Blog of Shame: Meditations on a Lapse in Judgment

Reading so much about John Edwards in recent weeks has made me realize that he and I have some things in common. For one, we both have awesome hair – I don’t think saying this will compromise either my anonymity or the ability of my detractors to imagine me as an ugly cat-owner…one can be ugly and have long, flowing locks, after all. For another, John Edwards and I both have a secret that threatens to destroy us. His secret was an affair with a woman. Mine is an affair with bad taste in the form of a script I recommended, the revelation of which I fear will shake the foundations of our tenuous, weeks-old blog-lationship.

That’s right, internet. Contrary to the impression I’ve tried to give you in previous blogs, my roses really smell like boo-boo-boo. I have endorsed a total piece of shit and I’ve been very, very wrong in terms of both box office and critical response. And I’m a little freaked out now that I’m sitting down to write this blog, in which I was planning to reveal my deepest shame to you and hope that afterward you’d turn to me like the boss in the end of any movie about young adults in the business world and say “Cecilia, I should fire you but your honesty makes me think you’re an envelope-pushing, straight shooter and I’m going to give you a promotion instead.” Sorry, dear readers of my reader blog, but I don’t trust you to be such total pushovers, so I’m having a hard time pulling the trigger on my confession.

To be honest, seeing the finished version of a script I’ve read is almost always a disappointment. If I liked something in script form (for example, the upcoming, very nutty Hamlet 2), it’s rare that what I see onscreen meets expectations that have been created by my imagination while reading. And if I don’t like something (as was the case with the recently released Swing Vote), well, I already know I don’t like it, plus what’s going to happen, so seeing it feels like watching an old, tired Saved by the Bell rerun (sorry, Everyone Else In My Generation, but I can’t even enjoy that show ironically, though various of you have made me watch practically every episode).

What’s weird is that I’m sure I’ve read fewer of the movies that get made than anyone who works at any agency, or is a successful actor, producer, director, etc. Because I read a sampling of EVERYTHING that anyone even thinks of making and they’re often just reading what’s very likely to get made. So I don’t know if I’m just peculiar and everyone else loves watching movies that they’ve read first, or if people in this business—most of whom got into it because they loved movies—are sacrificing their enjoyment of watching many of the movies that come out in exchange for getting to work on a select few. It’s a good question. I’ll have to ask around.

Stall, stall, stall. Back to that script got a “weak consider” recommendation from me, then got made, then sucked.

It would be some consolation if the script in question had made money. Though I generally base recommendations on the material itself, with secondary consideration given to what kind of business I think a script could do, occasionally there’s stuff out there that I don’t think is very good but do think could work and be profitable within its genre, and that I recommend for those reasons alone. For example, I gave a similar recommendation (weak consider) to the remake of Porky’s, which people may find hard to believe since, in comments on my Tucker Max post, it seemed to be assumed that I would have passed on that script if I passed on Tucker’s. But Porky’s was pre-sold on a few levels and on a larger scale (built-in audience due to Howard Stern’s involvement, plus fans of/nostalgia for the original Porky’s and its sequels). And it had some semblance of structure on which to hang its jokes, which I deemed a little stale, but also raunchy and plentiful enough to satisfy a teen audience. Also, Porky’s was far, far less mean-spirited than that other script and therefore more appealing to a larger cross-section of the population. So I thought it might turn a nice profit and, even though I’d like more teen comedies to be like Superbad, I stand by that recommendation as serving my company, if not my own tastes. Not so in the case of My Terrible Secret, the filmed version of which seems to be both unappealing and unprofitable on a major level.

Possible explanations I have come up with for the undue consideration that I recommended be given this script:

1.) I’m a terrible person who is ruining movies because reading scripts ruins moviegoing for me.

2.) I was in a loopy mood or had just had something happen to me that made something resonate with me.

3.) My boss was pretty into it and I was unduly influenced by him.

4.) I have genuinely bad taste and all of my other coverage should get thrown out like they do with the convictions of a D.A. who is caught cheating on one case.

But who really who cares why? I should be revealing what and instead I’m still stalling. I know, how about I do it in quiz form? Here are some very hard clues that, if you’re very clever, will yield up the name of the movie.

1.) One of the people in this film was also one of the people who has accidentally flashed her vagina in the last few years while going to a fancy nightclub.

2.) The film somehow doesn’t star a female reporter writing a magazine story, but should, based on its genre.

3.) Title rhymes with that of the late-New Wave, Francois Truffaut masterpiece about a large dog and caffeine-induced malaise: The Rottie and the Latte.

I bet you fools are stumped!

(don’t hate me. it was 6 years ago. i was young and stupid.)