Thursday, August 18, 2005

A Brief History of Nausea

So I have this 9am breakfast meeting with a producer pitching me a sci-fi idea. After WOTW I get pitched a lot of sci-fi ideas. Some good, some bad, and one so stupendously stupid I'm silently praying that particular producer gets hit by a truck so I can talk about it without reprisal.

Today's breakfast idea happens to be a good one. It also includes a possible chance to hang out with Stephen Hawking. You read me right. Stephen Hawking. Now understand that this is a common producer trick--dangling the cool "research experience" as some sort of bonus inducement to do the project.

This rarely works on me because I'm a fat lazy fuck.

Furthermore, for some bizarre reason my opportunities seem to revolve around water. And I hate water. People are constantly pitching me what they always call "boat repo movies" but what I call "modern day pirates without Johnny Depp movies". With those projects the "cool opportunity" is always the promise of "hanging out with the boat guys". But I can see the future: me, the producer and some sun-stroked pirate with that white shit on his nose looking like Dennis Connor from America's Cup in 1983. There'll be twenty foot swells (whatever that means) and I'll have so many seasickness patches on my body I look like the Yeti but it won't matter as I vomit so hard I throw up my brain.

But the Terminator teaches us the future is ours to make of it what we will and as we say down in Kentucky: "That Jew don't hunt".

And so I'm always left to tell these boat repo producers that a) I'm not going anywhere near the water or the project and b) there's like, six other boat repo projects and c) none of them are gonna work without Johnny Depp.

So I don't do water meetings anymore.

I also once had a producer promise me a ride in that weightless "Vomit Comet" thing they used for Apollo 13. Here was the conversation with Agent:

Agent: So whattya think of (silly movie idea)?
Me: They want me to go up in that weightless "Vomit Comet" thing they used for Apollo 13.
Agent: Cool! So Whattya think of (silly movie idea)?
Me: You know there's no fucking way I'm going up in that thing.
Agent: I'm sure it's not a requirement for the job.
Me: I think it is. I think there'll be peer pressure.
Agent: So...

Perhaps you're starting to see a pattern here.

My first girlfriend in high school was a closet smoker (and possibly a closet have-sexer with her neighbor while I was taking Driver's Ed). She scared me silly and I often threw up in her presence, sometimes just at the prospect of driving to her house and being alone with her. We went out for a year and by the end I weighed twenty-seven pounds. Ah. Good times.

Which naturally brings us back to Stephen Hawking. Because here's something else you might not know about me: I'm an idiot. A complete moron. I don't know jack shit about jack shit. No writer really does. He may pretend he does. He may have read a book or two, or gone on a "research trip". But honestly, if we really wanted to master a subject we'd make it our life's work.

Just like Stephen Hawking did.

Here's how it's gonna go:

Hawking: Wormhole theory, event horizon, Schroedinger's Cat...
Me: Um hmm...
Hawking: You all right Josh?
Me: Yeah, sure. I'm fine.
Hawking: You seem...pensive.
Me: No. Really. I'm good.
Hawking: You can tell me.
Me: Well. It's just...do I smell cigarettes?

And then I throw up my brain.

15 Comments:

Blogger Brandon said...

I think our highschool girlfriends had the same closet "problems", in their perception: "great experiences".

Forget 'em, now your meeting Stephen and she...

well she's married to a billionaire, her greatest dilemma deciding which pumps match her stockings.

whateva.. snakes on a plane.

8/19/2005 1:07 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hawking! I'm jealous. I wonder if he paid up on the black hole wager.

8/19/2005 4:54 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

'boat meetings'...get it catered by Hooters and become a convert...fast

8/19/2005 5:42 AM  
Blogger Chris Parr (ukscriptwriter) said...

I think you could have posted a single sentence:

I met Hawking!

Would have been a good enough post to impress me.

I doubt I'll ever get to meet anyone that cool in my current guise as a software engineer. Maybe I'll make it as a screenwriter and one day someone will try to impress me by saying "Chris, meet Stephen Hawking!".

If not... well, snakes on a plane!

That would be a cool thing to have on your grave stone:

A loving father, husband and a lover of base jumping just a little too much... Snakes on a plane.

8/19/2005 5:43 AM  
Blogger Chris Parr (ukscriptwriter) said...

Sorry to harp on about the snakes on a plane line, but…

Isn't the internet a wonderful place. I think it was proved by someone that if you send an email joke to 10 people, by the end of the day it will have reached some stupidly high number of recipients.

Saying "snakes on a plane" instead of "shit happens" makes perfect sense to me. Why not try to propagate the phrase around the net and see if people start using it before IMDB change the title back.

Simply call it a communications experiment.

8/19/2005 5:52 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thew up in my brain! Classic line, that should be a title as well - great post -

re: I wrote briefly about your Snakes on a Plane post on my blog - I'm still chuckling about that - and linked up, so hopefully more tasty hits will come . . .

8/19/2005 6:37 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey homeslice, create a feed so people like myself can subscribe to your very cool blog with an RSS client. Don't know what the hell I'm talking about? Go to feedburner.com. And this ain't no plug.

8/19/2005 3:40 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey homeslice, part deux. Turns out you have a feed already, but just no link to it from the site page. Here it is:

http://hucksblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I found it in the code. Cause I'm smart like that.

8/19/2005 3:42 PM  
Blogger notarysojack said...

OK, so I looked over today's movie ads and I came up with this killer script idea. Think "Wedding Crashers" meets Rob Schneider:

"Deuce Bigalow, Divorce Court Gigalo"...

I mean I'm not married to it, but....

8/20/2005 8:50 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

this may bug the hell out of you, but here's a grammar tip - periods and commas go inside quotation marks.
otherwise, your blog is great.

8/23/2005 12:38 PM  
Blogger josh said...

I just had this conversation a couple days ago with my wife and she was trying to convince me I was fucked up on the quotation/punctuation thing. Strunk&White pp36-7 proves me wrong but it looks better my way...

8/23/2005 3:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.phobe.com/s_cat/s_cat.html

A very simple, interactive form of Schrodinger's Cat. It's got a clicky-button! :D

8/25/2005 1:05 AM  
Blogger Sean said...

I know what you mean about your way looking better...I almost don't want to quote things at the end of sentences just because of that.

9/20/2005 3:57 PM  
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