From: Jasper
Date: Friday, August 31, 2007
Time: 12:07:31 AM
Solitairea1, ……..A real organization, yes. And how could a group like that function within the LAPD for years without the tacit approval of LA Secret Police, the Police Chief and the LAPPL? I don’t see how it could. That seems to me to be the ultimate problem with Laura Heart McKinny’s manuscript. ……….Sometimes a writer can tell more of the truth with “fictional” characters and situations than real ones. Men Against Women sounded like that kind of screenplay to me. And Michael Viner’s “smell test” rejection of it as a potential book after Fuhrman’s name became well known smells awfully fishy. ………..I don’t think Laura Hart McKinny CAN write the real story of her relationship with Mark Fuhrman without having every aspect of her personal life from 1985 to 1994 dragged through the mud. Men Against Women, though, could tell enough real stories about Fuhrman to do precisely what she said she set out to do when she began the project. I think she underestimated Fuhrman’s intelligence and “reach” in seeing what she was up to and seeing to it that the project went nowhere while simultaneously using her to get inside of the motion picture industry. Remember, it was Fuhrman who approached her; not the other way around. ……….Something tells me that Laura Hart was blacklisted and Fuhrman had a lot to do with it. Schools of Art don’t give out full professorships to people who don’t have outstanding credentials. With no significant screenplays to her credit that were actually sold, she had to have enough in her portfolio to tell the people who hired her that it wasn’t because she lacked the shills. ……… I have a hunch that Men Against Women made the fundamental error of telling it exactly the way it was. The more far-fetched the reality the less credible it sounds. It is possible that Laura Hart got nowhere in Hollywood for the same reason I saw some of the best designers and engineers in the auto industry get nowhere in their field – they were too good. There is no such thing as being too good when you’re going with the flow. But when you are good enough to direct the flow in a direction that can’t be predicted or controlled by the powers that be, you can hang it up. ………I was once working with a super-talented guy from the Ford Design Center Metal Shop who came into our studio to make an adjustment on clay model wheel base that should not have been necessary. Both of us knew it. Everybody in the studio knew it. I asked him, “Why do you think we spend so much time going around in circles?” He nodded to some “suits” (executives) huddling around another model that we were having the same kinds of unnecessary problems with. He said, “They don’t mind going around in circles. It’s the sudden right turns that they can’t stand.” ………. For the “suits” in Hollywood (and their LAPD censors) I wonder if Men Against Women looked too much like a “sudden right turn.” –Jasper