BYOB Archive for June, 2009

BYOB Monday Pre-Indy Day

71 Comments »

BYOB – Non-Twitter Has Killed The Video Star Edition

52 Comments »

BYOB Thursday 625

34 Comments »

BYOB 623

64 Comments »

BYOB – Room 2+2+2,22

51 Comments »

BYOB Friday 61909

65 Comments »

BYOB 616

51 Comments »

BYOB – Travelin' Friday

36 Comments »

BYOB Thursday

29 Comments »

BYOB – Tues679

Been on the run all day taping interviews… excellent and exhausting. And on the way out shortly for a screening. Will try to catch up soon. Meanwhile, SAG’s yea or nay is on it’s way…
I am ongoingly embarrassed to watch so many alleged journalists try to start picking the bones of Harvey & Bob Weinstein, anticipating the end, when the story is so very old and has not changed one bit. They started the company with too little capital. They have run the company with too little capital. When you have too little capital and don’t have a mega-hit to bail you out, you eventually go out of business. There is nothing more definitive about the next six months than about the last 26 months. They are just running out of chances… again. Tarantino has failed them commercially… again. (HW’s fault for indulging a niche filmmaker with 4 quadrant budgets and final cut.) And they are relying on an Oscar movie to bail them out… again.
They should have signed with Disney at $400 million a year when they could and more of the movies they have made or bought would have been distributed properly. Instead they went into the MGM distribution shit hole, their few big gambles failed to pay off, then went off on their own when MGM turned broke and pay-tv-less, and there is no loose, movie-crazy money out there to bail them out this time. (Ryan Kavanaugh has been bent over more times than Miss May, Miss November, Miss Dee Fied combined… but too many people in there already for him to save HW.)
Shut down TWC, open H&B Pictures, fund anything over $15 million individually with foreign money… and let’s move on.
Harvey Weinstein may be a lot of bad things, but he deserves the status of a legend and watching him twist in the breeze may amuse some jackals, but it does nothing for me. He did more for this business and for art house films than 97% of the people who are looking to dance on his grave. Fuck them and the failed ambitions they rode in on.
I am so done with trying to figure out how many sleeping pills were in the bottle every day in this town lately. Bullets, bankruptcy or bifurcation. Grow some balls and make a choice already.
Here’s some space for you all to chat while Lex sleeps it off.

36 Comments »

BYOB – Sunday 67

84 Comments »

BYOB Weekend – 659

36 Comments »

BYOB for a Wednesday…

65 Comments »

BYOB Monday

44 Comments »

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