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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Use a Scalpel, Not an Ax

I’ve been pondering this whole kerfuffle over whether Hollywood should boycott Utah and the Sundance Film Festival over the Mormon church’s financial support of Prop 8. Some have proposed that the Sundance folks move the fest somewhere else for 2009, perhaps Lake Tahoe. Aside from the practical impossibility of relocating a fest the size of Sundance to another location with just over two months to go before the fest, Tahoe sits on the border of California between California and Nevada, and it doesn’t make much sense to me to say, let’s move this fest to the state that just voted 52% in favor of restricting the rights of its gay citizens. Further, Lake Tahoe is located in Placer County, which voted in favor of Prop 8 by almost 60%. Doesn’t make much sense to support gay rights by moving the financial benefits of the Sundance Film Festival to a county that voted that strongly in favor of the proposition, does it?


Way back in 1992, the state of Colorado passed Amendment 2, which voided existing civil rights protections for gays and lesbians with regard to jobs and housing in the cities that had voted in favor of such protections and banned other cities from passing protective ordinances. And there was outrage, and a call for a boycott of the entire state, even though such a boycott of tourist areas in the state primarily affected places like Denver, Aspen and Boulder, where voters opposed the amendment.
In the case of Amendment 2, the call was to boycott the entire state because of the vote of its majority, though, to hit Colorado hard economically, and to send a message that if a state allowed the influence of the Christian right to assail the rights of its gay citizens, people would fight back with their pocketbooks against that discrimination. The attack was primarily against the state and the voters that passed the amendment, not against other states where members of fundamentalist faiths — or specifically members of the Christian Coalition, which led the charge to restrict gay rights — resided.
In the case of Prop 8, we have a bit of a different situation in that the Church of Latter Day Saints, which is headquarted in Salt Lake City, financially supported the passage of Prop 8, and reportedly both encouraged its members to send money to the Prop 8 campaign and sent missionaries to go door-to-door rallying support for the proposition. So the rationale is, let’s cut off Hollywood’s financial support to Utah by boycotting its ski resorts generally and Sundance in particular. Which only makes sense if you also call to cut off your financial suppport to all those California counties that voted in favor of Prop 8 — which includes Los Angeles county and Hollywood itself.
David made the point on The Hot Blog yesterday that while boycotting Sundance does not make sense, MCN would support a boycott of any specific businesses in Park City and Salt Lake City that are shown to have lent their financial support to the passage of Prop 8. This makes much more sense — as, in fact, it would make sense for activists in the gay community to unearth the names of every single business owner in Los Angeles County who financially supported Prop 8, and publish a list of those businesses so that LA County residents can express their outrage by boycotting those businesses as well.
If I were organizing the activism around this issue as it pertains to Sundance, I would dig deep and figure out exactly which business owners within Park City actually sent money to support Prop 8. Any amount, I don’t care if they just sent $20. Print up a flier (on bright pink paper, just for added impact) listing every single business in Park City that supported Prop 8. Recruit volunteers to stand in shifts, wearing pink t-shirts or scarves or something to make it easy to find them, at every shuttle stop in Park City, on the sidewalks in front of headquarters, and at key points along Main Street, handing those fliers out to everyone who wants one. Encourage everyone going to tell their friends not to support any Park City businesses that supported Prop 8. Mail out letters to every single business in Park City with large rainbow flag window decals, encouraging them to show their support of the gay community (and thereby make it easy for fest attendees to locate them and choose to spend their dollars there) by displaying a rainbow flag at their business. This would make sense.
And while you’re at it, do the same in Los Angeles County, and in every other county that voted in support of Prop 8. Target specifically those business owners who supported the passage of Prop 8. Protest at churches where ministers gave sermons encouraging their members to vote in favor of it. Get the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, who in 1993 voted not to hold their convention in Denver in support of the Colorado boycott, advocating within the Latino community about why Latinos should not support discrimination of other groups. Get the NAACP to get out there in the Black community, working with Black ministers to change their perspective and to understand that discrimination against one group opens the door for discrimination against all. But don’t blame all Blacks and Latinos for the passage of Prop 8, because it was the white vote and the Asian vote that gave it enough votes to pass as well; if you’re going to boycott, you have to boycott against all businesses
Boycott in a way that makes sense; don’t just vilify all Mormons, or all of Park City, for the support of their church for Prop 8. That makes about as much sense as hating all Christians because of the existence of Pat Robertson or boycotting every state with a large population of Southern Baptists because of Anita Bryant. Boycott with a scalpel, not an ax, and the financial and media impact will be far more effective.

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One Response to “Use a Scalpel, Not an Ax”

  1. Considering that Amendment 2, which I voted against, passed by a margin not much larger than that of Proposition 8, maybe the right thing to do is to move Sundance to Denver as way of apologizing for demonizing an entire state. From my point of view, the passage of Proposition 2 is a result of arrogance on the part of people who failed to study past history, and karmic payback. Sorry about the anger, Kim, but I remember too well all the self-righteous assholes who declared Colorado “the Hate State”.

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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