Once Upon a Kiss Page 23
I walked back over to him. “Yeah, let’s talk a little more about this documentary thing. Are we talking MTV-reality-series-like?” Maybe I could end up getting a deal there for my show. Maybe even a talk show. People were always telling me I was like a younger version of Oprah.
“No. I’m thinking more hard-hitting than that. More in the vein of something Barbara Koppel would do. Or the Maysles brothers.”
“Do they go to our school, too?” I asked.
I couldn’t imagine anyone would be so rude, but it almost looked like he cringed when I asked that.
“No, they don’t go to our school,” he replied with a sigh. “They’re only two of the most important documentarians in the history of documentaries.”
“If it’s a pair of brothers and then that Barbara person, that’s three,” corrected Hannah. It was stuff like that that explained why she was in AP classes and me and Lola weren’t.
“I stand corrected,” Geek Boy said. “So can I get your number?” he asked, holding out a notepad and one of the dozen pens from his knapsack.
I wrote down my phone number and handed it back to him. “This weekend’s kind of jammed but call me and we’ll set something up.”
“Great,” he said with a smile. His hair might have been a lost cause, but he had very straight teeth. He held out his hand, which looked like a waterlogged prune. “I look forward to working with you.”
I tried not to cringe as I shook it. “Uh huh. See you around,” I said as I started walking away.
Poor guy. Between the fact that he looked like a drowned gopher and the fact that I had had my fingers crossed behind my back when I had agreed, I almost felt bad for him.
chapter two: josh
It’s funny how when something’s meant to be, all these things happen to just make them . . . well, be. Like in Knocked Up, when Seth Rogen gets Katherine Heigl pregnant—first it seems like they’d never make it as a couple and then they end up realizing they do love each other even though he’s a schlub and she’s gorgeous.
And like with the documentary.
Flashback to the night before the purse-in-the-fountain incident. Me and my best friend, Steven Blecher, were hanging out at this coffeehouse called Java the Hut on Vine Street in Hollywood, where Quentin and Judd (that’s Tarantino, as in Pulp Fiction and Apatow, as in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and the above-mentioned Knocked Up) have been known to stop in when they’re editing movies at one of the various postproduction places in the area. Quentin and I are buds. Okay, well, I met him once when he spoke at our school’s Film Society, so maybe we’re not best friends, but we have exchanged dialogue.
As Steven bickered via IM with some kid at NYU film school that he met in a MySpace group devoted to Steven Spielberg about where Jaws had been shot, I worked on my essay for my USC application. “Do you think I should tell them that my dream is to become the Woody Allen of the twenty-first century, or do you think they’ll get that when they watch Andy Hull?” I asked Steven. Because the competition to get into the film school was insane, the week before I had decided I’d submit a short film with my application. My plan was to make one called Andy Hull, which I saw as being similar to Annie Hall—Woody’s 1977 masterpiece—but instead of being about a nerdy, neurotic middle-aged guy, it would be about a nerdy, neurotic teenage girl. I even had my leading lady picked out—Diane Lowenstein, a girl who my friend Ari had gone to theater camp with the summer before.
“Dude, I told you to bag that Andy Hull idea,” Steven said as he broke off a huge chunk of my brownie. “It’s lame.” Steven’s a bit on the tubby side. My mom’s always on me to lighten up on the sugar, but honestly, as far as I’m concerned, it’s preparation for later when I’m doing night shoots and need a quick pick-me-up. “If you’re going to blatantly rip off a movie that’s already been made, at least find some Japanese horror one no one’s seen instead of something so mainstream.”
I shook my head. “That’s way too 2005.” I sighed and tipped my chair back. “I just need to face it—I’m undergoing my first official creative block. I feel like Nicolas Cage in Adaptation when he couldn’t write the script.”
I would have done anything for Quentin to walk in at that moment so I could ask him what he did when he was blocked creatively, but I had no such luck. Instead I had to wait a full twenty-four hours, until I ran into Dylan. If you had told me even a week before that Dylan Schoenfield of all people would have ended up being my muse, I would have laughed in your face. Not only is she spoiled and stuck-up, but she’s also über-popular. Like Best Dressed/ Homecoming Queen/Miss February in “The Girls of Castle Heights Calendar” popular. Like Dylan-Has-2,028-Friends-on-MySpace popular.
Me? I have 612. And most are fellow movie buffs. I suffer from the opposite problem: not many people at Castle Heights know who I am. It’s not like I’m some weird loner who wears a Black Flag T-shirt and trench coat and army boots—I mean, I have friends, like the guys in the Film Society and Russian Club—but I’m a film geek. And proud of it, I might say. I already know that I’ll be quoted in the articles about me in Film Threat ten years from now as saying that I didn’t come into my own until my twenties, and I’m fine with that. Everyone knows that every artist who’s any good wasn’t popular in high school. Take Tim (that’s Burton, as in Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice)—I highly doubt he was prom king at his high school.
To me, the idea of doing a documentary about cool kids in high school was as original as it got. Sure, it had been done, but everyone knew that even though Laguna Beach was quote-unquote reality television, it was about as real as the idea of me getting crowned homecoming king that fall. My documentary—which, during the drive home from The Dell that day I had decided would be called The View from the Top of Castle Heights—would be a no-holds-barred look at the beautiful people. The good, the bad, the ugly—no one and nothing would be spared in my quest for the truth of what really went on behind the velvet ropes that led to Castle Heights’ cool crowd. And because we were talking about popularity in glitzy, sunny Los Angeles rather than, say, gray, rainy Portland, Oregon, it would be even more intriguing to audiences.
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