diane wonders if she can hire these guys to answer the phone
3 miles in 25 minutes. For those of you without the Calculator DA (do they even call them DAs anymore?), that's an 8.3 minute mile. And I did the first 1.9 miles 7.8 minute miles, which means I slowed down a lot...but the remaining 1.1 miles are all uphill.
I feel better. She can see my script now.
As Pooks reminded me, the object at this stage is to get read by everybody and anybody. If they want to see it, show it to them. (The script, of course--what did you think I meant?) And you never know who's going to read it, love it, think it's great, show it to someone else. Every little thing helps.
Linda sounded to me on the phone like she's going to do the free option with those producers, because when she met with them today she liked them. And she decided that they were acting more like agents than like producers, taking the script around to various places, and she doesn't expect to get paid by her agent. I reminded her that a year-long option would tie one of her scripts up for a year; she wouldn't be able to do anything with it. She doesn't care.
(It's funny: I know she's going to do it because she launched into a long explanation of why it might be a good thing to do, and I immediately thought, You're not trying to convince me, you're trying to convince you. It reminded me a bit of when I was a kid and wanted to get my story all worked out before I presented it to my parents--I knew I was going to do x, y, or z, I just wanted to be able to explain why.)
I drove to USC today and picked up a copy of the Script List. While I was at it, I picked one up for Linda, because I had to drop off some pages at Len's house and Linda lives near him. I paged through it: while it won't set any standards for layout anytime soon, it is head and shoulders above what was put out even last year, which was roughly the equivalent of a list down a page, dittoed. (For those of you who don't remember ditto machines, with their horrible blue ink and delicious brain-cell-destroying chemical smells, trust me: comparing the Script List output to a ditto machine is not a compliment.)
A few of my classmates have gone to Defcon 4 over some of the errors in the Script List: loglines were edited, secondary scripts were left off, and there are some egregious spelling mistakes. Linda couldn't believe it wasn't proofread; I said, "Proofread? They should have run spellcheck at least!"
Carolann evidently sent mail to Linda complaining that she'd been getting some phone calls off the Script List, but they were all "nobodies."
I said, "As opposed to the calibre of people she's been dealing with up until this point."
The entire reason for Carolann to send that e-mail was to let Linda know that she'd been contacted by producers and managers. And Linda and I had guessed beforehand that she'd do it. Some things are simply predictable.
Darin and I went to see Small Soldiers this afternoon. We both went in with low expectations--the trailer for this movie was just terrible--and we were both pleasantly surprised. If you liked Gremlins, you'll probably like this movie. Plots can't get any simpler--put military hardware into toy, watch toy take over world--and the real fun is in wondering, How are they going to get out of this one?
The characters with the most personality are, of course, the dolls, and the only voices we could consistently recognize are Frank Langella as Archer, leader of the Gorgonites, and Tommy Lee Jones as Chip Hazard, leader of the Commando Elite. (The military toys, by the way, are the bad guys in this movie, no matter what you might think from the preview.) Chip Hazard delivers a pretty funny rah-rah speech to the troops in front of an American flag pieced together from a jigsaw puzzle. Pretty funny.
I could have listened to Frank Langella's voice for days, however. Anybody else remember him as the amazingly sexy Dracula from only 20 years ago? Good Lord.
One of the amazing things in this movie that neither Darin nor I expected but both enjoyed immensely is that there is a payoff for everything--the tiniest little plot throwaway isn't. Which is not to say that this is a tight plot on the order of Back To The Future (there ain't nothing that tight these days), just that they use stuff you'd never expect. As opposed to most movies, where they present Plot Device A and Plot Device B and they'd better show us how they work, because they're going to Use This Later.
The major downside (for me) of this kid's movie is that the message is, You don't have to be violent, but if you're faced with violence you must be violent in return.
On the way home, Darin said to me he really hates movies where technology is used interchangeably with magic. He doesn't think we'll be able to build anything like this for a thousand years, and now the masses will think we can do this today. We can't, folks. Although if we could, Denis Leary's suggestion at the end of the movie for what to do with the toys would be snapped up like that.
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