MCN Columnists
Leonard Klady

Klady By Leonard KladyKlady@moviecitynews.com

Peek-a-Boo!

Hide and Seek scared up a hair-raising gross estimated at $22.2 million to handily take the lead in the weekend box office derby. However, audiences were less inclined for the equally visceral Alone in the Dark that had a roughly 90% less chilling $2.5 million debut. Overall business rebounded 24% from last weekend’s snow-out in…

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The Bill Chill: Snowdance Hits Theaters

You can’t fool with Mother Nature and she came down with a fury in the Northeast and Midwest, shivering movie going to the bone. The cinematic force majeur was likely to wither admissions by 20% to 25% of unrecoverable income with exhibition and distribution sources trying to emulate Happy rather than Grouchy and Sneezy. The…

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Passing Game

It was relatively peppy talk as Coach Carter led the Martin Luther King holiday frame with an estimated $29.2 million debut in a crowd of new openers. Apart from Meet the Fockers, the top five viewing choices were either new titles or national launches including a potent expansion of In Good Company, an OK premiere…

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Ek Static!

Though it couldn’t unseat Meet the Fockers, the Sixth Sense clone White Noise was a very honorable second place with a $24 million debut in a generally upbeat frame. Noise was the sole national opener but the span included limited expansions of both National Society of Film Critics winner Million Dollar Baby and Hotel Rwanda…

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This is the Way the Year Ends

Not With a Whimper, But a Pop! It was still all Fock and all action as Meet the Fockers continued to hold sway in theaters with an estimated $43.2 million during the New Year’s holiday period. The close out of 2004 saw a modest improvement from the prior year to bring the annual domestic tally…

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Klady

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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