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Friday, August 11, 2006

Some ideas just don't click


So Steve Spielberg called me. Apparently there is this totally huge war like raging in Israel and Lebanon right now, but of course the American media isn't covering it at all, they'd rather report on Britney Spears putting her baby in the microwave or whatever. But it's totally serious and totally bad, and Steve tells me he's got this idea for a Dreamworks-Pixar animated movie about two boys, one Israeli and the other Palestinian. Sort of Schindler's List meets Aladdin using that funky humanoid Polterganimation in Polar Express. Elton John is gonna write the songs. So I'm like, Okay, so will there be any talking fish? Talking cars? Some superheroes? Spielberg gets kinda sniffy and says, Look, I'm talking about serious cinema verite type animation. And I'm like, Dude, don't start tossing out the Latin words just cause you know I didn't go to college. He says it's French, and I'm like, Wait, you're gonna make an animated movie in French? Are you kidding? Does Elton John even speak French? I mean, Hello! Is this really Steven Spielberg on the phone? Is this the guy who made E.T. and Poltergeist? Are you turning into Francis Ford Crapola or something? Because if that's the case, why not pull a Mel Gibson and do the whole movie in ancient Aramaic, or Maori, or that click-click language from Africa. Or Palestinian. Thing about Spielberg is, he's a cool guy and very brilliant and everything, but he tends to cop a huge tude with anyone who doesn't just agree with his vision 100 percent and do whatever he says. But I'm like, Dude, maybe I didn't go to film school but I know what sells, right? I invented the friggin iPod, okay? Have you heard of it? So here's my idea. Instead of two boys we make it a boy and a girl, and we bump the age up a bit, like make them teenagers, so we can get a love story going, and we draw the girl really inappropriately hot, like Pocahontas, and we put her in tight outfits or whatever, so we widen our audience and get some middle-aged dudes in the theater, not just kids. And we cross-promote by having the characters wear iPods and we get a tie-in with Burger King to make falafels with a movie theme wrapper. Spielberg just sits there not talking like he's all in a huff. Then he makes this big theatrical sigh and says, Okay, maybe we'll talk later or something, and I'm like, Whatever, dude, you're the one who called me, remember? So, like, good luck with your cartoon movie in Latin or whatever.

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