T-Minus 7 Days: Hollywood Part III

Another story.

This one is about how you should be prepared to do something frivolous and whimsical at any moment, because you never know where it might lead.

In my case, I decided to attend a punk rock show held in the parking garage of a comic book store.

At the time, I didn't listen to punk rock. And I didn't read comic books.

While I was waiting for the show to begin, I idly began to thumb through the comic books on the rack.

I read the opening panels of a book - it didn't go anywhere ineresting.

But at that moment, I had an idea for a story.

I was immediately electrified -- couldn't stop thinking about it. Thought about it at the show, in the days and nights afterwards, while I was finishing my other script.

A few weeks later, I got on a plane to Madrid, and told my friend Huili about it. He loved it. He wanted to write it together.

So we began to write a screenplay by writing e-mails to each other, back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. Then we started a secret blog, and started writing blog posts to each other.

This went on for a couple years. I have a stack of printouts the size of a telephone book with all the material that we wrote. I read it now, and harbor a few doubts about our sanity.

Then I placed in the Academy's competition. I got phone calls. E-mails. Meetings.

People told me that they couldn't do anything with The Last Whatever, but was I working on anything else?

And so I told them the ten-second pitch for this idea I'd been working on.

Most of them didn't get it.

But a few of them did. They really got it. And they wanted to hear more.

And that's what's happening now.

We're about to go in for a new round of meetings with the helpful addition of "more".

I can't name the people we're meeting with, but I can say that I absolutely adored their movies when I was a kid. They're the reasons why I got into movies in the first place.

And none of this would have happened had I not attended a punk rock show in the parking garage of a comic book store.