MCN Columnists
Kim Voynar

Voynar By Kim VoynarVoynar@moviecitynews.com

Roger and Me

When I was a little girl growing up in Oklahoma City, I was a little geek who read books voraciously and wrote incessantly. I told stories to myself while walking to school to pass the time. I scribbled stories during class, hiding a notebook inside my textbook so my teachers wouldn’t know what I was…

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Yellow-facing and White-washing: The Racial Issues Raised by the Casting of The Last Airbender

I’ve been loosely following the whole kerfuffle surrounding the casting of M. Night Shyamalan‘s live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender (renamed The Last Airbender, presumably to avoid confusion with James Cameron‘s Avatar project), wherein the lead characters of the Asian-influenced animated television series have magically become white people in the live-action version. Avatar is one of my own kids’…

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Drunken Sex or Date Rape? A Look at the Issues Raised by Observe and Report

There’s been a bit of a brouhaha stirring over opening weekend about the alleged “date rape” scene in Observe and Report. When the film played at SXSW I didn’t hear a single person even mention this scene as being at all controversial. Now, as the film is seen – or not seen – by a larger…

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What’s the Truth About Objectivity in Documentaries?

The idea of a documentary film tends to evoke a certain perception that what we’re seeing on-screen is purely non-fiction, a “document of the truth.” But is it possible to say that any documentary encapsulates some objective idea of “truth,” as opposed to the story the filmmaker seeks to tell, albeit through footage taken from…

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Gentle Pressure, Relentlessly Applied: Women’s Voices in a Man’s World

Hip-hop music is a male-dominated field, although there have long been female voices fighting for a place above the testosterone-heavy fray. When the predominant voice of a culture, artistically, politically, and socially, belongs to one gender, how does the other perspective get heard — and, when it is heard, taken seriously? This weighed heavily on…

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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