Last Sunday, Jen and I shot a short film called These Things Take Time, based on a post by Tom Oatmeal. I don’t know if we will be sending it to Cannes or posting it on my YouTube page along with all my other masterpieces.
This is a still from it.
Yes! I’m so bummed I missed out on this shoot, but can’t wait to see how it turns out. Thanks Chuck!
The magician is amazing, but the crowd doesn’t know it yet because when the trick starts, it’s just a tape of him having really depressing sex with a woman who deserves better, but lacks the drive to end things with the magician.
In the next scene, the woman is pregnant! She tells the magician and he throws a smoke pellet down and disappears in a panic!
Next, we see highlights of the woman’s pregnancy. We see the classes and the baby shower. Finally, we get to the big day. Her parents rush her to the hospital and a few hours later, she gives birth to…
THE MAGICIAN!!!
The doctor faints and the crowd erupts in a thunderous applause! Even the woman’s father who up until this moment had vowed to hunt down and kill the magician is impressed. He extends a hand.
“I was wrong about you,” he says to the magician. The men shake hands and everyone watching exchanges looks like, “Remember Dirty Dancing?”
The only person not cheering is the woman’s friend Tracy who makes a snide comment about how it “wasn’t cool” for the magician not to be around for the pregnancy classes and “What about the gifts from the baby shower?”
Oh shut up, Tracy! God!
There’s not a lot you can do if the dog digs up some ancient prayer book and then chews it in a way the invites the kind of curse that makes him grow human hair. Keep an eye on it and offer only basic maintenance: Shampoo, conditioner. Maybe some pomade if you’re going out. But no need to break the bank with expensive haircuts and styling techniques to match the season’s hottest looks because remember: Chewing up the ancient prayer book was BAD. And the dog needs to know that. Bad dog!
Teaser from “I’m Not a Hacker” - a short film by Andrew Stegmeyer of Thunderlab Digital Media. Thanks so much to Andy for liking the piece I wrote for Slacktory enough to want to turn it into something more. It’s been fun to watch it all come together!
The premiere is this Friday! I’ll be sure to post more updates, but check out the page HERE: https://www.facebook.com/imnotahackermovie. Also, be sure to “like” the page (as long as an adult or library employee says it’s okay).
You can’t scream fuck you to a kiosk of loose granola just because you think it’s cereal and therefore belongs in the cereal aisle. You want to buy it, fine, buy it. Be my guest. And then you can put milk on it and declare it cereal to your little heart’s content. But if that’s what you honestly think: that putting milk on something somehow automatically makes it cereal, then you’ve got a real ego problem and if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to arm-wrestle you for the championship!
If they ever do a prequel to the Fast & Furious movies it should be about high stakes hoop trundling.
They say morale is the big key to any office, but if you’ve got a bunch of stiffs who can’t take a joke, then you’re not going to have any morale.
“It’s a mixer,” I told the new intern. “Just show up around 4 o’clock.”
And when he showed up to the address, it was a mixer all right! It was an industrial strength mixer that I’d rented for the day!
“Chew on that!” I screamed.
“Uh, yeah. You sure did get me.”
“Well, turn it on already!”
“I don’t want to.”
So I turned it on, but there wasn’t anything to mix so I turned it off.
“You know, if you’re up for it,” said the intern, “A bunch of us are getting drinks across the street.”
“You are? When did you hear about that?”
“There was an email chain.”
“Hmm…”
“You should come.”
But I couldn’t. I had to get that mixer back before 7pm or else they’d charge for a whole weekend.
Later that night at dinner, I thought back to the puzzled look on the intern’s face and nearly spit ramen all over the steering wheel of my car. Some people were just born losers.
Before his gunfight with Johnny Ringo, the camera should have panned down on Doc Holliday and then transitioned into an X-ray shot of his chest. In it, the Mucinex cartoon guys have momentarily stopped dancing to express concern over the fact that if Holliday dies during the gunfight, his body will be unable to produce the aggressive levels of mucus that allows them to Party Down!!!!
A Scene from my film, “The Main Spy: Havana Nights”
If you’re not doing anything, why not get a degree as a stylist? Open up a shop, build a respectable list of clients and then one day, you do that thing where you purposely struggle to even out someone’s sideburns. You trim one side, then the other. You frown. You squint your eyes.
“Hmmm…”
Then you trim again: back and forth, higher and higher until the two sides meet at the top of the customer’s head, creating the classic “headband of baldness” effect.
He’s livid, of course, but you calmly explain that the haircut was done as a strange joke inspired by a recent lottery win. You go on to say that you’re a millionaire and that you’d like to give him a few thousand dollars for being a good sport about the bad haircut.
“Well, okay.”
You pay him and as soon as he leaves, your stomach sinks because you didn’t win the lottery. It was a lie and the stupid check you wrote him will surely bounce. After trying and failing to win last minute on a handful of scratch off lottery tickets you decide it’s that magical time to fake your own death.
The car lights on fire pretty easily, but the whole thing heats up faster than you expect. Within seconds, it becomes impossible to manually push the flaming car into a ravine. Plus, you left it in park. In a panicked, Plan B you heave your body against a tree until you lose consciousness. A hiker finds you the next day.
“Ugh! I was in a car accident and I hit a tree!”
“But the windshield isn’t broken.”
“I must’ve rolled out the door sideways and then rolled forward! Ugh! I don’t remember anything!”
“Something’s not right,” says the hiker.
And so you try to kill the hiker by chewing through his ankle, but your teeth struggle to break through the fabric of his jeans, which provides him ample time to hammer you in the head with his aluminum water bottle.
At your funeral, your family comments on how nice it was for the mortician to use a skin-colored spray-paint to cover up the piece of loose denim trapped in your frozen jaws.
