By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Sundance Brouhaha: Filmmaker and Journo Reportedly Go to Blows Over Bad Review (rumors)

Posted Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 - 4 Comments »
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Update: Apparently the players involved were Variety’s John Anderson and Jeff Dowd, producer of Dirt! The Movie. Karina Longworth over at Spoutblog has more details. This is already the buzz of the fest today; while I was sitting here discussing the incident with a friend, another journalist walked by and joked, “Careful, don’t get punched in the face!”
You don’t usually see a bad review of a film at a festival result in violence, but that’s what happened at the restaurant at the Yarrow (home of one of the press screening venues) this morning. When I arrived at the Yarrow for a screening this morning, the police were just arriving to deal with an assault at the restaurant. They pulled several people out, and there was much yelling back and forth going on a the police tried to sort everything out.
I just spoke with a source, and here’s what allegedly went down: a filmmaker confronted a journalist in the Yarrow lobby this morning over a negative review of his film. The journalist walked away and went to the restaurant to eat, and the filmmaker followed him into the restaurant and continued to try to talk to him about the review; at some point, things got ugly, and the journalist reportedly punched the filmmaker in the face. Police were called out to deal with it. The source told me that so far as he knew, the filmmaker had decided not to file charges against the journalist and no one was arrested.
The Yarrow and festival staff, it should be noted, handled the situation quickly and as unobtrusively as possible; it’s unfortunate for the festival that a negative review of a film would leave to this kind of situation, but so it goes … jeepers.

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Posted in 10 Days of Sundance | 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “Sundance Brouhaha: Filmmaker and Journo Reportedly Go to Blows Over Bad Review (rumors)”

  1. Don Murphy says:
    January 21, 2009 at 4:25 pm

    wow- as if ANYTHING could justify an assault. But I guess that’s how you roll- I mean you must know I saw that attack you posted against me elsewhere so obviously belligerence is your thing

  2. Kim Voynar says:
    January 21, 2009 at 6:10 pm

    Don, was that comment directed at me or David? Because if you’re taking aim at me, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

  3. Don Murphy says:
    January 21, 2009 at 6:17 pm

    I sent the link to David. You didn’t enjoy my distaste for Cinematical so you struck back. Fine. Why you went after my wife who never did you any harm is more perplexing tho.

  4. Oi Vey says:
    January 22, 2009 at 12:30 pm

    Don Murphy is also the guy who ragged on Jon Favreau when HE himself got ‘dismissed’ as a producer from Iron Man (From New Line to Marve/Paramount I think). Also, do I need to remind the public that Murphy also produced The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I know..it’s been 6 years, but still

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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