What Ever Happened To...

Picture: It's definitely NOT this Matthew Wilder....

Remember movie director Matthew Wilder's William J Frick bio-pic, Your Name Here? Well, last I heard from him he promised we'd see the film released in a revolutionary way. A few days later he de-friended me on Facebook. Where is he now?

He's working on this. From Eonline:

"You snooze, you lose. You violate probation and have to take an extended stay in rehab...you lose.

Despite previous assurances that the production was ready and waiting for Lindsay Lohan, Inferno director Matthew Wilder exclusively tells E! News that his Linda Lovelace biopic is moving on without the troubled star.

[...]

"We are withdrawing our offer from Lindsay Lohan," Wilder says. "We are currently in negotiations [with another actress] and working out the legalities of bringing her onboard."

In fact, E! News will exclusively announce Monday which "amazing actress" is replacing Lohan as Lovelace.

So what finally prompted Wilder, who sang Lohan's praises as an actress and as a promoter when she was in Cannes to help sell the film (which ultimately landed her in hot water), to give up on the 24-year-old actress?

"We have stuck by Lindsay very patiently for a long time with a lot of love and support," Wilder says. "Ultimately, the impossibility of insuring her—and some other issues—have made it impossible for us to go forward.""

I have watched Your Name Here and it's not an easy film to sum up. Now that Wilder's moved on to other projects perhaps it's time to dig it out and write up a review...

Variety Reviews 'Your Name Here'

'Your Name Here' the William J Frick bio-pic which recently premiered in Vegas was reviewed in yesterday's Variety magazine. Reviewer Robert Koehler writes:

"Getting lost inside the decaying mind of a science-fiction novelist isn't the same as getting lost, a critical distinction missed in Matthew Wilder's whirligig "Your Name Here." With Bill Pullman as a fictionalized version of Philip K. Dick, pic superficially touches on David Lynchian down-the-rabbit-hole territory, but flubs an opportunity for a full-bore B-movie romp in a series of overextended, flat episodes. Cocksureness of the pic's culty profile hardly guarantees in-crowd, hipster action at fests and beyond, even with the spectacle of Traci Lords in multiple roles.

On the verge of completing his magnum opus during 1974's Fourth of July weekend, author William J. Frick (Pullman) is distracted by his screaming ex Julie (Lords), worried agent (Richard Riehle), the tax man (Dave Sheridan) and memories of his stillborn sister. Too much stress-relieving medication sends Frick hurtling into a fantasy world of escalating nonsense, some of it enticingly accented with Watergate-era paranoia care of the perennially masterful M. Emmet Walsh as a Nixon man. Former theater director Wilder lets too many scenes run on, and on."

PollyStaffle.com has another review here, which reads, in part:

"My biggest gripe here is they took a very sad story and tried to play it as a comedy. The film is based loosely on sci-fi writer Phillip K. Dick, who wrote “A Scanner Darkly,” later turned into a Richard Linklater film, as well as the stories that “Blade Runner,” “Total Recall,” “Screamers,” “Paycheck,” “Minority Report” and “Impostor” were based off of. Phillip K. Dick was a heavy drug user that suffered from paranoia and schizophrenia [note to reviewer: stick to your job as a reviewer and leave the diagnosing to the professionals]. His twin sister died five weeks after their births, he married and divorced five times, he had a stroke in 1982 and was disconnected from life support five days later to depart our world. There’s nothing funny about any of the things I just mentioned. “Your Name Here” tries to turn the tragedies of Phillip K. Dick’s life into a bizarre “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” meets “Memento” freak show. It’s not an awe-inspiring celebration of his art like “Ed Wood,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt” or “Man on the Moon.” It’s laughing at him, not with him, and comes off twisted and pretty damn sick if you ask me."

'Your Name Here' Trailer Now Online

YOUR NAME HERE TRAILER


I see pink beams, tooth-related agony, an insane asylum, and Pill Bullman. Doesn't look like a big-budget picture, but then maybe that's something it's got going for it. As you may have guessed by now, I was unable to attend the world premiere of "Your Name Here" due to the high price of travel (note to Middle East: after all the democracy we've spread on you, this is how you repay us?!). No word yet on when non-gamblers will get a look at this film but I'll keep you posted.

How's it look to you?

Update: QuietEarth.us has the movie poster:

Double Update: I finally figured out what this trailer reminds me of: the quick-cut viddies Alex has to watch in Clockwork Orange.

Could this be the most subtly diabolical dodgy chair reference ever? And if so will the curse doom this film as well?

Or maybe I'm thinking of Billy Joel's video for 'Pressure':

'Your Name Here' Interview with Matthew Wilder

I've already written about the world premiere of 'Your Name Here' the WJF (William J Frick) "bio-pic" but it's coming right up and the first drips and drabs of press coverage are starting to emerge. I just found a newly posted interview with the film's director Matthew Wilder posted over the Cinevegas website. Here's a new, slightly more detailed description of the film:

"It's the summer of 1974 and visionary science-fiction writer William J. Frick (Bill Pullman) is having a meltdown. Ex-wives are pounding on his door, the IRS is nipping at his heels, bikers are mixing meth in his garage, and his final masterpiece — an account of his collision with God in an East L.A. taco stand — is nearly complete. But after one hit of a curious magic powder, Frick wakes up to discover himself — like one of the characters in his novels — the prisoner of an alternate reality. And then another ... and another ... and ...

Writer/director Matthew Wilder orchestrates it all with deft precision, fully realizing his bizarre vision. And the fantastic actors deliver pitch-perfect performances, notably Pullman, who pulls off an amazing slapstick-nightmare of delusion, befuddlement, and hyperawareness. Buy the ticket, take the ride, and enjoy the trip that is YOUR NAME HERE."

Well, I gotta admit, this sounds like it might be a really interesting film. Plus I like that they're not pushing the PKD angle at all in the publicity.

Here's a few of the choice things Wilder has to say about making lemonade out of cinematic lemons:

"There's a scene where Pullman's character is sitting in a giant theatre, kinda like Abe Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. Suddenly onstage he sees himself-the bad guys have create a doppelganger of him who is a sort of country-and-western fascist, a cross between Andy Griffith in A FACE IN THE CROWD and our current Decider-in-Chief. Now in the script this hayseed character is selling happy pills to the public, and he has giant placards and posters and samples of pills, and he rolls out a screen that he shows a little promotional film on...it's a big to-do. The day we shot this, none of that stuff showed up. Nothing. There was maybe one sad little cartoon on a piece of paper the size of a record album. Pathetic. Horrifying. I could see Pullman go down below water for a second or two, and then suddenly he went, "Awright! Let's just do it in a spotlight! I'll be a one-man band and put on a show!" Now, when you see the scene, it's Pullman and a showgirl under a spotlight, and he's doing this big revival show, kinda like something out of BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS. It works. You can't imagine it any other way. But it was really because the poster guy slept in late that day."

Read the rest of the interview here.
And buy your tickets to the premiere here - it's on Friday June 13 at 8:30.

And yeah, I bought a couple tickets just in case I figure out a way to get there on the ultra-cheap. Please contact me if you'd like to sponsor my trip... or my attempt to see the movie, or if you live in the Vegas area and I can eat your Lucky Charms and sleep on your floor.

Oh, and I said a bunch of mean stuff about this film, Bill Pullman, and the notion of William J Frick, but that was before I thought it was actually going to be released. So producers, publicists, listen up, it's all water under the bridge; I am ready to shill for you - just get me to Vegas (and give me a little what my dad would call 'walking around money')!

Finally (and for the last time) Matthew Wilder is not the dude that wrote the "Breaka My Stride" song.

'Your Name Here' To Be Wildly Inaccurate

Above: Prominent adulterer and ultra-conservative neo-con Pill Bullman with Laci Tords and Damanda Ecker (all of whom are wanted on tax evasion and indecency charges) photographed on the set of 'Your Name Here'

More news of the quasi-PKD-biopic "Your Name Here" recently surfaced over at MTV Movies Blog.

Get ready for this:

"Portraying the sexpot “Dallas” star, Manning plays opposite Pullman as a doppleganger version of eccentric sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick, whose novels about time travel, androids and alternate universes have yielded such classics as “Minority Report,” “Total Recall,” and “Blade Runner.”

“Pullman plays William J. Frick, but it’s based on Phillip K. Dick,” she grinned, explaining that legal mumbo-jumbo kept the production from using real names (see “Bill Pullman Is Kind Of, But Not Really, Philip K. Dick“). “It is all kind of weird and bizarre - and I am a robot in it.”

Much like David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch,” the film mixes fiction and reality into a drug-addled concoction that’ll leave audience members questioning reality in a way that would make Dick proud. “Instead of being Vikki, I’m Nikki … It’s all based on [his life], but it’s all imaginative. Plus, he’s on meth - so, it’s all a bit skewed.”

When Manning appears to Dick…er…Frick in what seems to be a dream, his sci-fi world invades his reality. “He’s infatuated with my character … she starred in that movie ‘Earthquake,’ and he is obsessed with her even though he has a wife,” she said of one scene. “All around his office you see pictures of me. One day, he does a huge line [of cocaine], and the next thing you know he’s in the back of a limo, and there I am!”

Take a minute to process that.

'William J Frick' is on meth? doing huge lines of coke?!

I love how MTV's reporter refers to copyright law (or whatever esoteric branch of the legal system deals with identity) as 'legal mumbo-jumbo.' Something tells me there'd be a bit of legal mumbo-jumbo involved were I to make a movie about MTV being run by gangsters who were laundering money for an illegal sex-trade business they were running on the side. And I'm sure MTV would understand my fair and equitable solution to their outrage when I decided to change MTV to VTM. Now I'm not saying MTV's run by gangsters involved in the trafficking of young girls - I'm saying VTM is run by those guys - in my movie.

To intentionally create an inaccurate caricature of someone who died relatively recently (this is not Shakespeare in Love) in an extremely negative light (when his kids are still alive I might add) seems a bit shady. What's more they will beat the estate-sanctioned bio-pic 'Owl in Daylight' to the theaters, perhaps even creating a Deep-Impact-vs-Armageddon-type glut of PKD meta-fictions - perhaps a suffering devoutly to be wished for.

I've never heard of PKD snorting big-lines of coke, and I don't think it's quite right to depict him as a meth addict either, for any number of reasons. Oh yeah right, it's not Philip K Dick, it's William J Frick. But in every interview Pullman or Manning do they mention the movie's based on 'eccentric science-fiction writer' Philip K Dick.

Nice.

I love it when lawyers adhere to the letter of the law while wiping their feet on the law's spirit.

On the other hand, I believe deeply that on some level Philip K Dick, by virtue of being part of our cultural dialog, belongs to all of us. Lethem's article "The Ecstasy of Influence" really shaped the way I think about this stuff. We are all free to imagine PKD in any way that pleases us. Like it or not, he encouraged people to do precisely that by consciously manipulating the way he was portrayed in the press, by creating extensions of himself in his fiction, and by sensationalizing his biography over and over again in his novels.

I have to admit this movie sounds like it might be pretty good. I guess this is just further proof we're living in a PKD novel.

I'm quite curious to hear what you all have to say about this. Are two bio-pics better than one? Perhaps this is yet another Dickian narrative and now his story will be told from constantly shifting perspectives. "If you find this movie bad, you should see some of the others," Dick is saying as he looks down from his seat high atop the great magnet.

Do you think this film will be a winner or a loser?

Oh and this reporter says that the movie is not being written by the "breaka my stride" guy, but why should I trust her? After all, I've been blissfully assuming all these other professional writers were checking their facts. How do I know she's not the one lying? And now we're living in that Philip K Dick novel.