Staying Tuned

Survival in the advertising/entertainment/branded content business is all about shameless self promotion. After all, if you don't tell people how talented and gifted you are how can you expect them to pay you exorbitant day rates?

In that spirit, I've added the movie poster for STAY TUNED to my blog adornments.

If you read the fine print you can see I've been given a story credit for the movie. When in actuality, the screenplay was truly written by my good friends Tom Parker and Jim Jennewein. I merely helped with the story development at the very beginning of the process and couldn't keep pace with Tom and Jim after my dad had passed.

Nevertheless, in a testament to their good grace, they agreed to put my name on the project in the event the screenplay ever got sold -which was a long shot considering we were all junior copywriters at the time with nary a Hollywood credit to our names. That, and nobody but nobody sells their first screenplay.

But the producers at Morgan Creek liked what they saw on the page and ignited a weekend bidding war for the screenplay. By Monday morning, the deal was struck and we were all instantly wealthy men, wealthy being a relative term in Los Angeles where 1/2 million dollars barely affords you a 1 bedroom/1 bathroom condo.

That didn't stop us from celebrating like Powerball Billionaires. The day the first checks cleared, we packed our girlfriends/future wives into a stretch limo, drank like rock stars and for 7 hazy hours, lived the life others only dream of. Just thinking back on it brings a smile to my face.

I wish I could hunt down Meg, our limo driver, for a more detailed account of the evening.

And since she was as much a part of the Stay Tuned story as any of us, I like to think that maybe Meg is somewhere out there in the blogosphere. And that she too is using this poorly produced jpg of the movie poster to promote her career.

Godpseed Meg.