Movie City Indie Archive for August, 2012

NYT Op-Doc: Laura Poitras’ THE PROGRAM (8’27”)

“Poitras profiles William Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency who helped design a top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans’ personal data.” [More here.]

SIDE BY SIDE outtake: Dick Pope: “3-D ain’t for me”

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TIFF12 Trailering: INVENTING DAVID GEFFEN (2 clips)


Film4 Interviews Tony Scott (8’32”)

TIFF12 Trailering: 7 BOXES

Red Band Trailering LAWLESS (2’38”)

James Cameron: We Know When We’re Watching A Movie, It’s Not Real, So, 3D! (1’47”)

Triggering little parts of your brain, eh?

Teasing THE MASTER: “I Lost My Ship” (1’01”)

A teaser for the San Francisco screening at the Castro, August 21. Yep, it’s a scintillating one-take outtake. (All hail Mihai Malaimare, Jr!) Like the first two teasers, this small taste stands on own as a succulent, suggestive short film. While undeniably beautiful, there are few shots that could be called formally show-offy in the film proper: the editing tends to delicate restraint, rounding inexorably on the battle of the two men, Freddy and the Master. But there is a shot of that bridge that aches quietly as another ship passes, gloaming’s begun and pink falls to blued-down hues of red.

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Tony Scott’s AGENT ORANGE (4’58”)

BEAT THE DEVIL by Tony Scott (9’45”)

Movie City Indie

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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