MCN Columnists
Leonard Klady

Klady By Leonard KladyKlady@moviecitynews.com

Weekend Box Office Report – September 26

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps topped the weekend box office charts with a logy estimate of $19.5 million. The new batch of national releases generally underperformed based on tracking including second place Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga Hoole, which hooted up $16.3 million.

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie: Perspectives

C’est fini le fete international de film de Toronto. To be honest, the eleven days of the somewhat revamped Toronto International Film Festival are a blur. Three or four films a day, three or four hours of writing a night, one reception, innumerable dangling conversations and what do you get. The best I can come…

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Weekend Box Office Report – September 19

Though The Town was clearly out-pacing its competition in advance ticket sales, tracking pundits pegged the latter day Ridgemont High antics of Easy A as the box office leader for the frame. Devil was expected to be very close behind the duo.

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The Weekend Box Office Report

  Weekend Estimates – September 10-12, 2010 Title Distributor Gross (average) change Theaters Cume Resident Evil: Afterlife Sony 26.9 (8,390) New 3203 26.9 Takers Sony 5.9 (2,710) -45% 2191 47.9 The American Focus 5.7 (2,020) -57% 2833 28.2 Machete Fox 4.1 (1,520) -64% 2678 20.7 Going the Distance WB 3.8 (1,260) -45% 3030 14 The…

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie

One anticipated film that Toronto received the very first look see is Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter. It screened yesterday for press including the army of junket scribes that attend about 20 interview roundtables during TIFF’s opening weekend. They were grumbling about the filmmaker only doing two interviews during his stay and having to go to New York in October for the official press junket.

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie

Toronto has also evolved along these lines. It runs arguably the best programmed cinematheque in North America, touring film programs and underwrites scholarly research and publications that otherwise would be marginalized. The Lightbox marketing employs the catch phrase: The House That Film Built and, considering past good works, it should be a home base that’s both state of the art and sturdy.

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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