“We don’t threaten writers with violence.
There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.Cummins’ publisher Flatiron cancelled her tour in late January, citing “threats of physical violence”. 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. That’s what they were not able to deliver. 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. 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. 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. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. If he had - if that were what the accusation involved - the show would not have gone on. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone.
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. “That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.” My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named-” “Yeah, sure - you want his phone number?” 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.īut then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. 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. There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming. Which, in 1975, forget it - I mean, that was nuts.
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.Īnd so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. 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?