MCN Blogs
Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Marriage of the Minds

Well, this is some welcome news, even if it means I might have to finally suck it up and subscribe to HBO. Variety reports that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Wonder Boys, Mysteries of Pittsburgh) and his wife, writer Ayelet Waldman, have a project set up at HBO called Hobgoblin, about conmen and magicians using their skills to battle Hitler during WW2.

Chabon just happens to be my favorite (living) writer, and I’m quite a fan of Waldman, who I’ve been reading and loosely corresponding with since way back when I was mommy blogging on my previous blog, Catawampus, and she was mommy blogging on Bad Mother. Chabon may be the better known of the pair, but I’ve always loved Waldman’s sass and style. I asked her once many years ago how she dealt with “competing” with Chabon when it came to work and she replied simply, “I don’t.” Well, exactly.

This project marks the first time the couple is collaborating on a project — at least professionally. They’ve already survived marriage with four kids for quite a while now, so I expect they’ve hammered a lot of the balance of how they work together out a bit. I’ll be following this project with interest, so stay tuned.

By the bye, if you’ve been wondering what’s up with the adaptation of Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, it’s apparently still a go at Sony with Scott Rudin and the Coens. Good news on that front as well … though I’m still waiting for Kavalier and Clay, which still appears to be “in development.”

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments are closed.

Quote Unquotesee all »

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