Echo

Rejection

I watched Remember the Titans for the first time tonight. What an awesome, uplifting movie! I’m partial to sports movies anyway, but not since Monster’s Ball have a cried like that while watching a movie. It’s such an inspirational story, with amazing characters. The fact that it’s based on a true story just makes it.

Afterwards, I was watching the DVD features and they talk with the screenwriter. He tells a story about how, after writing the script, his agent said, “If this doesn’t sell, we’re in the wrong business,” and then they go out with it, and it tanks. It was turned down by every studio, even multiple times by some, and everywhere they went, they only got a “No.” The screenwriter talks about how he was trying to drum up the courage to tell the guys that the movie was based on that no one in Hollywood was interested in making their story, when Bruckheimer called and asked to see it, and it all went from there. They get a sound byte from Bruck saying how sometimes, you just need one person to believe in a project to get it rolling.

What an amazing story. If you’ve seen the movie, then you know that in itself, the events are wonderful and tragic and uplifting. But to hear that such a great tale was rejected over and over by the powers that be in Hollywood, is a reminder that as a writer (or director or actor or whatever you are), you can’t let that stuff get you down. You can’t take the No as a reflection of your work. You just have to believe in it, and sometimes, things that seem dead in the water are given new life when the timing is right. You just have to keep the faith.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen the movie, watch it.

Why Brian is a dialogue-machine:

(on his co-worker being in Amsterdam):

“He’s probably smoking some hash right now while watching some skank juice oranges with her cooter.”

Last Night’s Dream

I was in my high school, which was actually this large, multi-level building like a large mall rather than the flat shitspread that it actually is. There had been a serial killer loose there for a while, and I was the criminal-behavioral psychologist who had been profiling him. I had recently made public statements that the killer was a latent homosexual and most likely impotent, trying to rile him up and push him into making a mistake.

I was hanging around the school, hoping to catch him lurking when I saw some people suddenly screaming and running. Knowing it was him and that he had been pushed into a killing spree in broad daylight, I tried to sneak into the area to try to catch a glimpse of him. Unfortunately, he saw me and started chasing me. We ran through the halls and up stairs and he was one level behind me. I knew that if I slowed down even a little bit, he’d catch me. He was a tall, lean guy in his 30’s, very wiry and fast (looked like that dude from Scissor Sisters but not flaming). So we’re running and I’m on the verge of getting away by faking him out and going down another staircase rather than up and creating distance between us, when for reasons I had no idea, I decided to stop running, even as my brain screamed, what the fuck are you doing?!?

I stopped and turned around abruptly. He came running around the corner and stopped, looking kind of confused but nevertheless, thrilled with his good luck. He approached me menacingly.

I said to him, “I know you’ve been watching me and the things I’ve said about you in the press. We’ve been playing a little cat and mouse game, haven’t we? But let’s be honest–you didn’t come here to kill me. You came here to fuck me.”

And sure enough, there was that sexual tension sitting between us that was now out in the open and on the table and boom…he rips off his shirt and that man was ripped.

So we’re back at my parents house, in my room, having sex, but rather than this being a sex dream, I’m in my head thinking…the impotence was a profiler bluff but the homosexuality was something I believed to be a part of his profile. And here I was having unprotected sex with him. So I asked him if he’d had unprotected sex with men and he said he’d been with two men. I asked him if he’d been tested and he said no. And I flipped out that I was at risk.

Dawn was breaking and I knew I had to get him out of my house before my parents woke up so I walked him out, but when I came back in, I saw my mom wandering the hall in her pajamas. I could tell she was looking for me because she had probably looked into my room to check on me as a mom thing that she does and had seen that I wasn’t in my bed. I was also worried that she had noticed, um…stains on the sheets or something and would know what I had been up to.