By MCN Editor editor@moviecitynews.com

O’Hehir on Edelstein

“Okay, let’s hit pause here. We kind of have to. Why in the world is one ill-advised online joke about a movie made in 1972 endangering the career of one of the last big-name film critics? First of all: I know David Edelstein and we’ve always had a cordial relationship, although we’re not close friends. We’ve been in innumerable screening rooms together, and participated in the secretive (but highly non-thrilling) awards vote at the NYFCC. I’m not going to serve as a character witness, nor deliver some kind of “Brutus is an honorable man” speech. But I’ll say this: I believe David meant his unfunny butter joke to be puckish and harmless, and sincerely did not understand why many people would find it offensive. Furthermore, he clearly believed his personal Facebook page was a semi-private space. He was clearly wrong about that.I’m afraid I come down here on the highly conventional opinion that social media makes everything worse Edelstein posted a tiny but noxious brain-fart he never should have allowed to escape from his skull, then someone among his Facebook friends grabbed his post and flung it to the wolves, and NPR — fearing a “Me Too”-flavored uprising — had an exaggerated reaction. As a special added grace note, Edelstein’s social media defenders, who are mostly but not entirely internet film dudes in the 50-and-up set, have made things significantly worse with a lot of outraged breast-beating about Stalinist thuggery and the feminist thought police.”

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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