MCN Blogs
Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, July 4th, 2011 - Comments Off on Independence Day
Be Sociable, Share!

Independence Day

A while back over on the Hot Blog, David was asking folks to share summer movie memories, and since one of my clearest summer movie memories has to do with this holiday, I thought I’d share with the group.

July, 1996

Jay and I are living in Rochester, New York, having relocated from Fort Lee, New Jersey a few months earlier so he could be nearer to his family. My daughter Meg and my mom have gone to Oklahoma to visit my family for a month, so it is just the two of us there on the long Fourth of July weekend when I realize that maybe I’m pregnant.

We’d been kinda-sorta trying, with the “if it happens, great” attitude many young couples have. I do the pregnancy test in secret, not wanting to stress Jay out for no reason. It’s positive, and I have a brief moment of “Okay, people, this is not a drill!” before joy sets in. I tell Jay, and can tell by his expression that he’s feeling that same mixture of happiness and trepidation. We decide to go see Independence Day to celebrate.

We get there a little late and have to sit in the front; the theater is packed. The smell of popcorn and fake buttery topping is overwhelming and I excuse myself a couple times to heave in the bathroom, thankful we’re in the front row so I don’t have to keep stepping on people.

At some point in the movie, I become aware that Jay’s hand is resting on my belly, which already has that feeling of being with a child, even though I’m just two months or so along. I catch his eye in the dark of the theater, and we smile at each other. In a few weeks when Meg and my mom get home, we will tell them our news, but for now, we are the only people in the world who know that our baby is growing inside me.

Seven months later our daughter Neve is born. She was going to be named Aleishia, but a couple months before her birth Jay and I go to see Scream and both of us like the look of Neve Campbell’s name on the screen. We’re not enamored of the Dutch pronunciation “Nev,” but a little research reveals the Portugese version is pronounced “Neeve” and that both mean “snow.” We live in Rochester, which competes with Buffalo for most snow inches a year, so that seems appropriate. The day Neve is born there is heavy snowfall bordering on blizzard conditions, and that seals the deal. Neve she will be.

Happy Independence Day.

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments Off on Independence Day

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