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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, July 13th, 2011 - Comments Off on Go See This: Crime After Crime
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Go See This: Crime After Crime

In between last minute hectic tasks surrounding my daughter’s wedding, I finally managed to squeeze in watching the screener of Sundance doc Crime After Crime that came in the mail the other day. The film is playing LA and NY through July 14 before expanding to a city near you.

If you happen to live in Rochester, NY, my former adopted hometown, you can catch it at one of my fave old haunts, the Little Theater, July 14 as a part of the Ames-Amzalak Rochester Jewish Film Festival, and if you’re in San Francisco, you can catch it July 24 at the Castro during the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. If you’re in neither of those places, there’s a nice list of limited release cities — including Seattle — where you’ll be able to catch it. And if you haven’t seen yet, even if you think docs about social justice are boring, trust me on this … get thee to a theater and see this film.

Crime After Crime follows the lengthy pro bono battle by a pair of attorneys who normally practice land use law to free Debbie Peagler, who in 1983 pled guilty to first degree murder in the death of her husband, Oliver Wilson, who, it was documented in legal papers, battered, harassed and threatened her and sexually abused her daughter. Director Yoav Potash unravels Debbie’s complex legal case with exemplary storytelling that tracks the eight year long battle undertaken by Josh Safran and Nadia Costa to gain justice and freedom for Debbie under a California law that allows the cases of battered women in prison for a crime related to their abuse to be reheard with that evidence taken into consideration.

The film is skillfully edited and scored, weaving eight years of events into a seamlessly told story that makes excellent use of suspense and emotion; if you don’t want to throttle everyone in the LA District Attorneys office — especially former DA Steve Cooley, who gave Safran and Costa a letter agreeing to lower the charges against Debbie to manslaughter (which carried a six-year maximum sentence in 1983) and set her free, only to renege on that promise shortly thereafter — well, I expect you’d be in the minority among those who see this film.

Crime After Crime‘s socio-political and racial implications are reminiscent of another doc that debuted at Sundance, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s excellent Oscar-nommed Trouble the Water, about the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the levee on poor African-American New Orlean’s residents.

I love docs about all kinds of subjects. Where narratives tell our stories, documentaries capture slices of our history and our humanity in all their moments of light and darkness. Crime After Crime reveals both the darker and lighter sides of human nature, but dwells most heavily on the light, through Safran and Costa, of course, for their tireless effort to free Debbie Peagler, a woman they didn’t even know when they agreed to take on her case, but most especially for Debbie herself, who personifies grace, dignity and humanity through trial and tribulation most of us couldn’t begin to imagine living through.

See this film. You can see when it’s coming to a city near you — or request that it screen in your town if it isn’t slated there yet — right here on the film’s website.

Here’s the film’s trailer:

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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