MCN Columnists
Leonard Klady

Gross Behavior Column By Leonard KladyKlady@moviecitynews.com

So What!?

Wednesday morning Motion Picture Association of America president Dan Glickman got on the phone with (by my count) 15 or so entertainment business journalists. He told them a few things they probably knew, a lot they could have guessed and a panoply of things of no great significance. The seeming important news was that the domestic…

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Eye of the Navel 2007 …

The thing about top 10 lists is they tend to be relevant only at the moment they are compiled. A couple of weeks ago I sent in such a list to a poll conducted by the Village Voice/L.A. Weekly and in the brief time that’s followed it has gone AWOL. While nothing catastrophic has occurred in…

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Help Me Rwanda …

There weren’t a lot of films to be had at the Toronto International Film Festival, and for acquisition executives that was a bit of a relief. You see, there’s a glut of product in the pipeline and for most companies that fall somewhere between niche and mainstream their release schedules are sewn up through at…

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Jack Be Nimble

Late Thursday afternoon I was on the phone with Seth Oster of the Motion Picture Association of America. Toward the end of our conversation he made reference to Jack Valenti and indicated he wasn’t in the best of shape since his stroke in March. I asked him if he was at home and receiving a lot…

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Great … Scott!

What seems rather commonplace, even organic today – a screenwriter taking the reins of his script – was once a rather radical proposition. We’ve all been privy to yarns about brilliant scripts transformed into pedestrian vehicles by filmmakers with indifferent credentials that simply didn’t “get it.” The godfather of all writer-directors was Preston Sturges who…

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What’s A Billion Among Friends …

Last year the Motion Picture Association of America decided days before the start of the ShoWest convention to unveil its annual box office statistics in advance of the event. The rationale was that everyone knew that both box office and admissions had declined and getting that dirty detail out of the way would allow the…

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Alt + Control … Delete

Robert Altman was a scoundrel. It’s perhaps not quite the way one might expect to recall someone that I personally considered the greatest living American director. To be certain it’s said with a large degree of affection. I don’t believe he could have survived and prospered within the film industry if he were any less…

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Death and Taxes…

There’s nothing quite like receiving bad news to set your week up wrong. So, when the phone rang Monday morning with the news Sid Adilman had died, I at least could anticipate nothing worse happening immediately. Sid Adilman was for many years the entertainment editor at the Toronto Star. He was also the Canadian bureau…

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P.S. Toronto…

I began my annual journey to Toronto with a degree of ambivalence and a week after its conclusion I can’t seem to shake that feeling. However, distance has at least provided a glimmer of perspective. Somewhere hidden in the deluge of movies presented this year and in other recent incarnations is a great festival. For…

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An Extremely Inconvenient Truth…

Hollywood hardly has a reputation as the bastion of truth. It’s been tagged the dream factory and adjectives such as mythic, fantasy and fairy tale are the most apt when addressing virtually any area of the industry. Allegory and metaphor suggest a semblance of truth the town has never been particularly comfortable with because both…

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The Road To Mel is Paved With Good Intentions…

My chronology may be slightly askew but, if memory serves, sometime toward the end of 1983 when I lived in Canada there was a bit of a media frenzy when actor Mel Gibson was picked up for drunk driving. The actor was in Toronto filming Mrs. Soffel with Diane Keaton. Obviously the context back then…

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KAOS Stands For Nothing

The other day I was asked by William Goldman whether I had seen the documentary Boffo!? I hadn’t. He hadn’t seen it either. However, he’s been told that somewhere in the middle of this exploration of Hollywood’s blockbuster movies there was five minutes with him that were “brilliant.” I groaned but before I could rally,…

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Location, Location, Location…

  There’s an odd disconnect when you contrast the domination of event movies playing at the neighborhood multiplex during the summer months and the proliferation of film festivals that cater to idiosyncratic tastes this time of year. One isn’t necessarily the antidote to the other. Nonetheless, the two solitudes co-exist in a state of anxious…

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No Room At The Marquee

National Association of Theater Owner’s president John Fithian went on a tear a couple of months back, criticizing the media for taking a myopic view of film going. There’s no question that coverage of dips and bumps in the box office is evanescent, or as folks in film exhibition like to say, “cyclic.” Fithian quite…

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The Indolent and the Indulgent…

Summer 2006 is already shaping up as the season of the train wreck. The May release schedule that was supposed to dispel all talk of a movie going crisis has instead renewed considerable debate about audience apathy, blunted expectations, marketing acumen or its absence, fading stardom, cultural and demographic shifts and myriad other speculations. In…

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Black and Weitz

“Satire is what closes on Saturday Night” — George S. Kaufman Most filmmakers are superstitious. They wear things – socks, ties, shoes – that are supposed to bring them luck; they have traditions that have to be upheld when the deal is made, at the start of filming or on the first evening of a…

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My Hand Has A Headache…

About 10 years ago ShoWest decided to carve out a couple of hours in its schedule for a reception dedicated to the art house crowd. At that point the event was dominated by lunches and dinners sponsored by the majors that featured product reels and daises over flowing with stars of upcoming movies. Whether the…

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It’s All Greek to Me

  This past week in Los Angeles marked the 10th anniversary of the film series City of Lights, City of Angels. For the uninitiated, it’s a six-day program of recent French movies – an eclectic mix of popular and arcane cinema from the land of Truffaut and Renoir. It’s an initiative of a lot of…

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The Audience is Listening

Many moons ago for reasons that have been lost to time, I was attending a film festival in Montreal. While I can still vividly remember some of the selections, I cannot remember the name of the event or its stated gestalt. The program was very alternative with selections from the likes of Werner Schroeder and…

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Admission Slips

The mantra at ShoWest – the annual conclave of film exhibition – emerged as “we have to look at the long term.” And, on the surface, that’s not an altogether unreasonable statement. Let’s refrain from making snap judgments. What occurred six months ago may not be indicative of what we will see moving forward a…

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Quote Unquotesee all »

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