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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, May 14th, 2011 - Comments Off on Hey, is There Some Film Fest Going on in France or Something?
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Hey, is There Some Film Fest Going on in France or Something?

Chances are pretty good, if you’re one of my film industry colleagues, that you’re over in France at this little fest called Cannes right now. Maybe you’ve heard of it … you know, the Cannes Film Festival? Fairly significant fest in the film world. You can tell because Lady Gaga performed there the other day:

No, really, it actually is an important film festival. If you’re there, you’re staying busy eating panini while standing in line, or fighting your way through crowds star-gazing on the Croisette, or soaking up the best of the world’s cinema, or frantically downing free espresso shots in the press lounge, or arguing about the films you’re seeing with other critics over late-night drinks or an early morning cafe au lait.

And chances are pretty good that if you’ve got time to read this, you, like me, are not at Cannes. But, no fear! Like me, you can keep up on everything you’re missing by not being at the Cannes Film Festival this year by keeping abreast of what’s happening over there via indieWIRE and IFC.

indieWIRE — which, as always, seems to have everyone but the building janitor over on the ground at Cannes — has an ongoing, comprehensive list of the films screening at Cannes, with regularly updated criticWIRE grades so you can keep track of what’s hot and what’s not. It’s even conveniently broken down into competition, not in competition, special screenings, and Un Certain Regard.

I’m hearing from friends who are in Cannes that this is a very, very good year to be there. Looking over the current grades on Day Four of the fest, either the critics generally are just so excited to be both employed AND at Cannes that they’re in an exceptionally generous mood, or this year really is an exceptionally good year to be there, because you won’t find many films garnering less than a “B” average. At a fest where the critics will loudly boo and whistle if they hate a film, that’s not so bad, n’est-ce pas?

Also for your jealousy-arousing reading pleasure, IFC is rounding up all the news and reviews out of Cannes with their Can’t Be at Cannes feature (thanks, guys). Oddly enough, the big news IFC has for Friday — from Cannes, mind you — is that Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest guru Tim League announced there his plans for an anthology film called The ABC’s of Death — 26 shorts, by 26 horror directors, with each short being about a different method of killing. One for each letter of the alphabet.

Pretty cool.

Alright, it’s the weekend, so if you’re not at Cannes working your cinephile fanny off, be good to yourself and go do something fun. I’m going to go off and do fairy makeup for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, myself. But later on tonight, perhaps I’ll sit on my back deck with some vodka tonics and argue about films with my husband and my dogs while playing this video, shot (not by me) at the Le Petit Majestic during Cannes 2007.

It will be almost, but not quite, exactly like not being there. Ah, well. C’est la vie.

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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