Oscar night!

A bit of an anniversary for me.  Seventeen years ago on Oscar night I was working on a film script I was going to send Disney in an attempt to snag a Disney screenwriting fellowship.  I was also doing my very best to keep Anheuser-Busch profitable.  To this day I blame myself for Busch having to sell to the Belgium folks.  I decided to move on with my life and abandoned poor Anheuser-Busch and my beer drinking ways.  The people at Busch were brave and hung in there for a while but without my constant support they were doomed.

I digress.

I paced myself through the day drinking a twelve pack of Bud before I started the second twelve pack I was going to sip during the show.  To keep with the spirit of the night I was going to work on the screenplay while I watched the pregame show, with Barbra Walters, and actual broadcast.
At the time I was working on a Brother word processor.  You wanted to save a file you did it with a 3.5 floppy disc and the daisy wheel printer, built into the machine, made enough noise to wake the dead.  All I had to do was a little proofing and a little polishing and my script was ready to send off.

To this day I don’t know what I did wrong that night.

It may have been my thoughts of the movie Babe winning Best Picture.  I’d promised I would kill myself if the pig won Best Picture.  I didn’t want to live in a world where a talking pig had an Oscar.  I could live with James Cromwell winning Supporting Actor in Babe but the pig winning Best Picture was too much.  Kevin Spacey won Supporting Actor for messing with my head in The Usual Suspects.
 Christopher McQuarrie, won for Original Screenplay for suspects.  Emma Thompson won for Adapted Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility.  In 1995 the hottest writer in Hollywood was Jane Austin.  Ms. Austin is coming around again with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies later this year.
Maybe I was thinking too much about Jane Austin, or how I was going to kill myself if Babe won Best Picture, maybe it was me thinking too much about Verbal Kint and who was Kaiser Sosa, or maybe it had something to do with me starting the second twelve pack of the night early.

Whatever it was I did was wrong.  Very … very wrong.
I deleted all one hundred and twenty-six pages of my screenplay.  No backup.
I briefly considered killing myself early, but decided to go to the fire escape and have a cigarette and think about what I’d done.  The script was supposed to be at the happiest place and freakin’ earth in ten days.  What I did do was took a deep breath, finished the twelve pack, sweated out the end of the Oscars, and rooted against the pig picture. I was also getting ready to go to war against the clock and myself.
I told myself if I didn’t dilly-dally I’d be able to make it on time.  The good news is that the Brother word processor was portable.  The bad news is the damn thing was the size of a midsized suitcase and weighed about twenty pounds.  The Brother went everywhere with me that week.  That’s why to this day my right arm is three inches longer than my left.

The script got finished in five days and sent out in six days and did very well for itself.  Out of thousands of entries we were one of the twenty that made it to the semi-finals.  Thank god we didn’t get any farther than that.  Working hard for little money and less love is one thing but working for the Mouse Brigade is something else entirely.

Babe lost Best Picture that night to Braveheart so I guess maybe, if you have a nasty streak, you might say a pig did go home with the Oscar.