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” â 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 â 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 â he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” â and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging â I was with her at that moment â 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 namedâ” “Yeah, sure â 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 Iâm on the phone with you now, after all thatâs 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 didnât seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. Thereâs not a case of that. He wasnât using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had â if that were what the accusation involved â 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. Iâm not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, âYou know, itâs not this, itâs thatâ? Because â let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, thatâs what it lacked. Thatâs 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
And not spell-checking either, apparently.
The liberal media are all too eager to conduct a McCarthyite witch hunt against the NFL. Maybe it’s because the liberal media don’t dare report about Hollywood’s Horrible Summer.
^
Corporations by their very nature aren’t liberal, conservative, or anything else in between, they’re whatever ensures the highest return possible for their investors. So as long as you keep buying their toothpaste, they’ll keep reassuring your biases.
I wouldn’t call pointing out Goodell’s hypocrisy a ‘witch hunt’. If the commissioner wants to tell Sean Payton that ‘ignorance is not an excuse’ for any misdeeds or missteps, then he should be held to the same standards. He has obviously held players to high standards over the years.
That press conference yesterday was a joke, and days too late. He basically said “We hope to have something done about this by the Super Bowl”, meaning, “We hope you all forget about this so we can announce very small changes months from now, and business continues as usual.”
And last time I checked, ESPN wasn’t exactly the ‘liberal media’-they pretty much tow the NFL line most of the time, and stay out of politics in general.
There is a double standard when it comes to more “liberal leaning” corporations. The media never demanded Clive Davis’s resignation for not penalizing Chris Brown in the wake of his scandal.
That’s a fair point Pat-except the recording industry has never been in the habit of punishing its recording artists for misbehavior-see Clive Davis + Whitney Houston for one example, and I’m sure there are 10s if not 100s of others for him alone as a boss. We would be in the 10000s if we counted everyone involved in music.
All the sports leagues have ‘moral clauses’-I don’t know that Hollywood or the recording industry has ever tried it, because what would be the point? Actors, actresses, and artists of all kinds have drug habits, morally abhorrent behavior, etc., and nobody governs it-see Roman Polanski, etc. The Hollywood solution for both music and movies seems to always be “Send them off to Rehab quick”, and move on. And maybe they can’t find work again, which you could argue is a form of suspension or banishment.
But obviously sports, where there is no incentive to take any kind of performance enhancing substances, whatever they may be, is above that Hollywood level, and decides to police its players immediately (ha).
Selectively that is. And I hope Chucky was being facetious, because otherwise he is in WTF territory to blame this on liberal media. Let’s not go there.
Let’s just take two examples, and be done, because this has nothing to do with liberal media.
Kobe Bryant had a knee surgery in Germany last summer that is banned by the NBA in the US, but because he had it in Germany, it’s fine (hypocrisy one). The NBA union mandates ‘4 drug tests per year randomly’. After those 4 tests, they cannot give you another test, per union rules.
So, is it a coincidence that all 4 of those tests for most players take place before Thanksgiving, and they’re never tested the rest of the year? (hypocrisy 2)
Do me a favor Chucky, and watch the difference in NBA play from before Thanksgiving and after. People argue that the players start caring-they also start getting bigger and faster by the All Star Break, which, coincidentally, is when teams can decide to trade. And by the Finals, people can play straight games and Series with no problems. No Cortisone involved there.
So the conclusion is obviously to blame the liberal media.
The liberal media? Goodell is the most ineffectual sports commissioner since….Gary Bettman?
Goodell is either the most massively incompetent figure leading a for-profit organization in the United States, or is so beholden to the owners that he’s a stooge. The Ray Rice video scandal…we can’t see the video…we tried to see the video…the Ravens saw the video but not us…is so transparently corrupt it’s absurd.
The casino went out of business this weekend. Chucky, you could have obtained the video if you wanted, because the employees are all out of a job and no one cared anymore.
And the Peterson issue…zero guidance from a League dealing with a massive abuse scandal? Let’s punish AP a little…oops, too much of an outrage, I guess we should punish him harder. What a farce. Are the Vikings now part of the “liberal media” for pointing the finger at Goodell?
@pat, you’re absolutely right. Clive Davis should have been asked to resign during the Chris Brown incident. The fact he’d retired a year prior, and held an entirely ceremonial position at the time is no excuse.
In the world most of us inhabit, there were serious incidents that took place all the time involving domestic violence prior to Ray Rice. Shocking, I know. I’m not sure how long you’ve been a member of the human race, pat, but sometimes it takes a “unifying/galvanizing event” to draw attention to an issue that deserved it years ago. Case in point: Donald Sterling expressed despicably racist views for decades. The media largely ignored him aside from certain writers with prominently “liberal” views. This took place in the only sports league, of the Big Four, (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL) that’s widely cited as having a leftward bent (follow the campaign contributions). Conspiracy!
Nope, that’s just how corporate culture works in general.
Most US news media have devolved into blood-and-guts news, mouth-breather sports and right-wing screechers. Did the US news media go on a feeding frenzy when Edward Snowden exposed the sinister dealings of the NSA? Did the US news media go on a feeding frenzy when the Ferguson Police Department used military equipment against civilian protesters on American soil?
Conservatives correctly see what’s happening with the NFL as a matter involving a private business. It’s the liberals and their friends in the US government who want to punish the NFL. Many of these liberals scream about domestic violence — while writing for news sites that use nearly-naked women as clickbait. If that’s not being a hypocrite, what is?
ET-in fairness, I would blame the Vikings as much as Goodell here. They only reversed course with the ‘exempt list’ punishment once the Radisson pulled out as a sponsor (their biggest sponsor). They were probably trying to slip this past everyone while they were consumed with the Rice issue. And Peterson never initially apologized, which is also crazy-he just said “I hit my kids in the same way that my parents hit me-if that’s wrong, I guess I’ll stop”.
The troublesome thing with the video of the Rice incident, and the Peterson incident in general, is the lack of remorse, or insight into why they’re wrong for what they did. You read the OTL piece on ESPN.com, and you get the sense that maybe Rice realized what he did after the fact, but almost wasn’t allowed to come out and apologize for it, because the NFL didn’t want the whole incident to come out.
And I also agree with you entirely about the media aspect-except the NBA having a liberal bent. Maybe under Silver (that’s TBD), but under Stern, no way-all for the owner, all the time. Let’s not forget the Iverson/dress code incidents.
One, I don’t think a newspaper/internet writer controls the content that is on his/her website, no matter what their political leanings. I’m sure you can find some nasty click bait on some right wing websites. Or maybe it’s just selling the sex appeal of Ann Coulter (which has yet to be discovered on this end).
Two, what is your definition of ‘feeding frenzy’? I think both issues that you cite were examined with a lot of scrutiny by all sorts of news media, all the time for awhile. And depending on your political leanings, they may have drawn different conclusions.
But I think you could agree that there are distinct differences between the moral values of ‘stealing secrets from a government and putting them in the public domain’ and ‘punching a woman in the face and dragging her body into the lobby’. On one issue, you could legitimately have disagreements-on the other, ???? If you can’t see that, I guess I don’t know what to say to you.
In your opinion, was Sterling the victim of the ‘liberal media’? I’ll admit, I had huge issues as far as civil liberties go about the NBA taking away his team without due process. But the dude was undeniably a racist. Or was that a product of bias?
Chucky–as usual, you make some good points but are so blinded by ideology that it distracts from what you’re saying. There’s no doubt, in anyone’s mind, that Goodell and the NFL massively bungled their handling of the Rice situation, and that there were four subsequent domestic violence related issues in the following two weeks, two of which were also bungled by the same organization (Dwyer and Peterson). Are the media complicit? Certainly. But there’s a reason why the MLB and NBA largely avoid such scandals, and it’s because they have effective people in charge, not because the “liberal media” has a stake in highlighting the failings of the NFL while glorifying hockey and basketball. This is a corporate risk management failure on a massive scale, pure and simple, and as with any such situation, it’s turned into a media feeding frenzy.
@Ryan, definitely agree the Vikings are primarily to blame. After all, they have the worst owner in pro sports (Glen Taylor) now that Sterling is gone. What I was saying is the AP situation is illustrative of how the NFL has kneecapped the influence of the League and Goodell in particular on personnel issues. Think this would stand for a minute in David Stern’s NBA or Bud Selig’s MLB? Hah!
Agree on the remorse issue. On Stern? The dress code incident was him trying to appease conservative fans based on the results of focus group testing by an admittedly conservative consultant. Aside from that…he pretty much allowed hip-hop culture to flourish. Tattoos, musical artists, language…the NBA’s arguably greatest TV relationship in the Stern era was with Turner Sports, home of the most outspoken and un-PC black analyst in modern TV history. Instead of asking Turner to “tune it down” they openly sponsored a short-lived “Current News” TV show called “Listen Up!” which makes Rachel Maddow look tame. I can’t begin to fathom this happening today, or in fact how it did happen without an FTC violation. (The primary analyst team on ABC/ESPN features liberal activist Jalen Rose and Bill Simmons, who tries mightily to mask his political leanings).
The dress code issue wasn’t just minimal–it provided a gateway for starts like Dwyane Wade to create their own hip-hop influenced high fashion labels. Re: Iverson…I agree with you there. On the flip side, he was extremely lenient with Latrell Sprewell, the conservative symbol of player evil in sports at the time.
For a 1990s era sports commish, Stern was the most progressive by a country mile given the internal dynamics he was dealing with.
Et-agreed with your points about Stern, although I’ll never believe it was him personally who finally thought “Look at who your audience is before you reject hip/hop, tattoos, random dress code violations, etc.”
Stern seems like he co-opted someone else’s idea of where the NBA was going, took it on as his own, and relished in the success when it flourished. I also doubt that that person was Silver, although he seems like he would have had a better idea about the future, like he does with the overseas markets now.
Glen Taylor, Jeff Loria or James Dolan for worst owner?I’ll give Tom Ricketts a few years before I make a call on him? TOSS UP!!!
But there is no doubt in my mind that none of this abuse would have been tolerated under Stern-look at the Malice at the Palace for guidance-86 games for Artest, 30 for Jackson, 15 for O’Neal (originally 25), and on and on for the Pistons players. He was not messing around. You could argue that it’s a different scenario, because those players directly affected fan safety, but assault is assault. Those players mainly beat up each other in the end. And Stern handed down those suspensions the NEXT DAY!
Oh yeah, and Artest et al. weren’t trying to punch women in the stands.
Good points. And as a Knicks fan…yeah that title is definitely a tough call, haha.
Great thread…for a sports site. đ
We could talk about spelling all day I guess…
I forgot…. Condi Rice for Commissioner!