The Tao of Intoxicated Screenwriting

Disclaimer: The following is probably not true

Over this summer, I had envious duty of screening a pool of potentially memory deficient geriatric newspaper subscribers for inclusion in a research study. The task was rather tedious, most of them had, amongst a host of other maladies, rather severe hearing problems, and those of them that could hear well enough became rather hostile upon making out that my last name sounded remotely Baa'thist.

The test battery these participants needed to successfully complete to be included in the larger study included a serious of tedious questions ranging from rather uncomfortable, such as repeatedly asking if the person enjoys using illegal drugs, to the bluntly insulting, such as five successive questions that with slight variation asked if the geriatric interviewee found elementary school to be too difficult for them.

To be fair, a good percentage of them were rather pleasant throughout but there was the majority that either became irritated or just didn't want the half-hour long test to end. Case in point a elderly pot smoker writing a script with the horrible contrived plot which sounds vaguely like a rip-off of the little-known, poorly-recieved "ski school" starring Jim Varney (of "Ernest goes to Camp/School/Jail/the Beach/doesn't go the to Beach" fame) but set in the world of surfing. Now for confidentiality reasons I will try to remain as vague as possible but he wants it to star the non-fat guy from "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" and the non-funny guy that plays Jiminy Glick, who...I dunno he might actually have died already, not sure. But maybe I'm being to harsh, maybe its actually really funny. But its not and because he told me the title of his script and its the following, but -Up and +Down (Hilarious! get it? Its the opposite of what its supposed to be! Ironic right?!?!)





So really quite sad, a non-starter idea, and aiming for a dream cast of washed up actors, and to think he quit a legit job for this. Hearing from people like this make me feel a little less bad about wasting my time writing blog posts as I'm currently doing.