Break a Leg

Yuri's Note: Drew likes to swear a little and I don't like to censor people. It's not very much swearing, but if, for some reason or other, you have yet to see anyone swear on the Internet, TV, your daily life, or CNN.com -- you may want to blur your eyes.

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WE all have regrets. I know I do. Regrets make us human, make us who we are, make us something more than just amoral meat sacks hoping our next door neighbor doesn't slit out throat in our sleep to have unfettered access to our wife and power mower. Sadly, regret is universal. It dogs us at every step, turning what should have been a wild weekend of secret abandon into a virtual tattoo of shame upon our face from the moment we walked back in the front door.

But why? Why should we constantly reflect upon our every decision, wondering how we could have chosen better? An even more pertinent question may be, "What does this have to do with Break A Leg?" I hope with this essay to not only explore that question, but perhaps even to answer it.

When I first met Yuri and Justin, it was to audition for a fictional feature film called Life Noir. Fictional not in the sense that it was a work of fiction, though it was, but fictional in the sense that it doesn't exist. Yes we shot scenes, and there have been "rough cuts" and even once I think Yuri might have mentioned "picture lock", but overall the movie is vaporware, like Duke Nukem Forever.

Anyway, I auditioned I think with Flynn for a role in this "movie" and ended up being cast. I was pretty excited, having just finished (or maybe was currently working on) another feature film called "Lost in the Wash" with a mutual friend of ours. I felt that as an actor I was on a roll, at the top of my game, living it up. Nevermind that I wasn't getting paid a damn thing for a damn thing, that would come later. As they might have said in the heyday of the Dot-Com Era "1. Get cast in indie feature; 2. ?????; 3. Profit!".

I was making some money by the way, whoring myself out for corporate videos and the like, but that was all just to convince The Man (the IRS) that all of my deductions were going towards a bona-fide business. You may even hear my voice on a prune commercial from time to time, and catch a short glimpse of me at the beginning. Check out my website for a peek at that and some other crap I've done. My wife's in the prune commercial too!

Where was I? Ok, so Yuri cast me in Life Noir, and so began a journey with this zany crew that I will never forget. Myself, Flynn, Alexis, Daniela, Chad, Skip, Justin, Yuri, Dashiell, Dustin, Hillary, and one crazy mo-fo named Paul (he sadly did not manage to maintain his sanity long enough to become involved with Break A Leg. Seriously, he's insane. Justin made him insane). Since I was at the time sans child they basically had their way with me, keeping me out late nights and up early mornings; sunburns, blood-stained leather jacket, my life in the hands of aforementioned crazy motherfucker.

Oh, and then there was the time that I answered my phone while heading back to the car after a night of shooting outside St. Mary's Cathedral with a barely-functional generator, to have Yuri tell me that Justin taped over basically all of the night's work, or something equally incompetent. How's that for a regret right there?

The point is, had I any true regrets from working with these guys on Life Noir, I would never have become involved with Break A Leg (hey, I somehow managed to bring that around!). Yuri, Justin, Dashiell, Dustin, and Hillary are brilliantly creative people, all with unique strengths that compliment one another amazingly well, and they all somehow manage to tolerate working with me on repeated projects in spite of my lack of real talent. Plus I'm an asshole. Whether we manage to sell Break A Leg remains to be seen (fuck you Tim Goodman!), but I know they'll all manage to pull something out of their asses that will make us all rich and famous.

And Yuri assures me that they will finish Life Noir someday. And that I swear a lot.

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Yuri's Second Note: Let me add-on something interesting here. What Drew appropriately forgot to say was after he auditioned for the film and we called him and told him he got the part, he literally dropped out the next day, saying he was too busy, blahblahblah. We managed to somehow convince him, I forget the exact details now, because unfortunately, we like the bastard. But I think we had to schedule around him a lot. Oh, also, we heard rumors that Drew was always really serious and "professional" -- we never liked people like that, so we were wary. Luckily, the rumors were wrong -- Drew's a complete goofball.

Unless you cover him in blood in the middle of the night and then call him back, as he's going home, to reshoot for another 30 minutes. Then he's a really mad goofball.

'Till next time.