MCN Columnists
Kim Voynar

Voynar By Kim VoynarVoynar@moviecitynews.com

In Which We Discuss the Need for Nicolas Cage to Stop Making Bad Movies

I like Nicolas Cage, but he needs a new agent. Whatever happened to the Cage who started out making films like Racing with the Moon, Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona and Moonstruck? Or the later Cage, who intrigued with potent, evocative performances in Wild at Heart and Leaving Las Vegas? Or even the Cage who carried solid, action-packed films like The Rock…

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SXSW’s Janet Pierson on Stepping Up to the Plate and Out of the Shadows

Photo Credit: Jason Whyte This is Janet Pierson‘s “Hillary Moment,” and she’s loving every minute of it. For Pierson, taking over the reins of the South by Southwest is something that’s been decades in the making. Pierson started college at 16, where she quickly determined that film was going to be a part of her future. …

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The Big Blue Elephant in the Corner of the Room

Who’s afraid of the big blue cock, indeed? Watchmen finally opened this weekend, and all around the internet film journalists are endlessly analyzing the film’s opening weekend box office take, and whether the film will make back its bank, and how many DVDs it will have to sell to break even, and whether a Blu-ray Watchmen…

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What Will Women Watch(men)?

I’m looking forward to seeing Watchmen tonight. I know what’s coming, having read the graphic novel and hearing from early reviews that the film is as true to the source material as it is to the costumes. So as a woman who’s not terribly enamored of violence in films, how will I react to watching that…

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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