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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, April 28th, 2006 - 2 Comments »
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Post Gossips Spend Fun, Fact-Filled Day at the Movies


The Post’s gossip apparatus is all about New York cinema today, with Liz Smith leading the way with hottttt casting updates from the streets. Evidently Samantha Morton is out as Pride and Glory‘s Abby Tierney; the Colin Farrell-Nick Nolte cop vehicle will instead welcome “the beautiful daughter of stage legend Rosemary Harris – Jennifer Ehle. You may remember her from 1999’s Sunshine.” Or… not. Smith also reports that Robert Duvall will replace Christopher Walken in We Own the Night, which may have been true, like, four months ago–before Duvall, Joaquin Phoenix and Eva Mendes were locked into James Gray’s police-vs-Russian mob drama. Maybe if Smith went out more she would have a better read on these things.
You know, like her colleague Cindy Adams, whose first-rate reporting and masterful incomplete sentences reveal the “news” that film production in the city is soaring:

Hugh Grant sings and dances in Music and Lyrics By, the thing he’s making with Drew Barrymore and the guy who played Ray Romano’s brother in the series. … So, with more trailers around than there are Starbucks, any locals complaining? You bet your MetroCard. Those who are inconvenienced. Can’t reach certain streets, can’t use favorite parking spots. But, they’re told, the city in general benefits. People use their delis, workers get employed. Etc., etc., and yadda yadda. And then there’s those who are sniffing about Mission: Impossible III anchoring this downtowny New Yorky film festival when not one foot, not one frame, was shot uptown, crosstown or anywhere in this town.

There, there, Cindy, no need to get sniffy. After all, she did have the privilege of attending Vanity Fair’s annual Tribeca Film Festival party, from which Page Six scored what were probably the only real scoops of the night:

Pretty blond former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson was the star attraction at Wednesday night’s Vanity Fair party for the Tribeca Film Festival in the State Supreme Court Building on Centre Street. Just a few hours earlier, Karl Rove (who is derisively referred to as President Bush’s brain) testified in Washington before a grand jury investigating how she was “outed” as a CIA agent in 2003. … Also there was Mickey Rourke, who’s looking forward to making a movie that will be directed jointly by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. One will helm the first half, the other the second half.

Stop the presses! Mickey Rourke? A Tarantino-Rodriguez collaboration? Do tell!
Oh, wait.

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2 Comments »

2 Responses to “Post Gossips Spend Fun, Fact-Filled Day at the Movies”

  1. Jennite says:
    April 29, 2006 at 8:25 am

    Actually the Jennifer Ehle thing is true.

  2. STV says:
    April 29, 2006 at 9:01 am

    I was referring to the likelihood of NY Post readers remembering or even hearing about Sunshine; great film, but I doubt the audiences intersect.

Quote Unquotesee all »

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