20 Weeks Archive for May, 2007

20 Weeks: The Sequel

The point of this column is not to shovel dirt on the past, but to look to the quite immediate future. There is an entire summer ahead of us that looks a lot like one of the strongest summers ever without The Big Three being any more than The Big One.
Last summer, it was Pirates 2 followed by Cars in #2 slot with $244 million domestic. In 2005, it was Star Wars 6/III followed by $234 million domestic for War of the Worlds. In 2004, it was Shrek 2 and Spider-Man 2 in the ether and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with $250 million domestic in third.
The closest thing to this summer was 2002, with Finding Nemo and The Matrix Reloaded huge in May and Pirates of the Caribbean huge in July with Bruce Almighty at $243 million for #4 and X2 with $215 million domestic at #5. But that was so very different also. Nemo opened to “just” $70 million and did almost 5 times that opening. Bruce Almighty was a surprise with a $68 million opening and about 3.5 times that total domestic.

The rest…

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20 Weeks… A Month In

Back to the suckage …
Spider-Man 3 … Shrek The Third … Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End …
The irony is that all three of the triquels suffer from many of the same diseases. The most significant one is the confused disease of trying too hard to be people pleasers. All three add characters that really have nothing to do other than to be new. The two non-animated films add massive special effects, some of which really don’t work, although they are well done in and of themselves. All three seem to forget what is at the core of why people love the previous movies.

The rest…
And the not-much-changed chart

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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