30

I'm turning 30 in 22 days. Most people tell me how depressing it was to turn 30. I'm anxious. This may sound odd, but I feel like I'm supposed to be 30 now. Like maybe where I'm at in my life, with my boyfriend, my apartment, my job, film, this is a good place. I believe in things happening for a reason. I believe we create our own path in life. I'm happy with the road I've paved. I'm in awe of the people I've met along the way. I love and celebrate the fact that I'm growing. There's nothing depressing about it.

I reminisced today about how much I used to love (and still do) River Phoenix. I'm helping Bryan Chafin tonight prepare for an audition tomorrow where they describe the character as a young River Phoenix. Ah, my beloved memories of River. I sobbed the morning I found out about his death. Nearly choked on my sadness. He was my matinee idol.

Walter Lehman Site

I just finished the beginnings of the website for Walter Lehman. Check it out. It makes me happy.

Suburban Hell

I had the strangest dream last night. I don't usually remember my dreams, but this one has been sitting with me all day long.

I was hanging out with the Olsen Twins, riding around Manhattan in an old teal green station wagon. I remember thinking, "What a cool car, but it's weird that they would think this was a cool car." We decided to go back to their house and watch television. In the middle of Manhattan (maybe in Central Park) there was this long driveway up a mountain. Of course this mountain doesn't really exist. Once we got to the top of the mountain, it was like this suburban community, stale and boring. Huge, ugly houses that all resembled each other. The Olsen twin's house was large and awful. Everything was brown and 70s. We hung out in the livingroom watching cartoons on their brown shag carpet. After too long, I asked Mary Kate (or Ashley, I'm not sure which one) to take me home. We got back into the teal green station wagon and pulled out of the driveway. She drove around and around the neighborhood looking for the long driveway that would take us back down the mountain and back into Manhattan. We drove around and around, without any luck. It felt like hours. Mary Kate kept getting frustrated and started to drive violently through the neighborhood streets. I woke up, lost and afraid that I would be stuck with an Olsen twin in suburban hell for the rest of my life.

From inside a hip pocket

I finished the last draft of Brain Brawl. I refuse to work on the screenplay version any longer. Until someone is genuinely interested in working with us. Then and only then, will I work with other people's ideas, fleshing it out further. Until that time, I'm really happy with it. Of course after saying all of that, I will start to work on an hour-long television script based on Brain Brawl. I've been doing a bit of research on format and so forth. I don't watch a whole lot of television so I need to do a little bit of research. Stacy might tape some shows for me. Doing research by watching television seems really backwards to me.

By the way, Roberta Wells went up on the Cineclix site. You can download your own copy of it. What's cool is that my friend Duane's documentary, Up Syndrome, was picked up by Cineclix as well. Up Syndrome is really, really good. I forced all of my friends to watch it a few years ago.

I'm finding out that my friends are getting agents. I'm both proud and happy for them. I'm also quietly jealous. I want an agent too. I want someone to recognize my potential. It seems like it's that barrier. Having an agent and not having an agent. They say you'll get one when you need one. I need one. I need someone to put me and my script into their hip pocket and carry me around. Someone nice, preferably.

Tomorrow's Friday.

Being called in for dinner.

My friend Clare and I used to dream of winning Oscars when we were in high school. We wanted to clink our statuettes at the Vanity Fair party and sip champagne with Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro. We went to every Thespian competition in high school and would take home awards for solo monologues or group performance. We had leads in all of the school plays. I was Fastrada in Pippin, the narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, M'Lynn in Steel Magnolias ... I was a high school theater diva. I always thought I would win an Oscar for acting in some epic drama about war or drug addiction or something along those lines. I had no idea that someday I would be behind the camera. Filmmaking to me seemed ... honestly, I didn't understand it. I had no clue how films got made. And as the pieces started to come together and I saw the bigger picture, it still seemed over my head. All of the technical intricacies, freaked me out. They still do. But telling stories, oh man. I can feel it in my blood. I was describing to a friend the other day how and why I write and it all started to make sense to me. When I was little I spent a lot of time by myself. I created forts in the woods and made up friends who would come to visit. For hours I would hang out in the dirt lot next to my house creating cities in the sand to drive my brother's box cars around. I loved creating and breathing those other worlds. I would crawl inside my imagination and hide there when my mom would call me in for dinner. I still do. Sunday, when I was working on a rewrite for "Brain Brawl" Mark kept trying to talk to me and ask me questions. His voice was barely audible, almost warbled on the edge of my conciousness. I was deep inside Hampton College Preparatory School, hanging out with my characters while they battled it out against their rival school, Kennedy High for the Statewide Brain Brawl Competition Title. At that moment, on that day, it was all I knew. The only place I wanted to be. I like making movies and telling stories, because I still love to hide inside my imagination and pretend like I can't hear my mom calling me in for supper.

About me

I love hope.

Spilling over

It's Friday. I LOVE Fridays. I think I might like Fridays right at about 6:01pm better than any other moments in time. I like having my freedom for two and a half days. Even though most weekends, much like this one, are filled with meeting up with friends to work on projects or making time to write or packaging scripts or films to send out on Monday morning. But still, it's MY time and I embrace it with wide open arms.

I've sent and am sending "Brain Brawl" to a few recommended agents. I'm feeling ready. I feel like I've been writing a lot lately and have a decent body of scripts and am in the works on many more that kind of run the gamut from screenplays, television spec scripts and plays. I'm aching, in a big way, to direct another feature, but in the mean time, writing a lot is helping. The creative juices are spilling over. It's nice. So I'll cross my fingers that some agent will become smitten with me and I in turn, smitten with them and we will have a wonderful long lasting relationship that will benefit the both of us.

Run Free

I signed up for my first half marathon today. White Rock in Dallas on December 12th. I've been on a few 13-mile runs so far. I'm not terribly nervous about that one. But I checked out the map for the Austin marathon this afternoon that takes place in February. 26 miles is a lot of running. I was telling my friend Nisha, I'm getting a little queasy about it. She ran the NY marathon many years ago. She's keeping my head on straight about it and trying to keep me focused and inspired. She's good like that.

Ok, ok, enough already.

My boyfriend is hasseling me to post a new entry.

I'm pouring through a list of production companies, hoping to win gold with one of them. This process ... it's painful, almost.

For some reason the other night, I dug out all of the these old scripts that I'd written in college. Unfinished scripts. The format is all wrong, there are monologues that go on for pages and lots and lots of voice-over. It's fun to go back to that kind of stuff. It's actually pretty inspiring. I found a script that I'd started about my experiences working in a grocery store. It's hilarious. I've got an itch to flesh it out into a feature. I'd forgotten what crazy characters I used to work with. I mean, really, the people that exist in the grocery store world are truly bizarre. Which brings me to the fact that I'm on a comedy kick. Maybe because I'm not so depressed anymore. Maybe I grew out of that. I don't know. I still have PLENTY of ideas for dramas. While in New York, I think I scribbled down at least ten in my little notebook. Mostly while sitting in the subways. I'm getting sidetracked and I really need to stay on task. "Stay on task". I can't believe I just wrote that.