The Weekend Report Archive for August, 2006

Grid and Bare It …

Invincible would be hyperbole but the true life movie sports saga of the same name posted a sturdy debuted estimated at $16.9 million to finish at the front of a very crowded movie going field. New titles in the marketplace were generally soft with Beerfest grossing $6.6 million to rank fourth and How to Eat…

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Slithering on the Vine

The box office was stirred not snakin’ as Snakes on a Plane nudged its way to top weekend viewing choice with an estimated $15.3 million gross. Overall box office dipped for the frame with good to fair response for national debuts of teen oriented pics Accepted and Material Girls. The action was more intense in…

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Dancing on the Parade

While the debate entering the weekend focused on how competitive the debut of World Trade Center would be with Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, the innocuous teen dance drama Step Up took to the floor to complicate the picture. When the dust settled the order was clear: Talladega led with an estimated $22.6…

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No Tale-a-de-gating

Talladega Nights The Ballad of Ricky Bobby lapped the competition for a commanding lead estimated at $47.6 million at the weekend box office. That left the rest of the field in the dust with the kidtoon Barnyard a distant second milking $15.7 million and The Descent scaled back with $8.6 million. The frame also featured…

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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