MCN Columnists
Gary Dretzka

Columns By Gary DretzkaDretzka@moviecitynews.com

Digital Nation: Bran Nue Dae

By Gary Dretzka - Thursday, September 9th, 2010

It’s taken nearly 20 years for Bran Nue Dae to make the leap from the stage to the movies. The semi-autobiographical musical was written by Broome native Jimmy Chi and his band Kuckles, based on their own experiences. Chi’s broad Aboriginal/Asian ancestry reflects the ethnic diversity of the pearling and tourism town, which is on the far northwestern corner of Australia.

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TIFF Dispatch Day One: Ups and Downs

By Kim Voynar - Thursday, September 9th, 2010

I’m starting to feel settled and in the groove now that I’m getting acclimated to being back in Toronto. It was just about a year ago that I attended my first day of the fest going full force and then wound up being taken by ambulance to the hospital on Day Two, where I spent…

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TIFF Review: Behind Blue Skies

By Kim Voynar - Thursday, September 9th, 2010

Swedish film Behind Blue Skies very strongly reminded me of Holy Rollers, Kevin Asch‘s Jesse Eisenberg-starrer about a young, fresh-faced Hasidic Jew whose greed lures him into a scheme to transport ecstasy from Amsterdam into the US using other young Hasidics as mules. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, as I actually…

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Wilmington on Movies: I’m Still Here, Soul Kitchen and Bran Nue Dae

By Mike Wilmington - Thursday, September 9th, 2010

Okay. Here’s my opinion. I think they had us on. Obviously. Totally. To me (and to lots of others) this looks like a Borat-style mix of a fake central character (Phoenix travestying himself) and a fake premise with some (maybe quite a few) real reactions from the real world around him. (How many, who can tell?)

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DVD Wrap: The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, That Evening Sun, Why Did I Get Married, Too?, The Exploding Girl, Solitary Man … and more

By Gary Dretzka - Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond: Blu-ray That Evening Sun Movies put into limited release in the dead zone between December 26 and New Year’s Eve share certain traits. They tend to feature stars whose work has previously been recognized by the folks at AMPAS, but whose commercial prospects don’t warrant an expensive marketing campaign….

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Interview: The Savory Sound of Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen

By Ray Pride - Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Music is both architecture and pulse in Fatih Akin’s tasty, generous farcical food-com, “Soul Kitchen.” Music’s there from the start of writing the script, he tells me, as well as confessing a nasty addiction to something called “vinyl.”

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Wilmington on DVDs: Solitary Man, Crumb, THX-1138, Macgruber and Caravaggio

By Mike Wilmington - Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW Solitary Man (Three Stars) U.S.;  Brian Koppleman & David Levien, 2010 The thing that fascinates people about a serial seducer like Ben Kalmen (magnificently played by Michael Douglas in A Solitary Man) is his speed of conquest. What could take the average man, even in our liberated society, several months…

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Frenzy on the Wall: Who’s the Biggest Star in the World (Right Now)?

By Noah Forrest - Monday, September 6th, 2010

William Goldman is one of the greatest screenwriters of all-time, but he was also a fantastic essayist and one of the most insightful minds when it came to writing about films. His collection of essays, The Big Picture, has been read so many times by me that the pages are starting to break free from…

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26 Weeks To Oscar: The Year Of… Patience

By David Poland - Monday, September 6th, 2010

The awards season has gotten off to a rousing “uh, okay.”

Yeah, the festival season is upon us and there is a lot of drool dripping over some of these films – including my own happy salivations – but festival excitement is not, in and of itself, an answer.

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MW on Movies: The American, Machete, Going the Distance, Mesrine: Killer Instinct, Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 and Lebanon

By Mike Wilmington - Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

The American (Three Stars) U.S.; Anton Corbijn, 2010 I like George Clooney. No off-color psychological speculations, please. What I like about him is the easy-going “good guy” way he plays the Hollywood game. I like his politics, his philanthropy, his unpretentious smarts, his good-natured jock style, his taste in movie scripts, his daring as a…

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The Gronvall Files:Going the Distance from Fact to Fiction with Director Nanette Burstein

By Andrea Gronvall - Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Change is good, although it’s not always easy to reinvent oneself. But New York filmmaker Nanette Burstein, a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominee for On the Ropes (which she co-directed with Brett Morgen), doesn’t miss a step in her transition from nonfiction film to narrative features.

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Most Recent Comments Archives

Gary Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Ophelia, Ambition, Werewolf in Girls' Dorm, Byleth, Humble Pie, Good Omens, Yellowstone …More

rohit aggarwal on: The DVD Wrapup: Ophelia, Ambition, Werewolf in Girls' Dorm, Byleth, Humble Pie, Good Omens, Yellowstone …More

https://bestwatches.club/ on: The DVD Wrapup: Diamonds of the Night, School of Life, Red Room, Witch/Hagazussa, Tito & the Birds, Keoma, Andre’s Gospel, Noir

Gary Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Sleep With Anger, Ralph Wrecks Internet, Liz & Blue Bird, Hannah Grace, Unseen, Jupiter's Moon, Legally Blonde, Willard, Bang … More

Gary Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Bumblebee, Ginsburg, Buster, Silent Voice, Nazi Junkies, Prisoner, Golden Vampires, Highway Rat, Terra Formars, No Alternative … More

GDA on: The DVD Wrapup: Bumblebee, Ginsburg, Buster, Silent Voice, Nazi Junkies, Prisoner, Golden Vampires, Highway Rat, Terra Formars, No Alternative … More

Larry K on: The DVD Wrapup: Sleep With Anger, Ralph Wrecks Internet, Liz & Blue Bird, Hannah Grace, Unseen, Jupiter's Moon, Legally Blonde, Willard, Bang … More

Gary Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Shoplifters, Front Runner, Nobody’s Fool, Peppermint Soda, Haunted Hospital, Valentine, Possum, Mermaid, Guilty, Antonio Lopez, 4 Weddings … More

gwehan on: The DVD Wrapup: Shoplifters, Front Runner, Nobody’s Fool, Peppermint Soda, Haunted Hospital, Valentine, Possum, Mermaid, Guilty, Antonio Lopez, 4 Weddings … More

Gary J Dretzka on: The DVD Wrapup: Peppermint, Wild Boys, Un Traductor, Await Instructions, Lizzie, Coby, Afghan Love Story, Elizabeth Harvest, Brutal, Holiday Horror, Sound & Fury … More

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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