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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

BYOB 070314

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17 Responses to “BYOB 070314”

  1. Stella's Boy says:

    Going back to Toronto! Holy sh*t am I psyched. Haven’t been to the festival since 2005. Got my tickets, flight, and hotel yesterday. September 4 can’t get here soon enough. When do they typically start announcing the films?

  2. Gus says:

    Does anyone know any details about Michael Bay’s contract for Transformers? I can only imagine that it is insane, given that he’s stuck around for four films so far. I read online that he made more than $80M on TF3 alone, but I’d love to read something more detailed.

  3. Jack1137 says:

    Gus i’m guessing that Bay got some Upfront and the rest later Probably near most likely bweyond 100 Mill.

  4. film fanatic says:

    Gus: Why do you care? Are you a profit participant or Viacom shareholder? What possible difference could it make?

  5. doug r says:

    Points, baby, Points.

  6. Gus says:

    FF: I like the guy’s movies a lot and think he’s the most adventurous director of visual effects alive. So when he knocks out as many originals in his early career as he did but then makes four of the same property in a row, I get curious as to why. Four is a lot, and in my opinion it seems natural to want to move on after a trilogy.

    I always find it pretty interesting to read contract details as well. I like statistics, be they box office numbers, sports results, economic patterns, what have you. This is a pretty inside-baseball kind of website anyway, so it seemed like a decent place to ask.

  7. Dr Wally Rises says:

    Gus, as gently as possible I don’t think that ‘Michael Bay is the most adventurous director of visual effects alive’ is a statement that can go unchallenged. Cameron? Spielberg? Nolan? Zemeckis? Jackson? They’ve all pushed the envelope of technical achievement in VFX and given us more iconic visual moments than Michael Bay ever has or ever will. Say this for him though – for all it’s faults Pearl Harbor was the first time in VFX history that they got CGI planes to fly and move convincingly (just look at Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One – it looks horribly tacky now in terms of it’s CGI). But purely in terms of being a director of visual effects, I think that’s as innovative as he’s ever got. Certainly not anywhere near the level of those other far superior directors I mentioned.

  8. EtGuild2 says:

    Most inventive alive? Jodorowsky has a case.

  9. Gus says:

    My original post was about his contract, not his merits as a director, but I think that references to Bay’s directing abilities are pretty difficult to divorce from the stories and the overall memorability of the movies. I definitely agree that the guys you named are superior in terms of making movies that stick. Characters that we care about and get excited for, and certainly all that adds up in terms of creating replay value, which I think Bay’s movies completely lack.

    That’s also why I tried to specify how good he is in terms of VFX rather than saying he is simply a good director.

    But in terms of the people you mentioned, Cameron is the only one who I would put in the same league, and even then it’s a tough comparison given that JC has put out two movies in the last 18 years. But it’s clear that no one has demanded more and invented more than JC in film’s history. He has redefined what visual effects are at least four times (T2, Abyss, Titanic, Avatar.)

    But again I think it’s hard to divorce storytelling from the purely imaginative aspects of Bay’s films. He’s never been great with character or story, and continuity is something he explicitly flaunts, so it is very difficult to rationalize his choices. I think as a result he is criticized for doing things in a “stupid” way. But I don’t think his process has much to do with rationalizing the work. The cuts are constantly irrational and inexplicable. The chaos on screen is really unprecedented. As a result I find the work just beyond comprehension and I really like that.

    When AO Scott kind of off-handedly referred to TF4 as a “very long art film” in his review, I think this is what he meant. Bay is clearly not a communicator of any sort of deep emotional or conceptual experience the way a typical artist might strive to be, but his work is at times purely aesthetic in a way that none of the other directors you name go for. The reason I find that so appealing is that I don’t know how anyone can conceive of it. It really has no grounding in story or character at all. It also has very little connection to the real world or the locations they’re supposedly in. I don’t know if I have a better word for it than “flabbergasting.”

    Spielberg and Cameron are, to me, the best action directors but berthing that’s in there can be explained. It’s super clear and subjectively presented. That makes the story clear and allows for an emotional connection. That’s why I think they are clearly superior directors but because their VFX are in service of something else it can feel a little subdued by comparison, IMO.

    This is all a matter of degrees, though. We’re basically comparing the 6-10 most successful/popular directors of all time, or thereabouts.

  10. SamLowry says:

    Who didn’t see this coming?

    Hollywood Is Giving Up on Comedy.

    Foreign bucks are where it’s at, but comedy doesn’t translate well at all, so you do the math.

    Stupid Hollywood.

  11. Pete B. says:

    Hollywood Is Giving Up On Comedy…

    Sounds like the title of a review of TAMMY.

  12. movieman says:

    I kind of figured something was up.
    Nobody even bothers w/ medium-budget romantic comedies anymore.
    There haven’t been a whole lot of good rom-coms this decade (was “Crazy Stupid Love” the last great one?), but at least there used to be X number of them released every year.
    Now it’s pretty much crickets.

  13. SamLowry says:

    When you try to remove the chick flick from romantic comedies to make them more palatable to men (and wind up with movies like LOVE ACTUALLY), what did you expect?

  14. movieman says:

    There are still chick flicks: all of those damn Nicholas Sparks movies for starters.
    But as for good, old-fashioned rom-coms (“My Best Friend’s Wedding” or “You’ve Got Mail”), a genre that used to be the industry’s bread and butter, it’s pretty much been nada.

  15. cadavra says:

    Well, just wait until Biffle and Shooster take the nation by storm next year! (Shooting begins Tuesday.) Not much rom, but a whole lotta com!

  16. SamLowry says:

    Congrats to Dave, I suppose, since TheChive.com “borrowed” a DP/30 clip of JLaw talking about candy.

  17. SamLowry says:

    5 Terrifying Milestones of Adulthood That Sneak Up on You:

    “Dad jokes are to comedy what Michael Bay is to movies: The setup might be fine and innocent, but before long everyone is in pain and cringing, the Earth is on fire, and robot dinosaurs are eating everyone. They’re so objectively, shamelessly horrible, it’s impossible to see why anyone would willingly tell them. Scientists have actually found an inkling of survival instinct in hipsters, as even they are physically unable to enjoy dad jokes ironically.”

    Heh heh.

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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