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.

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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.