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
Peter Webber remembers exactly where he was when he first saw Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï. He was 17, had bunked off games, and had headed straight for his favourite hang-out, the Electric cinema in Notting Hill. then a squalid fleapit, rather than the chi-chi picture house it is today. “I had managed to sign on for football and rugby, both of which I hated,” he says. “The school playing fields were a bus ride away, so I’d just catch a different bus and spend the afternoon at the Electric. The rugby people thought I was playing football, and vice versa. I did get caught…. But by then I’d seen a lot of strange European films from the 1960s and ’70s.” The movie that made the greatest impact, “like pop music,” on the young brain of the director of The Girl with the Pearl Earring and Hannibal Rising was Jean-Pierre Melville‘s 1967 hitman thriller, Le Samouraï. “I’d heard a bit about Melville because, being a very pretentious teenager, I had got into the French New Wave filmmakers and had read that Melville was one of their forebears, as well as being a link between New Wave French cinema and American film noir. And what I loved about Le Samouraï was how abstract it was. Hardly anything happens. It is very still, very pure.” [Webber describes the film at the link; it’s available on Criterion DVD.]
