MCN Blogs
Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Sunday, June 5th, 2011 - Comments Off on SIFF Dispatch: In Which Our Raptured Car is Found, Safe and Sound
Be Sociable, Share!

SIFF Dispatch: In Which Our Raptured Car is Found, Safe and Sound

Good news! My mom’s car, which was raptured/stolen from the parking lot during the Renton SIFF screening of The Sound of Mumbai a couple weeks ago, has been found in an apartment complex in Auburn, empty of gas and littered with burrito wrappers but otherwise fine. Whew.

I can’t really say the Renton police department did anything spectacular or daring to get it back — they pretty much told my mom that they don’t actually look for your car at all if it gets stolen, they just basically make a note of it in the computer system, and if it turns up somewhere parked illegally, they will very sweetly call and tell you so you can (maybe) come and get it before it gets impounded and you have to pay out hundreds of dollars to get it back.

So last night as we were waiting in line at the DQ to get our pack of kids ice cream following the big year-end school performance for their music classes, my cell phone rang, and the Auburn police were on the line to tell me my mom’s car had been found, and if she could come and get it RIGHT NOW they wouldn’t impound it. We quickly completed our ice cream order and loaded the kids into our new(ish), very clean purple van, Grape Ape, with DQ Blizzards threatening to drip all over the cloth seats (the van’s one bad feature — I wanted leather seats, but the van was otherwise too good a deal to pass up).

I uttered vague threats of bathroom-cleaning duty and loss of video game privileges if anyone dripped their Blizzards on the cloth seats, we rushed back home to drop me and the kids off, and my endlessly patient and kind husband very sweetly schlepped way the hell out to Auburn with my mom to retrieve her Subaru, which is now resting in its place in the driveway, heaving a sigh of relief and recovering from its two-week ordeal.

The SIFF staff, who have all been very great throughout and were concerned about the vanishing automobile, can breathe a sigh of relief , as can the City of Renton, whose officials were probably not happy to have a journalist’s car stolen from the parking lot of their SIFF venue just as they were building a relationship with the fest. I can stop feeling guilty for driving my mom’s car to Renton and it’s subsequent disappearance. Hooray!

All is well. But it’s only Day 18 of SIFF, and there’s still another whole week of movies and parties and all-night passholder happy hours at Boom Noodle to go. Back to the movies.

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments Off on SIFF Dispatch: In Which Our Raptured Car is Found, Safe and Sound

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