MCN Columnists
Leonard Klady

Klady By Leonard KladyKlady@moviecitynews.com

Toy Boys and the Billion Dollar Babies

To no great surprise Toy Story 3 retained top position in weekend ticket sales with an estimated $58.7 million. The frame’s two national freshmen also landed in anticipated order with the arrested development comedy Grown Ups performing better than expected with $40.5 million and the star driven action comedy Knight and Day underwhelming with $19.4…

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To Finity … And Beyawned

June 20, 2010 The highly anticipated Toy Story 3 arrived right on target with an estimated $110.2 million debut, which marked the biggest (unadjusted) opening for a Pixar movie. The week’s other incoming title Johah Hex wound up with an accursed $4.9 million that ranked it seventh in the weekend lineup. The session also featured…

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If You Build It, Will They Come?

The Los Angeles Film Festival kicks off Thursday night with a curtain raiser of The Kids Are All Right, which won awards and commercial distribution following its premiere at Sundance in January. And despite its relative nascence, LAFF is attempting to do a bit of re-imagining. The most obvious change is its location. Following home bases in Hollywood and Westwood,…

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Chop Chop

June 13, 2010 Industry trackers were virtually unanimous that The A-Team would be top dog among weekend movie goers with the re-imagined The Karate Kid a competitive but distinct runner up. However, whether it was a poor sampler or respondents were too embarrassed to divulge their honest sentiments, ticket sales provided a radically different conclusion….

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Clash of the Lilliputians

June 6 , 2010 There wasn’t sufficient love for a quartet of new national releases and virtually by default Shrek Forever After emerged as the top title at the weekend box office with an estimated $2x.x million. Among the debutante set comedy prevailed with Get Him to the Greek ranking second with $17.3 million while…

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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