I've told this story before, and not really crazy but weird.
I'll do the abridged version.
Saw a UFO in my driveway in Beddington. Came over Nose Hill and hovered down the neighborhood.
Broad daylight.
Tall, silver cylander.
No idea what it was. None.
Location: A simple man leading a complicated life....
Exp:
Back in my teens I didn't always have the best judgement when it came to choosing friends. There was one bad apple in our group who went by the name of Larry Smith. He was a prankster by nature and loved to put his friends in uncomfortable situations. Most times it was harmless and we'd a have a good laugh about it later.
Now there was one situation that left me and my 2 other friends very uncomfortable and justifiably angry.
On summer weekends the 4 of us would pile into Smith's car head for the strip in downtown Calgary. It consisted of people gathereing in their vehicles to drive down 6th and 7th avenue and parking at the west end/bull#### corner to meet and talk with others. On this particular evening we were crusing 7th when Smith spots a drunk older and what looks to be a homless women standing on the street corner.
We pull up and Smith yells out to this woman asking if she wants to go on a date. To our surprise she approaches the front passenger side where my good friend Ron is sitting. Now Ron sees what Smith has doing and is not happy and tells him to drive on. Nope! Smith puts the gear in park and turns off the ignition. As the woman gets closer there was a smell that would knock a buzzard of a #### wagon. Ron and the rest of us were getting irate telling Smith this is a bad and cruel idea when it comes to pranks
All hell breaks loose when this women reaches inside the passenger window to get a hold of my good friend Ron. She gets him in a bear hug and is slobbering all over him with wet kisses and such. Ron can't get away from this women and is screaming at Smith to start the ####ing car! Start the ####ing car! Smith of course was laughing the whole time thinking this was a excellent prank. The rest of us were livid and started smacking Smith on the side of the head to get the car going. Smith has enough and off we go.
We get to bull#### corner and the three of us get out of the car and just lit into Smith with both barrels for what he did. Ron walks up to Smith and knocks him to the ground with a solid right. In the end we offered some more expletives and took a cab home. Never saw Smith again
Oh come on, that story deserves more than two sentences!
A friend and I were heading out somewhere and saw this house on fire. It was a side street and no one was around.
One of us managed to climb onto the roof of an attached garage and went to a window to stir people inside. A tow truck was passing by and stopped and we quickly pulled a car off of the driveway as the house was engulfed by this time. The fire department arrived quickly but the house was pretty much destroyed by then.
Everyone got out unhurt. We spent a couple of hours inside of a fire department investigators' van answering questions.
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.
The Following 10 Users Say Thank You to OMG!WTF! For This Useful Post:
We did the night/dark tour of Alcatraz when we were in San Francisco. Had to beg my wife to do it because she's into spirits/ghosts type stuff and she really didn't want to go there, but convinced her anyways. The place is creepy enough as is, but she was on edge the entire time which made it worse. She becomes really agitated and says we need to leave now as she's had enough and she feels a negative energy is following us around. I laugh and tell her she's full of #### as usual. When we get home, she starts developing the pictures of the trip and in a few of the pictures right where she started to freak out there is a red orb following us in a couple rooms/cells. Now I don't believe in this stuff at all, but these pictures are creepy as hell with the backstory.
One other i can think of is when we were on vacation in Marco Island Florida a couple years ago. We were driving across the Everglades to go to a baseball came in Miami (think it was like a 2.5 hour drive across from the Gulf Coast). I ask the hotel where I could find one of those tours to see the alligators on the way there. They tell me, don't bother with the tour and spending money, and once I was on the Tamiami Highway i could turn off at a certain road and to drive up the dirt road for a few minutes and there would be huge gators everywhere in the water and lying on the banks but do not in any circumstances get out of my car. So we start up this dirtroad, which looks like it was in the movie Deliverance, and sure enough there's gators everywhere. Hissing and charging at our car (I didn't really care as it was a rental). I decide i'm going to go up a bit further than turn around and head back to the highway to Miami. I see what I think is a big tree in the road and I look to my wide and say that it's going to be a pain to turn around because of that tree. She looks back at me and says "That tree is moving". So I pull up a little closer, and I realize this isn't a tree, this is a Bermese Python which apparently is now becoming a nuissance in the Everglades because some people started dumping their pets their when they got too big and the Everglades are an ideal environment for a Bermese Python. Anyways, freaks me the hell out as I hate snakes, I get a few pictures, of what I estimate was a 16 to 18ft snake, and leave. I tell the concierge at the hotel when I get back the next day and she tells me I should report this to Florida Game and Wildlife, which I did. I ended up having to fill out a bunch of reports and send them my pictures so they could confirm it was a Bermese Python (which they did). Apparently they go out and try and destroy all these Pythons as they are growing rapidly in population and disturb the environment greatly as they are now the apex predator over the gators.
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.
What the hell did I just read?
The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to Hockeyguy15 For This Useful Post:
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.
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.
This to me is the greatest piece of writing that I ever read on this board.
I laughed I cried, I might have pooped a little. I wish to know more about this group of misfits, and their adventures through the twilight zone.
This is in the lines of the literary greats of short stories, like Steve Martin's cruel shoes (must read). Or Pensacola Tom's tales of the Hobo wizard (I might have made that one up).
This post gives me hope that creative license isn't dead replaced by some self writing android sent from the future to edit Wikipedia to prevent a future apocalypse.
Please write more.
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
The Following User Says Thank You to CaptainCrunch For This Useful Post:
PS, I wouldn't even try to write this because I don't have the filter. At the point that the group met Jane Seymour there would have been some serious group sex involved.
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Some great stories in this one. I won't be as eloquent as some, but....
Significant other and I are flying to Vegas a couple of years ago and we get into a good conversation with the guy who is in the third seat of our row.
During this conversation, he slows down and you could tell he was more focused on what was happening outside of the plane. We asked and he started explaining what he had just witnessed.
About half an hour later, our row mate is off talking to buddies in the back (probably telling them what he had just saw) and we happen to see what had seen earlier.
Outside the plane was a black mist "flying" along side of us. It was like octopus ink, but it definitely had more of a substance to it. The mass of black mist was probably the size of a car and just cruised along with us for a bout 10 seconds. Then, it took off and we didn't see it again.
I Googled "black mist over Arizona" but could never find pictures of what we saw and, naturally, our phones weren't handy or we were too slow to get one out.
Arrival made us go "hmmm" though as the medium used by the visitors in that movie to communicate was very very similar to the mist we saw flying beside us.
Last edited by Leeman4Gilmour; 03-09-2017 at 12:36 PM.
