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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, June 28th, 2012 - Comments Off on (60) Days of Summer
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(60) Days of Summer

Today was the first official day of summer for us; last day of classes was last Friday, but since Luka was in the hospital Monday and Tuesday I’m not counting them as summer. Usually, summer is a time I set aside for being a little lazy and spending a lot of time relaxing with my kids before Toronto and awards season. This year, though, there’s just so much I want to get done and this is the time to do it. My plate is very full right now, and it’s a good thing I’m skilled at multitasking and being well-organized (yet another unexpected side benefit of my years as a project manager in tech).

Right now I’m working with some amazing women to organize a massively structured Homeschool PTSA that could end up being a model for similar groups nationwide. It’s exciting to be breaking new ground, and while it’s a lot of work and a bit of a time and energy suck, it’s also very important work we’re doing here, in building this foundation of connection for homeschooling families in our region. It needs to be done, and we’re trying to do it well; fortunately we have some formidably brainy businesswomen on our Board and we are kicking butt and taking names getting things organized.

I’m very excited also about an indie film collective I’m working on with a carefully curated group of ridiculously talented Northwest filmmakers. There is so much potential in what we’re starting to work on, if we can just organize it right and maintain a commitment to the ideas we’re batting about. Much more on that later as it starts to gel.

My other major summer project, work-wise, is finishing up two scripts I’m working on, and getting a good start on a third. I want to be work-shopping and peer-reviewing the script I want to develop first by August, which is an ambitious deadline given that I want to get in a couple of revision passes myself before I bring it to a group of peers. I’m also going to be doing make-up design for Alice in Wonderland, which means two casts of roughly 70 faces to get fantasy make-up on, fast. But I’ve done make-up for Alice before, and it’s one of my favorites to design. Besides which, my kids are all in the play so I have to be a the theater for tech week anyhow. Might as well be doing something fun, right? Oh, yeah, and I got called for jury duty on July 5.

And then I do intend also to spend some lazy days at the beach with my kids, and we’re going camping a couple times with some groups of families with kids. I’m really looking forward to both those trips, and to hanging out with some good friends while our kids get to spend a few days unplugged, playing in the sand, frolicking in the ocean, fishing, and climbing trees.

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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