinee image while playing Ryan. In the remarkable ambush scene he does look terrified and out of his depth while trying to rescue the other passengers. Having not seen the new one do they still treat Ryan like that? As someone who would prefer a desk or do they simply make him a spy in training?
Hallick, sure he was known for high profile roles, but none of those projects lived or died on his star power (and neither did sum or daredevil). I think the litmus test would be if you went to see patriot games or clear and present you would tell people you were going to the see the new Harrison ford movie, but with Sum you were going to the new jack Ryan movie.
“Maybe his Star Trek costar Zachary Quinto might have been an interesting choice. He’s not box office but it would’ve been interesting.”
bulldog that’s an intriguing pick — i know i do like the same 3 rants here, but since it’s never stopped me before: one of my pet peeves is what seems like a particularly insidious trend in recent years wherein the powers that be play it so safe when casting lead roles that we end up with the same 5 actors in everything, in rotation doing musical chairs from role to role, rather uninspired and homogenous and imo detrimental to cinema, a medium that thrives on the injection of fresh talent and energy; but that relies on inspiration, instinct and taking risks, qualities which are of somewhat antithetical to mainstream film-making at the moment. i like chris pine fine, but really, they couldn’t take a chance on some fresh, up & coming talent to take the role of Ryan and make it his own rather than giving captain kirk another franchise? sometimes i’d just like to conk skulls together.
(hcat, i think ford does have a few nice Jack Ryan moments so i don’t want to pooh-pooh him out of hand, and the ‘family man’ aspect of his version of Ryan feels natural and easy to me, a strength of his different interpretation of the role)
“Hallick, sure he was known for high profile roles, but none of those projects lived or died on his star power (and neither did sum or daredevil). I think the litmus test would be if you went to see patriot games or clear and present you would tell people you were going to the see the new Harrison ford movie, but with Sum you were going to the new jack Ryan movie.”
But you’d say that with Sum because Affleck was the third actor to portray Jack Ryan, just like somebody’d say they’re going to go see the new Bond movie, y’know? And when Ford made Crystal Skull, it was always “the new Indiana Jones movie”.
As far as star power goes, so few people have the power to open on their name alone that I think it’s unfair to ding other stars like Affleck for being more like the majority of working leads who have hits based on other factors. He was a bona fide movie star at the time, just not a box office rainmaker.
As I recall, there was another reason why Baldwin didn’t continue with the Jack Ryan role: The follow-up movie was supposed to conflict with the Broadway run of the Streetcar Named Desire revival in which Baldwin played Stanley. Can’t day how true that was, but I do know this: Baldwin was excellent in that production. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Here’s a quote from Frank Rich’s original NYT review:
The exciting news from the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where Gregory Mosher’s new Broadway staging of “Streetcar” arrived last night, is that Alec Baldwin has won. His Stanley is the first I’ve seen that doesn’t leave one longing for Mr. Brando, even as his performance inevitably overlaps his predecessor’s. Mr. Baldwin is simply fresh, dynamic and true to his part as written and lets the echoes fall where they may. While his Stanley does not in the end ignite this play’s explosive power, that limitation seems imposed not by his talent but by the production surrounding him and, especially, by his unequal partner in unhinged desire, Jessica Lange’s Blanche DuBois.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Baldwin imbues Stanley with an animalistic sexual energy that sends waves through the house every time he appears onstage. The audience responds with edgy delight from when he first removes his shirt and unself-consciously uses it to wipe the New Orleans sweat from his armpits and torso. Yet the actor’s more important achievement is to bring a full palette to a man who is less than a hero but more than a brute. Cruel as Mr. Baldwin’s Stanley is, and must be, he comes across as an ingenuous, almost-innocent working stiff until Blanche provokes him to move in for the kill. His Stanley is funny in a post-adolescent, bowling buddy way as late as the rape scene, when he fondly emulates a cousin who was a “human bottle-opener.” Even the famous interlude in which he screams for his wife, Stella (Amy Madigan), becomes pitiful as well as harrowing when Mr. Baldwin, a fallen, baffled beast, deposits himself in a sobbing heap at the bottom of a tenement’s towering stairs.
Hallick, I see what you are saying and yes I was diminishing Affleck who had certainly arrived by that time.
But, even outside of Bond, do people ever say they are going to go see the new Pierce Brosnon or Daniel Craig movie? Part of the reason you say Bond is because without Bond they wouldnt be Stars.
And after I had posted that they were hedging their bets with Freeman I came across the poster for Sum in the Netflix queue and Darn it if Morgan’s face is not the more promenent of the two. So not to take anything away from Affleck but adding Freeman casts a wider net at the audience.
joe, i think you’re right (i thought that was pretty much ‘the’ reason baldwin didn’t do more Ryan – for some reason i’m remembering a person here sharing some pithy personal anecdote (was it cadavra?) about the street car thing that seemed to bear out the story, and alec Baldwin’s said as much himself on occasion re regrets about turning it down