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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, November 7th, 2011 - Comments Off on Dear Santa: I Want This Book for Christmas
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Dear Santa: I Want This Book for Christmas

Hey y’all! Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, has a book coming out next year (you can pre-order it now). She’s one of my favorite reads; she’s totally screwed up in a way that’s very comforting to the rest of us who are also weird, because we read her stories and we think, “Hey, I’m not so bad!” No, seriously. She’s awesome and whenever I’m stressed out from dealing with the minutae of pre-production leading up to shooting Bunker, I can take a break, read Jenny’s latest misadventures with Victor, her long-patient husband, and laugh my ass off. Today’s entry nearly made me snort chai all over my MacBook. An excerpt:

In the elevator, Bob explained that this is a “transient hotel” and I was all, “Like a flophouse?” He just looked at me and I assumed maybe he didn’t know what a flophouse was, so I clarified, “You mean, like a crack house?” He was still quiet, so to fill the awkward silence I said, “Because this is the swankiest damn crack house I’ve ever been in.” Then more people got on the elevator and they stared at me and I assumed they were staring because they only heard the last part of our conversation, so I further clarified “Not that I’ve been in a lot of crack houses, I mean. I was just being polite.”

In hindsight, it’s possible that they staring at me because I was carrying a dead mouse and because the hotel porter had a hot-pink purse on his shoulder, and not because I was bragging about all the crack houses I hadn’t been to. It didn’t really matter though because we got off on the next floor, and then Bob explained that a “transient hotel” is one where people stay overnight. I explained that normal people just call that “a hotel.”

You can read the full entry right here, but you should not probably not drink your chai or coffee or vodka while reading it, lest you snort it all over your MacBook from laughing.

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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