Inside joke follows. Please don't take away my Blog Card.

I'm about to commit a horrendous blogging faux pas. I have posted a funny item without explaining the exact story behind it. Suffice to say, if two bored beancounters ever whiled away their afternoons by e-mail, for months on end, imagining themselves as eccentric but famous Hollywood producers, this might be a marquee they would find amusing. I'm not saying for sure, though.

An' I built it all by myself! Well, me and LetterJames.

In a related Beautiful Thing, the LetterJames site has a way to make your own Easter greeting. Share with your kids!

Comments

[Anthony]

An explanation is overdue:
"Shirtless in Gaza" is a film script involving two suspiciously hunky actors named Hugh and Russell (played, one would hope by Russell and Hugh) who are desperately trying to get into the ultimate indie movie making the rounds in Hollywood, "Shirtless in Gaza" (imagine John Milton after a round of Robert Bly). Unfortunately, all Hugh and Russell can get is lucrative but ultimately frustrating beefcake parts in movies where, no matter what the genre (war, outer-space, sci-fi, slob comedy, western) they are called upon to run around with their shirts off. Hugh and Russell dream (nay, fantasize) about the respectabilty that "Shirtless" would bring them, but are doomed, so it seems to constant paychecks and pec work.
James Cameron plays the sensitive New Age director/writer of "Shirtless" and director Paul Verhoeven appears as an angry European auteur bitterly denouncing Hollywood's infatuation with sex and violence. Look, as well, for Quentin Tarantino as the studio flunky hack who directs all of Hugh and Russell's films and Brendan Frasier as an aspiring waiter who can't quite seem to break into the restaurant business.
Coming to a theatre in your imagination whenever you want....!

[pam]

It just gets better every time I hear it.

[Anthony]

I just want to go on record as stating that David Lynch was not our first choice as director. We were leaning towards Alfonso Cuaron, Spike Jonze or even Gus Van Sant, but the imaginary studio bosses who run our world insisted on someone "more commercial" which tells you alot about our conceptions of Hollywood and David Lynch as well!
We tried Sophia Coppola but she kept making lame jokes about the script being "lost in translation" so we gave up. Personally, I think she got wind that we had shown it to Spike first and she wanted nothing to do with it because of that....

[pam]

Remember that Lynch will also sign with us for practically nothing. He knows he's still working off a karmic debt to us, after the odyssey that was our last movie venture, a big-screen version of "My Mother The Car". Lynch shot a large body of the film in the backyard of our house/production company. In the ensuing, er, enthusiasm, Lynch's crew completely trampled our landscaping, let a car get driven into our pool ... and then they all packed up and left one of Lynch's personal assistants hiding out in the cabana. (We kept the boy in our house a few months, until he was well enough to return to the wild.)