[OMG!WTF!]

Sorry for how long this is. Just started typing and lost track of time. All true though....

NSFW!

In 1992 I won a film script writing fellowship at a studio in Los Angeles, a pretty big deal that I really didn't think I had a chance of getting. The previous two internship classes had three movies scripts get optioned by studios and two scripts produced. It was a big opportunity.

Me and nine others met in Los Angeles in February. I think it was fairly obvious after the first few meetings and workshops that the success of the first two years would likely not be repeated with this group. We had some problems.

Mandy came from somewhere in Arizona. She traveled a lot and liked drugs more than anyone I'd ever met. She was always high and maintained that poetry could be merged with script writing in a summa cum laude of art. Her work must have seemed brilliant to her at the time of its genesis but ended up in workshop sounding like people talking in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Small World pentameter. She wore the same dress everyday.

Jenny was from Ohio and carried her Bible with her as reference for her script about Jesus. She wanted her movie to be a true recollection of her savior's life. She smiled all the time. And if she hadn't dropped out after two months to make porn films in Chatsworth, she may have been the one to land a deal with Mel Gibson and save the rest of this group.

Kyle spent the previous six months living in the forest of Northern Washington with his bow and arrow and a skirt made out of deer hide. He didn't care if he lived or died in those six months and considered his arrival in LA a victory over nature itself. His movie had an angry anti hero named Greaser who survived Desert Storm 1 and roamed the streets of a post disaster America looking for some vague notion of justice and revenge. The scar on his face would get redder and redder as a gauge of his anger. I was afraid of Kyle and his character but for some reason he liked me the best.

In the early years of the '90's Joe thought he was Jim Morrison. His script was a deep sea dive into his alcoholic past culminating in a cross country road trip in search of a violin his father had given him. Joe held hands with two people everyday as we walked from our residence to the studio past Liquor Loco. He ate so many donuts. His weight gain was alarming.

I was the youngest in the group and one break down away from pushing a cart full of telephones up and down Hollywood Boulevard babbling about how Kevin Costner took all my good ideas.

After four weeks of fruitless toil we decided to rent a van and get out of LA for a night. We would either drive to the place on HWY 46 where James Dean crashed his car and stay for a night on a beach where we could watch the surf and let the ocean speak to our subconscious. Or we'd go out to the desert and see if we could recreate Doors-esque peyote trip on the sand dunes east of Pasadena. Either way we were looking for inspiration. A flip of the coin and we went to the ocean.

Ten people in a van was nothing unusual in Los Angeles. We were only five but we had no air conditioning so the windows were open, We started late and headed for Venice. We thought we could sleep there if we had to but it wasn't like that. We walked up the promenade thinking we had been inside for too long. Mandy wandered off and came back with a box of bunnies.

"They were just giving them away and I didn't want them to be split up."

So we had a box of 12 bunnies.

"Like the apostles" Jenny said. "Look...Peter, Mathew, Mark, John.."

"Who's going to be Judas?" Kyle said.

Jenny hated Kyle.

We found our van again and headed up the coast.

"We need to get bunny food," Mandy said.

Joe drove because it kept him steady and focused. He said he would stop at the next grocery store he saw but we quickly ran out of options. There was one Mexican stand on the side of the road just outside of town so we stopped there to get some lettuce. We agreed. Lettuce was the best thing for bunnies.

But the small little store, really just a stand with a tarp over it, had no lettuce left. They just had peppers. And chili's. And not even any of the nice sweet chili's. They just had the damned bright orange evil little bombs that would scrape your tongue clean and make it so all you could taste was metal.

We asked for the best and least hot ones. The women gave us a basket full of small red ones, smaller orange ones. And one single green one we all thought was the least hot. Pasilla peppers.

We chopped them up with Kyle's Bowie knife and dropped them in the box of bunnies after taking out all the seeds. They didn't seem too bad and the bunnies liked them. So we continued up the road enjoying the turns and the air and freeing our minds to create. We were geniuses after all...ten out of thousands. Five out of ten. The chosen ones.

By the time we arrived in Malibu the bunnies were in a frenzy of sorts. They made noises like I'd never heard before. Mandy was crying and Jenny was praying. The bunnies fought with each other in gangs...Paul and Peter against Mark and little weakling John.

"I didn't know they had teeth!" Mandy screeched.

Joe sped down the highway as if he could escape the horror in the box behind him.

"We have to stop!" Mandy said. "We have to!"

She was smoking pot now to calm her nerves and so we stopped in Malibu. But all the houses there have gates. We finally found one with an open gate and a driveway to a beautiful ocean front house. We rang the bell.

It was Jane Seymour's house and she answered the door covered in paint...she's a painter...an artist. She was in her studio painting flowers when poor stoned Mandy held up this box of rabid bunnies and said "Our bunnies are sick!".

"You're Solitaire!" Kyle said.

Jane said something about calling the police but she was concerned about the bunnies. She's a very sweet woman and in real life, twenty years later, I had the chance to ask her if she remembered this group of idiots with the box of bunnies. She did. She rescued our bunnies and ended up keeping two of them. They were named Robert and James.

We dumped the box on her step and ran back to the van. Mandy cried because we told her to never ever take bunnies from a stranger again. She yelled at us for feeding them peppers. But we didn't know.

It takes a while to get to the exact spot where James dean crashed. We didn't get there. The sun had just gone down when we arrived at Micky's beach and found a spot to sit on the sand. Mandy and Jenny went for a walk. When they came back, about two hours later, Jenny was very quiet.

"Are you stoned, Jenny?" Joe asked

"I think so," she said. "And I saw a UFO."

"Oh Jenny. Why?" Joe asked. "Mandy!" he scolded.

"No really," Mandy said. "We saw a UFO. Then we got stoned."

"A UFO?" I said.

"Yeah. It was big and shiny and filled with friendly aliens. They just wanted to know what we were made out of."

We slept on the beach together that night...in a pile. Like puppies. No one listened to Mandy and Jenny when they talked about the UFO. We just hoped Jane was nice and wouldn't call the cops on us. But the night passed peacefully. We talked about script ideas. We thought of Zoo Story, a potential Disney pitch about animals in a magic zoo. We talked about a football movie, a college team coached by Goldie Hawn. We liked Goldie Hawn and thought she would be our star. We had no good idea though...no real home run. We were not brilliant at all. We slept.

Just before dawn we woke up to a strange whooshing sound. It was like air pressure more than noise. We got up and Jenny lead us towards the sound. It was coming from the area where they saw the UFO earlier. And this is the amazing part of the story. We watched a black helicopter hover over the exact spot Mandy and Jenny said they saw the UFO. Four men in black suits flashed beams into the ground and then shoveled up the sand from that spot into their canisters. They loaded it onto the hovering chopper and within seconds they all jumped back in and flew off silently out over the ocean.

"There has to be a script here," I said.

'I told you," Mandy said.

"Yeah. It was a UFO," Jenny said.

"I believe you," I said.

"We still have no script," Joe said. "No one is doing UFO movies now,".

We went back to LA the next day. We were tired, not renewed. Five years later Men in Black would start production with Will Smith and a hundred million dollars behind it. But for the next two months we wrote, work shopped, listened, created, destroyed and recreated but ultimately failed. The LA riots brought a merciful end to our sad struggle. Jenny left her Bible in the room she shared with Mandy. She didn't need to be saved after all.

There are UFO's. They exist and are real as are men in black. Bunnies don't like chili peppers. Drugs might be bad for you. But no matter how ready you think you are, nothing in life just falls in your lap.