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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 - Comments Off on QOTD: Hot Tub Time Machine
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QOTD: Hot Tub Time Machine

Here’s a random question for you: If you could go in a Hot Tub Time Machine back to one year of your life, which year would it be, and what, if anything, would you change?
My serious (somewhat doomy-gloomy) answer is after the jump. What’s yours?


There are a lot of years I might want to go back to, but the thing is that every link in the chain of my life is intertwined, leading to the place I am now. And while it’s been a rough, oh, five or so years now in a lot of ways in my personal life, without all those past links I likely wouldn’t be working in this field that I love, wouldn’t have my wonderful children … and who can say that what I would have had would have been better?
I could go back to 1984, the year my best friend committed suicide. If I had that to do over again, I could have followed my gut, gone to check on her that night, and saved her life before it was too late. It’s a terrible thing, to carry that guilt for so many years, it lives within me still and probably always will. BUT … because of the grief I went through in the wake of her loss, I was in a certain place at a certain time to meet the guy who would become the father of my oldest daughter, and my oldest and dearest friend. And wouldn’t that be a terrible choice to be in a position to make — to have to choose whether save my best friend or have my future kids?
Because I had Meg, my oldest, I made other choices that eventually led me to Seattle, and then to NYC, where I met and fell in love with the father of my four younger kids (and eventually, back to Seattle, where our marriage would fall apart). And in spite of the heart-shredding this relationship has cost me, I wouldn’t trade that pain away and not have these kids in my life. There are many other things I would willingly give up to not have gone through the pain of the ending of my marriage, but not my children.
Or I could go back to 1995, a year when I hit one of those life forks and made a choice to walk away from a potential relationship with a guy who ended up being a multi-millionaire in the dot com industry. He was (and probably still is) a nice guy, and maybe that would have been a good path to take, or maybe that, too, would have ended sadly. BUT … because I chose the other path I have my four younger children, and I wouldn’t trade any one of them for all the dot-com millions in the world. Sure, I probably would have had other kids, but they wouldn’t be THESE kids, each of them a unique treasure who lights up every day of my life and buoys me up when the bullshit of life drags me down in its undertow.
That’s the thing about the fantasy of time travel and “do-overs.” It’s nice to daydream about things we would have or could have or should have done, but at the end of the day we’re where we are because of those choices. I might not always like the stress of where I am at a given moment, but there are absolutely enough blessings in the here and now for me to say honestly, “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

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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