MCN Originals Archive for December, 2014

The Weekend Report

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 made the hat trick as it topped session moviegoing with an estimated $21.7 million. In what’s been traditionally one of the slowest weekends on the calendar. Distribution propped up the self-fulfilling prophecy by largely avoiding new product apart from low-budget horror adventure The Pyramid that grossed only $1.3 million. On the bright side, limited launch of Wild opened to a sturdy $622,000 from 21 screens and The Imitation Game continued to post strong numbers with the addition of four engagements. The significant expansion of The Homesman also generated OK results.

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Friday Box Office Estimates

On one of the weekends of every year which distributors avoid like the Bermuda Triangle of old, no new wide releases. Fox shoves The Pyramid out onto 589 screens and may get past $1 million for the weekend. Otherwise, last weekend’s Top 10 jostles for position. And Searchlight’s Wild starts its trek on 21 screens and has its eye on $24k per screen for the weekend.

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Gurus o’ Gold: The Rise of Selma

The Gurus are back from the holidays with a look at Best Picture and Best Director, where Ava Duvernay is red hot and some of the big names aren’t diddly squat.

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The DVD Wrapup: Penance, 100 Foot Walk, Copenhagen and more

Anyone who simply can’t wait for every new season of shows like “True Detective,” “American Horror Story” and “The Killing” ought to check out the sensational Japanese mini-series, “Penance.” Shown in New York last spring as a single five-hour movie, it is best suited for the small screen in series form. Easily translatable, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find it adapted for American television someday, just as the creepy French mini-series “Les revenants” was shown intact on Sundance and re-imagined for American audiences by ABC as “The Returned.”

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MCN Originals

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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