Darin and I are being obscenely cute this evening. He'll call me, we'll talk for a few minutes, then I'll call him, and so on.
I'm waiting for the Babylon 5 repeat to come on. Tonight's X-Files was great, wasn't it? "Memoirs of the Cancer Man." Who here votes that he's Mulder's father? Glen Morgan told us how he came up with this story idea (one that doesn't include Mulder and Scully, did you notice?) -- that Cancer Man is responsible for all the great conspiracies of the past 30 years. (Well, as of 5 days from now, the past 33 years.)
I have, however, just seen the most ridiculous scene ever committed to a crime show -- no, really. I turned on Jack Reed: Death and Vengeance and found Sergei, some kind of Russian Mafia hitman, mounting an assault on an apartment -- I guess he had to go kill someone. It turns out half the police force is waiting for him.
They tell him to drop it, it being the grenade launcher or whatever he's got tucked under one arm.
So he does -- well, he drops his arm and holds on to the gun.
And all the cops lower their weapons.
Hello? I think not.
Of course Sergei blasts his way out of there and manages to escape.
This is intensely stupid. What's on VH-1?
Today I woke up and worked myself into a lather about what I was going to do about my documentary. I knew I needed someone to come with me, just to give me that little push on the bicycle without training wheels.
So I called:
Dammit.
Don't I know anyone in the Greater Los Angeles area who isn't doing something on a Sunday?
I called Tiffany. I knew she had work to do -- there's a talk she's giving on Tuesday and she had the flu the other day, but maybe I could drag her out for some coffee while I try to get this act together.
"Hey, sure!" she said. The stomach flu had passed. "I have to work on my talk and there are a couple of questions I want to ask you about it."
Um, Tiff...I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV.
"My talk's on linguistic aspects of asphasia. You majored in Linguistics."
No price was too high to pay for help doing this documentary, and sooner or later Tiffany's going to find out I'm a twit, so what the heck. I met her at her apartment and she read me the talk she's going to give and gave me the handout to follow along with. I think I asked one intelligent question, which probably made my participation all worthwhile. She also liked having a sounding board, which made it clear to her how she needed to reorganize her task.
Then we headed out, camera in hand. We walked along Main Street in Santa Monica. And guess what? Tiffany does not have a shy bone in her body. She stopped people on the street, corralled clerks in the Ben & Jerry's, interrupted conversations.
"How can you be so extroverted?" I asked her. I've never thought of Tiffany as being an in-your-face kind of person, but here she was, Ms. Investigative Reporter.
"This is the kind of thing I have to do all the time," she said. Oh...yeah. As a doctor she has to introduce herself to new patients all the time, make them immediately comfortable, and find out what's bothering them, in the space of 15 minutes. Walking up to someone and asking them to participate in a film project is no problem next to that.
Well, we got some great responses to the question I asked. (Or rather, Tiffany asked.) As explanation for why I wanted to do this project...a couple of years ago, I had heard that a TV news station had done man-in-the-street interviews with this question and gotten a positive response from every single person. I wanted to see if this was true.
The question asked: "How's the screenplay coming?"
Most people weren't working on one, but they immediately could string a line of b.s. you wouldn't believe. "It's got cowboys...and Martians. I've been working on it since 1972. I don't want to say too much." There were a few people who actually were writing screenplays. And the only person who wouldn't talk to us on camera was a woman who was actually reading a screenplay.
We were on a roll -- Tiffany is great at this, let me tell you -- when the battery ran out. Of course, equipment is at such a premium at this point in the semester that I could only check out one battery, instead of the usual two. (Why there still wouldn't be two batteries per camera, I have no idea.)
I have to return the camera tomorrow morning, but she told me of a hot spot I could stop at tomorrow morning that's on the way to USC to get a few more interviews. I think I got enough material today, but getting more couldn't hurt. And now I know I can do this. By the end of our day together, I started asking people if they'd participate and asking the question -- "You're getting the hang of this," Tiffany said.
Who here thinks that the President of Texaco, rather than continually apologizing and ripping his fellow executives, should do the honorable thing and resign? Wouldn't that show that he was serious about changing the corporate environment? The Japanese have the right idea.