IFP-HOSTED SCRIPT READING IN FANCYLAND

Today led Craig and I down a strange path in our lives…the IFP held a reading of five Emerging Narrative screenplay segments for an industry audience at the Norwood Club…a place I’ve only heard about in fancy publications and dreams fueled by cream pies and butterscotch.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of casting director Amelia Rasche, we were very fortunate to land us a couple of child actors who came in with sugar-fueled energy levels and the great Michael Showalter, who pulled out a pitch-perfect performance as a Reverend who falls in love with a severed pair of buttocks.
After talking to our boys, Lucian and Aaron, and realizing that our references to Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder were proving to be more obscure to them as we had hoped, the guys just went at it and the direction of “be dumb and have a lot of energy” were pretty much all they got.
Aaron was held over from a Spanish class, so I waited outside for him to arrive in a cab, just in time for the reading to begin.
The sweatiest armpits in the room belonged to me, but the guys really hit it out of the park. Michael Showalter erupted into a Jerry Falwell-on-steroids performance – really milking the lines with all the could – even adding improvised giggles and expressions of his own that got great reactions. Lucian and Aaron held their own – Aaron’s timing with our weird-ass dialogue hit spot-on in every case. The whole thing was surreal. Craig and I wrote this screenplay over iChat, and never pictured a scene like this…a swanky club with kids and Showalter on display for the film industry.
The point I felt that things were moving right was when Ramsey, the actor hired to read the scripts’ scene direction, began laughing himself and had to cover his face.
This was a moment I had personally been looking forward to since being accepted into the Emerging Narratives program and, wow, was it weird.
I don’t know what trajectory this reading will send out film onto…I hope it’ll help for someone to see the potential in our writing…or perhaps it’ll lead to a studio buying the script and having it re-written into a Mac & Me sequel…
For the time being I continue to be incredibly grateful to the folks at IFP and Amy Dotson especially. What a weird way to spend a day in New York. I realize that further south on Wall Street things are a bit bleak, but for this near-broke filmmaker who has never owned a stock or had a 401K to worry about, things have been looking up.

** Special Thanks to Mike Tully for the photo which I stole from his blog.