Note Pad Archive for September, 2005

The 2005/6 Awards Season’s First Studio DVD Delivery

And the “Premie” goes to… New Line’s release Mike Binder’s The Upside Of Anger. Looking for nods for Best Actress (Joan Allen, Best Supporting Actor (Kevin Costner) and Best Original screenlay (Mike Binder). Congratulations.

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Good Golly

They’re not showing the new film, but the building of a campaign begins here after NYFF…. “The Museum of Television & Radio Presents Good Night, and Good Luck: Murrow from McCarthy to Monroe September 21 to October 23 in Los Angeles October 7 to November 6 in New York New York, NY and Los Angeles,…

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A Look At The Doc Race

The documentary portion of the Academy (AMPAS) is evolving. If you look back at the last decade, you’ll see that up until a rule change for the 2002 awards season, being the rare popular documentary was a clear disadvantage in making it into the final five. In the last three Oscar seasons that has turned…

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Great Tip From A Reader (RP)

The Sony promos from Nip/Tuck’s premiere – which include a new Dick & Jane trailer and first looks at campaigns for Freedomland and All The King’s Men can be found here. Click on Kelly Carlson and a Java theater comes up with all the pieces.

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A Look At The Doc Race

The documentary portion of the Academy (AMPAS) is evolving. If you look back at the last decade, you’ll see that up until a rule change for the 2002 awards season, being the rare popular documentary was a clear disadvantage in making it into the final five. In the last three Oscar seasons that has turned…

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23 Weeks to Oscar

Here it is. So what do you think?

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Just As A Point Of Reference…

The only Gold Lion award winner at Venice ever to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (as least in the last 50 years that I checked) was Atlantic City, which won the award 25 years ago.

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The Fat Man Sings Again…

Just when you thought he might actually be in trouble, Harvey Weinstein has the ammunition to be a player in the Oscar race yet again. Forget about Proof or The Libertine or any of the other maudlin mess of stuff that has been unceremoniously dumped this month. The goose that has gold in its colon…

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17 Scientific Achievements in Competition for 78th Academy Awards®

Beverly Hills, CA — The Scientific and Technical Awards Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that seventeen scientific and technical achievements have been selected for 78th Academy Awards consideration. “This list of achievements is announced to allow individuals and companies with similar technology or claims of prior art the…

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Note Pad

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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