So Drew screened his short film in Irvine. Having glimpsed a rerun of Miami Vice and seen the movie, I think his Bent Steele is a mighty fun time. He pays homage to two eras of Michael Mann with the fluency of an American speaking English (or something like that). Marvel at those black levels, which are not gray but inky black. If only Drew went rogue more often and did more of this oh-shit-the-cops guerrilla filmmaking.

It seems everyone I know is gettin’ down and dirty with their creative selves. Jaemin Yi is, and of course so is Sean with his romance Rory’s First Kiss. Spring has that effect on the physiology of an artist. I guess for everyone else it makes them want to clean or breed or something.

Oh alright. Fine. I’ll put up the plot of my script, a short romantic drama. But not the whole thing. And take it all with a grain of salt. There are more juicy bits to the lives depicted here that I left out; and while this is a skeletal representation of the story, it’s soft, tender bone that’s yet to mature, still incubating in my imagination.

One night in a coffeeshop, a cute but nerdy girl, Kate, waits to meet her online pal, Derek, for a blind date. She waves when she sees a guy who matches his description, but he walks right past her. It gets late. Derek never shows up.

The next morning, Bryan is startled out of bed by a phone call; a girl on the other end playfully screams “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” She intended to give her boyfriend a wake-up call, but dialed the wrong number. She apologizes and hangs up.

Bryan meets his friend, Derek, over lunch. The two don’t get along, but Derek has a favor to ask: he wants Bryan to meet a girl named Kate. Last night he went to meet her, but thought she was ugly and gave her the cold shoulder. She still wants to meet; but because she already saw him when he ignored her, he wants Bryan to stand in. After, Derek says he can make up a story to break off the relationship. Bryan says he’ll do it for the girl’s sake, but thinks Derek is a jerk.

On his way home, Derek stops at an intersection and eyeballs a pretty girl as she enters her house. When he gets a text from Kate, he turns the car around.

Bryan dresses for the date. His phone rings. The same girl dialed the wrong number again, but instead of hanging up she asks for advice: “What’s the easiest way to break up with a guy?” Bryan becomes morose, remembers his ex, and tells the girl how not to break up with a guy. They get into small talk, find out they’re a few blocks from each other, then hang up. The doorbell rings. It’s Derek. He gives Bryan his phone for the date; Bryan offers his phone in exchange.

Derek stops for coffee. The phone rings. It’s the girl. As if in a hurry, she begs Bryan for help, then gives her address. Derek ignores it, drives home. When he stops at the familiar intersection he realizes it’s the same cross-street as what the girl blurted. He glances at the house the pretty girl went into and sees the address is identical. Curious, he parks the car and approaches the house.

There is a theme undercutting the events, but yeah, this is my plot in TV Guide form. I lopped it off about a third of the way (so there’s still a good seventy percent to go), right before the first catharsis. It’s structured as a farce, where the A B and C stories collide in convoluted ways.

I don’t want to tell a love story so much as I would rather tell a story about love. A “love story” is essentially a genre piece, stripped and stupefied to archaic expectations (the meet cute, the denial, the compromise of lifestyle, the happily ever after OR the bittersweet departure). A “story about love” is open-ended, and in all likelihood, truer to the heart. It compels me to go buck wild in terms of style. There’s more to love and life than can be expressed in middle-class, Mac generation music. Behold, I give you New Order’s “Your Silent Face,” a song about death, and a very odd choice of music for my ideal title sequence.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The way to sidestep an expected love story is to blindside the audience with other emotions: hate, pity, fear, sadness, and then love. I adore stories that hook us from the beginning, tease us with a slow build, then reward us with an ending in which everything collides spontaneously; not because it wants to impress us, but because the Fates have spoken and destinies must yield (see: In Bruges). It’s not about the “happy” ending, which is always, always easy, but about taking one step further to become the “beautiful” ending.

Rule number one: Everything happens as it must.

At long last we met up with Chris Yi in Los Angeles, a city that inspires both awe and disdain in both the natives and the tourists. I grinned in relief when Sean and I were told to meet at Mossimo’s Mudspot, a modest hole-in-the-wall of cracked stucco and peeled paint. Parts of LA, like the southern parts of Orange County, are ballrooms of Victorian formality, where strangers dance with other strangers in a secret but acknowledged ritual of unspoken attraction.

“It’s the same with any city. If you go to Hollywood you’ll get a lot of stuck-up people who wanna be actors, so I just stay out of those places,” Chris explained. This guy is talkative, easy-going and interesting. I meant what I wrote in this Tweet—just give him five years, tops. If I was the sort of ‘azn’ who doted on my heritage, I’d be AZN PRYDE all over this guy, who as a fellow Asian-American has directed some cool material. But the fact stands that I don’t give a damn about my roots, not in that way, and even in that light his work is still mighty impressive. He’s twenty-three.

Our meet went aiight. Some awkward silence here and there; or maybe that was because we took simultaneous sips from our drinks. One thing is for sure: Back to the Future is a powerful force to be reckoned with. I was giddy with enthusiasm when Chris said it was his motivation to become a filmmaker. Me too! And when Sean brought up Rory’s First Kiss, his webseries in the making, Chris plunged into even deeper depths of insight: the best stories are first and foremost entertaining. Let me say that I am a believer in Roger Ebert, who wrote A film must be entertaining before it can be art. Damn true, that.

What spurred us to meet was our one mutual fixation: short films. Chris told us his sad, sad story: a student at UCLA, he fell out of love for cinema because his filmmaking peers were so damn snotty and selective. He shot Korean Days of Our Lives (which is so awesome) and then decided that advertising was less artsy-fartsy than cinema. It was only recently that he started up his Netflix account and realized how much he missed the movies and, I suppose, the potential to make his own.

You all know Sean’s story—that guy is busy with Rory’s First Kiss, which can be said to be a series of short films. Me? I’m furiously plotting a twenty-plus page romantic drama. It’s the ending that eludes me: should it end happily, or should someone, like, get shot or something?

An hour later, when Chris glanced at his iPhone and said “Alright guys, I gotta split,” we shook hands and parted ways. Sean and I zipped over to Samy’s, a superstore that sells everything on the planet you could ever want (as long as you’re a filmmaker). I lingered in front of the Steadicam display, fondling the buckles and pneumatic arms as if it were a girlfriend, until Sean whispered in my ear that it probably costs twenty-thousand dollars. We sauntered upstairs (the store is three levels high) to admire the lighting equipment, to which I noticed these really cool babies. Yes, they are also battery powered and dimmable! But alas, the bigger units run up to around two-thousand bucks.

I desire this Litepanel so bad that it violates the Seven Deadly Sins. A powerful, portable floodlight, without the need for AC or a huge-ass generator, is a total revelation.

So Sean has been meaning to show me his outline of Rory’s First Kiss, his very own webseries in the making. What little he has revealed makes me think of The Guild crossed with Quarterlife. The Guild is cool, but I pledge no allegiance to it, just a fleeting Hey that was kinda funny. As for Quarterlife, well, the show is a watered down WB soap, clinging to cliches and borrowed structure as if they were hand-me-downs from Kevin Williamson.

Sean dotes on Rory’s First Kiss the way a pregnant mother dotes on her unborn child: it doesn’t matter that his water hasn’t broken yet, he’ll still spend hours trying to decide on the wallpaper. At this early stage the plot is all that matters. Still, I’m confident he can bang out a pilot that’s a notch above the production values of The Guild and a notch above the conventions of Quarterlife.

Oh and I am, by the way, eating Taco Nachos, a new $1.99 item from Jack-In-the-Box. That’s my keyboard right above it. See what I just did? I interrupted the flow of the topic and substituted it for an image of cheesy-gross nachos. This is called a Chapter Break. You all may visit the restrooms and make a choice at the vending machines.

Sean said that he has trouble reading my long-ass posts, and so it pains me to say that I shall have to relinquish my rambling insight and give in to this ill-educated, homogenized mass of soul-crushing public opinion. After skimming through successful blogs, I see that the only folks who are allowed long-ass posts are either experts and their “industry tips,” or generally attractive girls who Jack Kerouac the crap out of their sentences and are popular; because men on the internet understand that an attractive girl’s blog is the next best thing to sniffing her hair, and so they linger, a misdirected shot at romance.

Oh yeah! My short film.

After brooding all last night till four o’clock in the morning, I formed a solid idea of the first half. As already mentioned, this will be a romance. It’ll be different from Rory’s First Kiss; so different that it’ll be like the North and South Poles–you can’t get any further apart on Earth than that (right?). Sean told me his influences, which are Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” and, though he didn’t mention it, “Garden State,” because I know it happens to be his number one movie…and is such an inspiration to him that I suspect it even plays a role in the moral choices he makes in life. (“Garden State” is an insidious puppeteer to trend-conscious youngsters that tells them that if they do not meet a girl like Natalie Portman then their life is broken and needs to be fixed by behaving more like Zach Braff)

Pleasant movie, though. I saw it. Twice.

My influences are of the snottier sort, the kind your single aunt or professors are aware of because of course they are wiser and more mature than you and don’t you dare question that: Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Trois couleurs: Rouge”. Yeah, that’s like trying to measure up to God; but as a failsafe I’ll say that my third influence is Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs”. Because if I don’t like the way my short turns out then I can just end it on a shootout or a rotting, decapitated head…and it will still be an awesome stroke of brilliance.

Wish us luck! And the Taco Nachos are good but now my heart feels slower.