MCN Columnists
Leonard Klady

Klady By Leonard KladyKlady@moviecitynews.com

True Grit: The Sands of Tommy

May 31, 2010 The pre-ordained juggernaut of Sex and the City 2 was naut. Smiling ogre the Memorial holiday weekend was Shrek Forever After with an estimated $55.6 million. The weekend’s incoming box office behemoths — Sex 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time — duked it out for the Miss Congeniality spot…

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Star Shrek: The Wrath of Con

May 23, 2010 Shrek Forever After held sway ogre the weekend with an estimated debut of $72.5 million. The session’s other wide opener MacGruber wound up a causality of ware with a humorless $4.1 million bow. The Bollywood hybrid Kites touched a toe in the water with 208 playdates and its $1 million box office…

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There Goes the Neighbor, Hood

May 16, 2010 Iron Man 2 took a 60% tumble but retained the top spot at the weekend box office with an estimated $51.9 million. A trio of new national releases followed in its wake, most noticeably the new millennium Robin Hood, which was pretty close to the bullseye with $37 million. A pair of…

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Iron and Steal

May 9, 2010 Iron Man 2 signaled the start of the summer season with a blockbuster-like debut gross estimated at $134.1 million. With the comic book sequel fusing more than 70% of the marketplace, holdovers generally experienced 50% plus erosions and other debuts were confined to the niches. The non-fiction Babies bowed at 534 theaters…

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Elm Oakay

May 2 , 2010 The resurrection of Mr. Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street scared up an estimated $32.1 million to claim weekend bragging rights in an otherwise soft movie viewing session. The frame’s other national debut, the unintentionally horrifying Furry Vengeance, ranked fifth in the lineup with $6.5 million. Niche freshmen including Bollywood…

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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