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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 - 1 Comment »
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Of Weddings and Such

This time last year, I was getting ready for major surgery, waiting for doctors to take things apart and put them back together and tell me if the tumor in my pancreas had been caught before it turned malignant. At the same time, my marriage was ending. In short, my life was in a state of turmoil. Mostly, I spent a lot of time lying in bed or on the couch, buried in awards seasons screeners to distract me.

If you’d told me a year ago that I would ever get remarried, I would have told you that you were crazy, that I’d sworn off relationships and that maybe when my kids were all grown I might just move to New York or go off and become a Buddhist nun or join the Peace Corps or something interesting like that. But get married again? Bah.

But, life has a way of working things out, even when you don’t know what you want — or think you know, but really don’t. This past weekend, I married my fiance, Mike, who I met in the midst of all this turmoil, and who calmly and patiently waited for the storm of my life to settle down enough to allow me to open my heart to him. It’s been a bit of a crazy couple weeks, with me and my youngest daughter both deciding to come down with walking pneumonia the week of the wedding, and new in-laws coming in town, and much wedding craziness capping off months of planning and organizing and merging two households of stuff, six kids, two dogs and two hamsters into one house.

It’s been a hectic few weeks as we got closer to the big day, and while I kept up with my editing work my writing has been a bit more sporadic and in spurts of available time and energy. I have a growing stack of screeners at the foot of my bed, and if yours is among them I promise, I am working on getting to it. Other than general life stuff and holidays and such, my work energy is firmly back and focused on awards screeners, and getting back into my regular writing groove.

It’s been a crazy year-and-a-half or so, but it feels like things are finally settling down into something resembling normal again (or at least, as close to normal as my life gets). On with the show.

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One Response to “Of Weddings and Such”

  1. Gus says:
    November 16, 2010 at 10:40 am

    A huge congratulations to you. The turnaround sounds like a blessing.

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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