Oh, man, this is a dirty drink. Or, rather...not the drink itself, but the name I came up with for it. I totally did not mean it to mean what it means, but then someone at our Fourth of July party asked me what the drink I was serving was called, and this just seemed like the obvious answer, and then it was out of my mouth and there was no taking it back.
"Oh, this?" I said. "It's called a Salty Squirt."
Ew, I know. Go yell at the people who named the most delicious soda in the world "Squirt."
Back when I lived in Los Angeles, I entertained constantly. And then, somewhere along the way, I stopped being all that interested in hosting parties; it was just so stressful. And then I moved out to the Bay Area and realized:
Oh. I totally love entertaining. I just need it to be all chilled-out and California-style.
The thing about summertime outdoor entertaining is that it’s just so simple, if you let it be. All you have to do is keep your refrigerator stocked with a few key items – fresh fruit, potatoes, hamburger meat, chips and salsa, and a cold bottle or three of Pinot Grigio - and you're good.
Back in the day, I wrote a whole bunch of movies and TV show pilots. It's a byproduct of being an actor; you spend your days reading script after script after script, and at some point you start thinking to yourself: "Dude. I could TOTALLY do this." And so you pick up a copy of Final Draft and start tapping away on your keyboard, and sometimes what comes out is an extremely unfortunate (but not autobiographical at all, oh no no) tale of a girl who moves to Los Angeles to be an actress and ends up wildly disillusioned (oh yes; it was as bad as it sounds). And then sometimes you end up with is something that's actually sort of...okay.
I've written a lot of stuff over the years, but I still think that one of my favorite things that I've ever written is a script that I wrote for a college course I took on the 1950s, and that was read by exactly two people: my professor and Kendrick (the latter only because he found a copy of it at some point and asked to read it). It's a coming-of-age story (because that tends to be what people who are still coming of age themselves write), but it's - shockingly, I know - not about me, which is a bit of an achievement in and of itself.
Something you learn very early on in Hollywood is that every script has to have a "log line" - a punchy, easily-digestible, 1-2 sentence explanation of what, exactly, the film is about (or what, exactly, you think will make people want to pay money for said film). So Armageddon, for example, could be "Die Hard meets Independence Day, with asteroids." Pirahna 3D would be...well, actually in that case the title pretty much does the trick. My script, Meridian Planet, was The Wonder Years, but with a girl.
