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Things have been in a holding pattern as I'm still doing exactly the same thing I've been doing for a while. Pitching. Writing. Entertaining visitors. Studios slowly say no and we're running out of them. After six weeks of running around, we still might just have to write the thing on spec and see what happens. But if all this is for naught, it's really not (no terrible joke intended) - because we have met a lot of people and garnered a lot of fans and we're still up for this rewrite gig and one of the production co's could always buy it out of their discretionary fun and la la la. And in running around pitching a movie and talking to movie people and going to movie studios, I've been thinking a lot about movies lately. I realized the other day that one of the most happy times for me, ever, is sitting in a movie theatre with the trailers going (some of the "buy popcorn" things they have here with popcorn buying a girl-drink a drink and then popping his own corn with excitement over a kiss makes me nauseous and I actually have to close my eyes) and the movie ahead of me. Really, the whole movie experience does it for me. Even just the look of the theatre marquis and the smell of the popcorn. Even paying way too much for drinks and trying to find where I put my ticket and balancing everything as I find a seat and hoping no one huge sits in front of me. I love putting my jacket on the seat next to me if the theatre isn't too crowded and turning off my cell phone and the inevitable moment after the previews when you've been so caught up that you've forgotten what film you're there to see. I like seeing which studio is putting out what and bitching about them showing too much of the film in the trailers and laughing about the pointlessness of closing the curtains after the trailers and then opening them right back up for the feature as they do in some theatres I go to. I love stadium seating and theatres where you enter down by the screen and even the theatre on Vermont where the front row is actually higher than the last row, where I saw Anthony Kedis either sleeping or weeping during Dancer in the Dark. I love it all. Last night I was recording the latest film I saw in the theatre, Swordfish, which I very much enjoyed. (It was loud and stupid and directed by a hack, but fun and exciting and ten times more satisfying than Shrek or the ass that is Moulin Rouge.) I was writing this down on my 78-page computer document of every movie I've seen in the theatre since 1990. I started it as a lark, along with the books I read, but have kept on keeping on, and now it's an invaluable document. It has the date, who I saw it with, and a rating. Obsessive and weird, yeah, but I love it. Reading back over the years is like a timeline of my life. People I no longer see. People I don't even remember who they are, I've gone to movies with. I discovered last night two girls I didn't even remember dating until I saw that I'd seen The Cowboy Way with one and A Kiss Before Dying with the other. It's also quite funny to see how much I remember about certain movies, and how I can't even remember a thing about others (hello Diggstown, I'm looking in your shitty direction). I can look back and remember films I made out during the entire thing, or ones I walked out on, or fell asleep during. I remember being in a fight during entire movies, or being on a first date during another. And, there is always the embarrassing incident of drinking beer during a double-feature and trying to pee into a cup so I didn't have to leave and miss the upcoming promised titty-shot in Indecident Proposal, but we'll just pretend that's someone else's story, shall we? So while I run around town and paint the picture of my script for movies executives and get tired and bored and upset at the rejection and the near-misses and the dismissals, I occasionally remember that I'm not selling hairbrushes or vacuums plots of land in South Florida, but something I love and enjoy and would no matter what path I'd chosen for my life, and suddenly paying ten stupid dollars to valet park while pitching for a visiting and bored-looking New York exec at the Polo Lounge, as I did yesterday, isn't so bad.
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