By Leonard Klady Klady@moviecitynews.com

Confessions Of A Film Fest Junkie

Posted Sunday, November 13th, 2016 - Comments Off on Confessions Of A Film Fest Junkie
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Over the past fifty years, it’s been tough to program a film festival in Los Angeles. It took Gary Essert years to secure financing and convince the Hollywood establishment that the long-gone FilmEx was benign, not a radical assault to crumble studio walls. That was back in 1971, and his pioneering festival was first significant showcase of international cinema in the City of Angels.

Sponsorship and industry trepidation are now things of the past. The good news today is that AFIFest 2016 has a range of strong films, including documentaries, shorts, foreign-language gems, new American cinema, and highlights from prior festivals, including Ken Loach’s Cannes winner I, Daniel Blake, a devastating examination of the British healthcare system realized in human terms. Other standouts include Germany’s absurdist comedy Toni Erdmann that makes us laugh and wince at global corporate culture and Jackie, the aftermath of the JFK assassination through the eyes of his widow (Natalie Portman) that feels fresh. There are ample nods to Hollywood from Disney’s Moana, to Oscar-touted musical romance La La Land, to the sober-sided Patriot’s Day depicting the 2013 Boston Marathon attack.

But here’s the difficult part. The twentieth-century film festival is past. There are unquestionably events that hold to the norms of the format. What we refer to as a film festival now incorporates other kinds of moving images, embracing television, advertising and social media content. What was once a relatively homogenous and age-indifferent festival audience has vanished. The new generation has different aesthetic sensibilities even only by virtue of the size of the images they consume. Any festival programmer has to be mindful of diversity in their potential audience. It’s the reality of adapt or become extinct.

I don’t have a solution. It certainly isn’t to dumb down the selection of films. The most lasting work in the Seventh Art remains the things that prompt impassionate debate rather than movies that achieve consensus. Aside from the best movies’ ability to engage, enlighten and entertain, the challenge of art is to reflect its times, which are ever-changing.

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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