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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Ghosties

I don’t watch or write about television shows much, but right now it’s 6:30AM and I’m sitting here wating Cartoon Network’s The Othersiders with my 10-year-old son. He totally digs this show, but his younger sibs wouldn’t let him watch it last night, so I promised to watch it with him today.
The Othersiders is a kids’ reality show about a group of teenagers who investigate places reported to have paranormal activity. I actually really like this show — not just because of the paranormal stuff, which is occasionally kind of cool, but more for the way in which it presents the teens on the show.
As a mom of a pack of kids, one of whom has already navigated her teen years, and the other four who are heading that way, I feel like teenagers often get a bum rap. Yes, they can be loud and annoying, particularly when they run in packs. They can me mouthy and rebellious and slam doors and roll their eyes spectactularly. Guess what? So did we when we were teens. I don’t know about you, but when I was a teenager, I was a real pain in the ass. I know, it’s hard to imagine, but it’s true. Just ask my mother.
On The Othersiders, though, the teens are presented not as irritating creatures to avoid, but as intelligent beings who have smart things to say. The teens have “jobs” on the show — webmaster, technical manager, etc. They go into creepy, dark places — haunted camp grounds, haunted houses, Alcatraz — in search of proof that ghosts and such exist. Honestly, some of the places they go creep me out just watching them on TV. I don’t think I would be as calm and rational as some of these kids are.
At the end of each episode, the whole team gathers back at their headquarters and reviews all the evidence they gathered, and then votes as a team on whether they think the place they’ve investigated might actually be haunted. This is my favorite part of the show, because I like seeing how carefully these teens peruse their evidence. Zack,the nerdy-but-cute technical manager, and team leader Riley are always the hardest to convince. They don’t actually agree as a group very often that a place really is haunted.
On a recent episode at a haunted campground, though, the team gathered evidence ranging from unexplained thermal “hot spots” to ghostly voices recorded on their high tech recorders. In that case, when the team analyzed all the evidence, they voted unanimously that the camp was haunted – rarely do they all agree that way.
On the Alcatraz episode, KC and Riley just clearly heard banjo music from the shower … that’s the place where for years there have been rumors that one-time Alcatraz guest Al Capone, who reportedly went insane in the prison, used to play his banjo. Creeeeeeepy. Is Alcatraz haunted? Jury’s still out, we have to watch the rest of the episode to find out.
These are smart kids who will later be able to apply their gig on The Outsiders for grown-up jobs. Imagine a future job interview: “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” “Well, I was in Alcatraz and heard Al Capone’s ghost playing his banjo ….” Groovy.

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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