BYOB Archive for April, 2009

BYOB – Travellin' North

Driving up to San Francisco today for the SF International, America’s eldest film fest with some of America’s smartest and ambitious fest programming.
You have the con’…

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BYOB 42809

Sorry if I gave anyone whiplash with the problems loading the last entry… and sorry to the 99% of you who have no idea what I am talking about.
Does anyone care as little as I do about the agency merger?
Michael Speier writes in The Wrap, “The new company’s creation is, without a doubt, an industry-shifting jolt to the entertainment business at large. WME is now a company that will automatically rival CAA as the top agency in town both in terms of mojo and clients.”
But there is no real notion of why anyone who is not directly connected to this inside baseball story should be paying much attention. Will a greater consolidation of talent create better movies or just more shitty packages?
Agencies have too much power and are paid way too much money in packaging deals already… so is there some way that his deal changes that… aside from making it incrementally worse? I mean, agencies don’t MAKE anything… they are middle men.
And frankly, the one notable thing is the use of the word “Entertainment” in the new title, which scarily suggests that there may be an intention to assert more of a hand in developing movies and television… people whose jobs – with all due respect – are not to make anything of quality, but to sell something.
The real power remains with the studios and distribution channels, though the people in charge of these things often forget that they are The Money and that the agencies are not, giving too much to the agents and threatening the financial potential of projects.
What am I missing?

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BYOB – Pre-Weekender

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BYOB – Humpday 42109

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BYOB Sunday Night

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BYOB – The Weekend To Come

Kim Voynar’s column this week gets into the O&R date rape muck again…. well worth reading.
My perspective remains pretty much the same, even after a two-day edit/discussion with Kim on her column. I think both sides of the discussion tend to overreach the scene itself. It can be argued that it is or is not a date rape. The content of the film does not offer real answers, only moments that can be interpreted as one chooses to interpret them.
Kim gets to the bigger issue, which is whether discussions about things that are on that line of political correctness are allowed by The Dogmatics. I would argue that the same is true for those on the side of political incorrectness. Far too many people are dismissing arguments that it is a date rape as hysterical or “not getting it.” And I find that on both sides use the examples of filmmaker comments, etc, that best make their side of the argument and avoid those things that suggest they are wrong. Not cool. As much as saying that it absolutely could not have been consensual on some ugly, but real, level, claiming that it absolutely could not qualify as date rape is an extremist position.
My personal argument comes back to the filmmaker. Did Jody Hill develop this scene to spur debate… or was he just using sex and drug abuse to create a shock punch line? The former would have be kinda brilliant… the latter, to me, given the content of the scene, inexcusable. But that’s just me…

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BYOB 41409

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BYOB – Back In LA… Ahhhhhhh

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BYOB Weekend

Passed over work… but a 2 movie day today…

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BYOB Passed Over

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BYOBloody Pictures – Chicago Day 2

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I guess critics’ quotes really do matter!
This is actually from NY on Sunday. I went back to see if Fast & Furious had yet made it to the streets – it had not – and saw this new Wolverine cover with a (fake… obviously) quote from Jeffrey Lyons… two claws down, way down.
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Checking in to the hotel, there was a police incident down on the street… and suddenly I felt the Batman vibe.
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Opening Day at Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox… and one of those places where being overtly all-American still plays…
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it was 40 degrees… but after removing my hoodie, I was still sweating, the sun was so intense. Sorry I couldn’t get a shot of the 2 jet flyover on my silly little iPhone camera.

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BYOB Chicago

The (small) world tour continues…

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BYOB Sunday Night Live

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BYOB Weekend

It’s a rainy day in NYC… so much for the debuts of the new stadia!
But wait! The Mets game started anyway… 3-1 over the Red Sox with 1 on and 2 outs.
A lovely, busy, wet day…

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BYOB – Thursday After April Fools

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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