Background Story
This is the story of a man named Brady-wait, no, wrong story. Okay, this is the story of a bunch of guys out in California calling Fate a wuss and getting creamed, and the story of another bunch of guys out in Maryland preparing to do the same exact thing (minus the getting creamed bit).
It all starts with a phone call between me and this guy in Sacramento named Kyle. Kyle and I have been friends since grade school. We've cheated on the same tests, built the same tree forts, got beaten up by the same high-school girls, debated each other over the same philosophies, and talked the same trash to each other over the phone when I moved away from California. We've got more bull between us than a rancher. So when Kyle tells me that he's joined the production team of a movie crew, I figured he was full of it. (Of course, he was just asked to write in a romance slant to the movie and run the website.) I was so confident that this was his latest round in our war of bluffs that I made him three-way the supposed director, Brian, into our conversation. He did so, and Brian told me they were in desperate need of a script writer. (I should have guessed... after all, if they were desperate enough to let Kyle write they had to be :D) Of course, script writing involves writing and this was right up my alley. I joined up with CDI Productions in an efoort to put out a sci-fi/horror flick called "Exhilaration". I wrote a script, they ate it up, and I was on the team.
After some haggling over certain scenes (it turns out that the actors wouldn't do kissing scenes; the swordfight-from-on-top-of-moving-vehicles scene was regrettably labeled as "too dangerous"; etc.) we arrived at a final script. This let me kick back and hear the news trickle in from California about how the shooting was going. It also let me whip the pants off of Kyle in long-distance chess and therefore force him to talk in a British accent for two three-ways with Brian (bloody hilarious, hearing that colonist git sound like a Cockney). [Advice: NEVER make a bet with me on a chess game.]
But anyway, it turns out that all was not well in the magical Land of CDI Productions. Actor-director relations were breaking down and the few scenes they had shot weren't showing signs of becoming the next Blair Witch anytime soon. They tried to press on, but it was relatively fruitless so they gave up.
I decided that, given that I didn't have a job or school crowding up my schedule, I could salvage my script from the sinking ship of "Exhilaration" and use it to patch a hole in the ship in the shipyards here in Maryland so I could sail wherever the heck it takes to find a good metaphor that makes sense. Along the way, I would also try to film "Exhilaration" with some pals of mine here in Maryland. |
