The Worst Idea For A Romantic Comedy...

Upon leaving the Navy, I was all set to get my life started. I returned to my San Francisco home (now in Pacifica) and my fiancee and got ready to start college and get a job. Shortly after arriving home, I moved into an apartment with my good friend and fellow Navy buddy, Jay.

During the next six months, I had the sorts of adventures and life-changing moments that you see in hundreds of coming-of-age college type movies. Parties, women, crappy jobs, college, sports, and all sorts of crazy exploits surrounded me and my eyes were definitely open and my brain was definitely recording.

At the end of these six months, however, my fiancee dumped me and I was so heartbroken that I decided I'd rather live at home and spend money on a car rather than rent. As it turned out, my friends parents wanted to move back from New Hampshire - so they simply reoccupied the apartment that they had left for my friend and I.

It wasn't until a few years later, however, that I started looking back on this period with a sort of nostalgia. The heartache was still there, but the other events that happened during those six months were almost the stuff of legend. Certainly, I thought, they would be good fodder for a movie script. I began developing this idea for an autobiographical story that would be this romantic comedy.

Except that in real life, I was dumped. And miserable. Mixed feelings about this period aside, I began to play with ideas for a story.

And play.

And play.

And play.

A few years passed (Okay, more than ten, less than twenty... so far) and I started back to film school. After a rather successful attempt at making a horrible movie, I started thinking about the subject of my next film. The idea came back to me. I still hadn't figured out how to tell a romantic comedy where the main character gets horribly dumped and spends most of the movie moping around, but I started really developing the idea further.

Development always stopped however when it came time for my character to get dumped. It wasn't that the pain of being dumped had somehow inhibited my ability to write after all these years, it was more the fact that it was just so depressing of a story development that there was no amount of cool stuff that could overcome this momentum killer.

I pretty much gave up on the idea as a lost cause. But three weeks ago, in a moment of pure, brilliant insight, I suddenly realized that by moving some of the events around, by changing the actual event's orders, I could alter the momentum just enough to launch the story properly. Being certain that it had to be a mirage and that once I started writing I would realize that it couldn't possibly be that simple, I sat down on August 25th and started writing.

Last night, I finished the movie script. It took me three weeks to accomplish what it took me fifteen years to think about. The script isn't perfect, yet, but its a lot better than it has any right to be. I have finally succeeded in writing a romantic comedy about the end of my long standing relationship.

And I even managed to keep some of it still based in reality.

Oh... and best of all... No Star Wars references, whatsoever.