Jimmy Page’s Trousers

This morning, as I stare into the bathroom mirror repeating the phrase ‘I’m a winner’, I can do so with more conviction than usual. Today, people, I am a winner.

My short scene entry over at The Rouge Wave was voted the best. Hurrah for me! My first earnings from writing, an Amazon gift certificate for $25, will soon be virtually winging its virtual way to me.  If I may be permitted another hurrah?

Hurrah.

Although this is a small victory, I am encouraged and emboldened.  I would be feaverishly working on a spec script now if I hadn’t spent the last eight hours writing my acceptance speech.  A couple more drafts and it should be ready.  Four, tops.  Maybe five.

Didn’t win the Movie Mogul thing. Pah!

If you’ll excuse me, I have a number of cases of sour grapes to get through.

How often do you get to quote Al Green?

So then, the bad news. I didn’t make the next round of the British Short Screenplay Competition. It seems that Branagh (I’m assuming it was him) didn’t like my script. Either that or he was scared by the vast talent evident in every page, line, word and non-breaking space. Yeah, probably scared. I’m quite sanguine - to even have made it to the second round is a reasonable achievement for a newcomer. I think.

The good news: Having entered a very, very short scene into, predictably, a short scene competition being run on one of the more useful (and certainly one of the most prolific) screenwriting blogs, I’ve been shortlisted as one of three scenes for blog patrons to vote on. I’m not publishing a link at the moment as they, quite rightly, want to try limit voting to regular readers rather than having a bundle of blow-ins turning up to ballot-stuff. Should I win, I will receive the princely sum of $25 (hey, it’s a blog, not the bleeding Academy), most likely in book-token form. Old school. Nice.

The indifferent (for a little while at least) news: Yesterday, I posted my submission for the Red Planet Prize. Ten-page extract and one-page outline. I’m happy with my ten pages. Let’s see if Tony Jordan feels the same.

Finally, in anxious news, the Movie Mogul thing will be announced on Friday. My hooks are well and truly tentered at this stage. Go on lads, gimme the gig. Fair warning if I don’t get it: I’ve been saving my faeces and have a large supply of jiffy-bags.

I’m more than a little frightened. For the last two days, there has been a mysterious, glowing yellow orb in the sky (a sky which was a weird blue colour, by the way). This unfamiliar golden orb shines and burns and, to be honest, terrifies.

The only course is to sacrifice something in order to appease the orb and bring back our usual cloud and heavy rain.

…What sort of person is seduced and beguiled by a film called Death Race, starring Jason Statham (who has crossed the line into being typecast as a bloke who pretends to drive stuff), for which the trailer states only “A race for convicts where the only rules are: there are no rules”?

Well, thanks in no small part to the weirdos that read this (that’s you, that is), I’ve made it. I remained in the Movie Mogul top ten all through August and am now eligible for the, much more scary, jury round.

The jury are cogitating and contemplating; mulling and meditating. They’re deliberating their pretty little heads off and will have a result on the 26th - next Friday. If you actually voted for me with your real email address, I’m guessing that they’ll announce the results over email. That being the case, you can join me in jubilant triumph or help to contribute to my miserable self-censure. Either way, there’ll be beer involved.

If the results aren’t emailed to those that voted, you can read about my performance here. Unless, of course, I don’t win in which case it will never be spoken of again and I’ll rewrite the blog history to make sure it never happened.

Ref: Jimmy Pages Trousers. Post should read, “No competition entered. Chocolate rations forecast to increase to 25 grammes per week.”

Doubleplus good.

Sincere (really) thanks to those that registered and voted for me. I genuinely appreciate it. I am a little awed by the fact that some nice people, whom I know only from comments and posts, would take the time to do that for me.

Doubleplus good, indeed.

Lying in bed this morning, I popped on the telly and flipped through the channels, pausing on a Jerry Springer. I’m now not sure if I’m still asleep and dreaming.

It started out innocently enough with Jerry talking to a chubby, bearded, good ol’ southern boy. He said that he’d slept with his little brother’s girlfriend. He didn’t feel guilty because he’d ‘knowed her longer than him’.

So they get the brother out. His name was Jueble or something similar (I’m unsure of the spelling). Picking on the syllable that they recognised, the sound men played him on with a rousing chorus of Hava Nagila. The audience clapped along.

Jueble stands there, all smart in shirt and tie (like his brother), looking a bit trepidatious - he knows he’s not going to like this. The chubby one doesn’t beat about the bush and tells him that he ‘got intimate’ with his girlfriend. After the initial shocked look, Jueble is over eyeball to eyeball with chubby. Chubby pushes him away and then rips his shirt off, leaving himself bare-chested and bare-bellied but with the tie still around is neck. Jueble, not to be outdone, rips his shirt off, again leaving the tie - he’s pretty skinny though. A good wrestle and shoving session starts. The audience bays and the bouncers break it up.

At least a dozen times, they go for each other and, every time the bouncers break it up, some hapless sound man has to try pin their mics to their ties again in the scuffling. Skinny keeps calling Chubby a pig-farming troll and telling him he’s jealous because he didn’t finish high-school whereas skinny did.

Jerry eventually gets them to stand still long enough for him to get the girlfriend out. There’s the usual griping and name-calling. Jueble tells her that ‘even if he made her a gold robe and built her a gold house, if a tree fell in the forest and no-one was around, she’d still bitch about it’. I like that.

Jerry asks her if she loves chubby. She says she doesn’t, she loves Jueble. Jueble says he loves her and wants her back. Seconds later, they’re eating each others faces. Chubby looks forlorn.

Then, in a final act of ultimate bizarreness, Jerry says “so where are you boys from anyway?” Chubby answers, “Tennessee” and suddenly, music starts playing and the audience all get up and begin performing some sort of square dance all over the stage. Jueble and his girlfriend join in and even some audience member starts dancing with chubby, the boys all shirtless and grinning like loons, their ties flapping as they dance.

It must have been a dream. If it was, it was an entertaining one.