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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Harry Dean, Off To The Dan Tana’s In The Sunset Sky

Lucky Harry Dean Stanton

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7 Responses to “Harry Dean, Off To The Dan Tana’s In The Sunset Sky”

  1. jspartisan says:

    There’s no other actor, ever, who could do what HDS did. He’s fucking irreplaceable, but it’s very cool that he went from 1954 to 2017. That’s some solid fucking awesome.

  2. Ray Pride says:

    Lucky opens later this month. It’s as Harry Dean as it gets.

  3. PTA Fluffer says:

    Now his perf in Lucky seems destined for a posthumous Oscar nom.

  4. Ray Pride says:

    Considering the first word he speaks in the movie…

  5. LBB says:

    There were none like him and there will never be. Improved everything he was in just by showing up and demonstrated the best of his skills in every moment. We were lucky to live in his times.

  6. Sideshow Bill says:

    I’m gutted. I thought he would just live forever. Like LBB says above he automatically improved everything he was in. He has I think 3 scenes in Carpenter’s Christine but they elevate the whole thing. He was so good, so unique. There was always so much going on behind his eyes. This really hurts. RIP HDS.

  7. LBB says:

    I’d honestly forgotten he was in CHRISTINE, Sideshow Bill. I imagine I’ve forgotten more films he was in than I remember, which will make the coming months (years?) a fresh sadness as we remember something or come across him in something we watch again in a long time. I’ve known his name and face since ALIEN (which I wasn’t allowed to see, so I pored over film books in the library and absorbed it as much as possible), and his appearances so often were less “hey, it’s Harry Dean Stanton!” and more “okay, at least this movie has Harry Dean Stanton.” He was a reassuring presence, someone who made you feel so comfortable and pleased in those moments. Losing him is like the planet losing a basic element. We’ll go on but certain critical combinations will be impossible.

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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