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By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, February 12th, 2015 - 2 Comments »
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David Carr Exits

David Carr’s magic was that he was the most human person you could imagine. He was far from perfect. But his flaws were gloriously sharp, like the scars that showed, the ones you could hear, and the ones that were not so carefully hidden.

He cheated death, and not only came back to life, but earned the life he absolutely wanted. No one ever loved their kids more, respected wives for being able to put up with we men more, and his love affair with The Times… well… he bled gray.

Loyal to a fault… perhaps beyond. Once he believed something, he believed it. It was personal. Professional faults could be overlooked if he believed in you. And professional success would mean little if he had decided that you were of bad character.

He, like all of us, would get played now and again. But I always felt that his susceptibility was caused, in part, because of his modesty and that he felt—at least when I knew him pretty well—that though he wore the biggest sheriff’s badge going, he was not the sheriff, but Deputy Dawg.

I don’t know if he ever did end up feeling like The Sheriff. I hope he did. He certainly deserved to feel that way. But one rarely, if ever, caught him patting himself on the back.

He was a guy that you just wanted to sit with, as he mulled things over, ideas forming, asking questions when he already knew his answer, throwing out unexpected intimacies as though he was talking sports scores (which we never talked), finding something you hadn’t noticed but that he was chewing up.

He made himself an icon by not doing anything intended to make himself an icon. Just a guy with a job to do… with kids he loved… with a wife he wanted to please… Our Andy Griffith, but with the nasty edge you just knew Andy had to have when the cameras went off… with a deep love of music… of dark, dank rooms where something real could happen… with that crooked neck and that croak and that smile that always seemed to come with a twinkle. A skinny Santa with a bag full of surprises and fun and comfort.

I loved David Carr. I pissed him off on a few occasions and for that I cannot apologize, except for the time I was being a smart ass and had my facts dead wrong, making a meme out of a coincidence. For that I was (and am) sorry. And with that minor infraction, I did feel like I lost my friend and went back to acquaintance. I think he saw this as disloyalty on my part. But there was no conversation. Just a quick written slap and a “noted.” My loss, no question.

But I loved him. And I love him. He was, above all, a mensch. A flawed, sometimes fragile, never boring, unexpected, open, loving, silly, broken, beautiful mensch.

Couldn’t you have fucking waited for double -30- at least?

Sad, sad day.

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2 Comments »

2 Responses to “David Carr Exits”

  1. Stella's Boy says:
    February 13, 2015 at 5:37 am

    Sad day indeed. Sad week really. RIP Carr and Bob Simon. Both will be sorely missed. The passing of those extremely talented gentlemen and the announcement of Jon Stewart’s pending retirement, what a week. A sad, bad week.

  2. Dberg says:
    February 14, 2015 at 8:46 am

    I met him once on a plane to SXSW. Great guy and some great stories….

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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