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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, April 7th, 2011 - 11 Comments »
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AOL vs Cinematical: The Final(ish) Chapter

While I was traveling to Dallas all day Wednesday for the Dallas International Film Fest, things continued to implode around Moviefone and what’s left of Cinematical.

Moviefone editor Patricia Chui first sent an email out to freelancers attempting to provide them with some information about what was going down, then had to retract the bit where she said canned freelancers would be able to blog for FREE, and ultimately was fired.

I’m not going to regurgitate everything you already know at this point. Anne Thompson does a good job of breaking it all down over at Thompson on Hollywood if you’re not up to speed.

What I will say is this: The first email Patricia Chui sent, though it certainly generated a lot of backlash, is the single most honest piece of information the Moviefone and Cinematical writers received through all this bullshit since the HuffPo merger. Sure, it pissed off the higher ups and got her unceremoniously fired, but you know what?

She needed to get the hell out of their anyhow, she no doubt knew the axe was coming her way eventually, and Patricia is a decent person who, I suspect, felt badly about the way the writers were being treated and wanted to at least communicate fairly and honestly with them. So Patricia: I’m sorry you got fired. But you’re better off.

That’s all I have to say about it for now, other than this: If Jason Calacanis put the money into starting a new version of Cinematical tomorrow (he’d have to call it something else, because those assholes at AOL would likely not give him the name back even when they kill the brand off entirely), I suspect many of the Cinematical editors who’ve resigned recently and writers who just got canned would join him in a heartbeat to bring back the site its many loyal readers once loved.

And this: Writers, I implore you, do NOT write for Arianna Huffington or AOL, whether you are paid or not. AOL is a destroyer. Its MO is to buy the competition and, ultimately, obliterate it. The sole focus of the higher ups is traffic, and when you aim for a wide scattershot with a web site, your writing inevitably dilutes accordingly to meet a lower watermark.

And this: Readers, I implore you, boycott AOL/HuffPo. Don’t give them traffic by reading their content. Don’t give them traffic by linking to their content. BOYCOTT, BOYCOTT, BOYCOTT.

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11 Comments »

11 Responses to “AOL vs Cinematical: The Final(ish) Chapter”

  1. Jette Kernion says:
    April 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm

    I’m with you, Kim. I even sent a note out to all Slackerwood contributors on Monday telling them that we would no longer be publishing links to AOL or HuffPo content on the site, with the occasional exception of pre-HuffPo Cinematical articles.

  2. Kim Voynar says:
    April 7, 2011 at 12:12 pm

    Jette, good for you.

  3. NickF says:
    April 7, 2011 at 1:15 pm

    I’ll delete Huff’s bookmark when I’m on my home PC.

  4. Don Murphy says:
    April 8, 2011 at 9:10 am

    Why are you attacking AOL and defending Cinematical (a bullshit site if there ever was one)? Didn’t you already abandon the site years ago so you could afford to eat more pie?

  5. Kim Voynar says:
    April 8, 2011 at 10:58 am

    Don, you were not invited to this discussion, and if you comment here again I will delete it without further discussion. I don’t know what the hell your problem with me is, with the thinly veiled insults and other such BS, but you make yourself look very foolish with your attacks on me.

    Grow the fuck up. Or go take your little boy pissing-in-the-sandbox nonsense over to Hot Blog, where David, for whatever reason, tolerates your presence. It’s not welcome here, and neither are you.

    Better yet, go wallow in your piles of cash and build something shiny for other little boys to play with. There are people, I’m sure, who like you. Go find them.

  6. Don Murphy says:
    April 8, 2011 at 12:31 pm

    Comment deleted.

  7. Don Murphy says:
    April 8, 2011 at 10:51 pm

    Comment deleted.

  8. Don Murphy says:
    April 9, 2011 at 6:55 pm

    Comment deleted.

  9. Don Murphy says:
    April 10, 2011 at 10:37 am

    Comment deleted.

  10. notwoz says:
    April 10, 2011 at 3:09 pm

    The truth is you are a misogynistic troll who should be doing something better than bullying someone who simply expressed her opinion in her column.

  11. notwoz says:
    April 10, 2011 at 3:11 pm

    No lie here: You are a bully who should not harass a writer expressing their opinion in their own column. Don’t you have a robot toy you can torture or something.

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