Hello all you loyal readers and supporters! This is going to be my account of life as a volunteer teacher in Chiang Mai, Thailand over the next year. I will try to update as often as possible, so be sure to check back frequently! I'll be posting pics, updates, and random thoughts of life in a foreign country. Enjoy!
To begin the Thailand journey, I must first talk about my “farewell tour” of the U.S. Beginning in December, it was as if I was being told that the Hollywood chapter of my life was drawing to a close and I was being given the opportunity to say goodbye to all the people who began my (less than) illustrious Hollywood career. These were the people I started with as a lowly production assistant, and one by one, I was able to work with them in my role as a script supervisor. It was really a cool way to get to tell people about the next chapter in my life while saying goodbye to my Hollywood one.
Then, in January, I went up to Washington to say goodbye to as many people as I could in person, see some babies, and beg for money. ;) (BTW, thanks to all who decided to support me in the end!) That was a great week! I got to have just enough snow, but not so much it inhibited my ability to get anywhere, and I got to spend some quality time with people I love.
I came back from Washington and got a job straight away, meaning I had enough money to make a last minute road trip to the Sundance Film Festival, which will likely be the last one I have any movies in. This year I had two short films and two feature films. Even better, I got my friend Tricia to come with me, thus having someone to hang out with on the road and someone to help split gas costs! Plus, my friend Sarah and her roomie Malina were gracious enough to let us crash on their new pull-out couch. We did not watch Saturday Night Live, however.
We drove all day Wednesday, hung out around Park City with my friend Julia on Thursday, and planned to try for tickets on Friday. This was the first year I’ve been to Sundance without working, so I had no idea how to actually go about getting tickets.
Well, in keeping with the roll I was on, we actually got tickets to both premiere screenings of my feature films, coming soon to a theater (probably not near you) this summer. On Friday night, we got to see The Future, starring and directed by Miranda July. I got one extra ticket from the producers, and a lady out front had extra tickets, so Sarah and Tricia got in too. After the show, we went to the opening night dinner (yay for free food) and got to go to the premiere night party as well! There, I ran into some friends from my other movie playing at the festival, Circumstance. After a fun (but sober) evening, we drove back to Salt Lake City in a snowstorm. Fun times! Going about 25 miles an hour and not able to see the lines on the road reminded me of Washington winters.
The following day, Saturday, we got up at the crack of dawn to try to make it into Circumstance. Some of you may remember me doing a movie in Beirut, Lebanon about a year and a half ago, and this is it. I was really excited to see it because the cast and crew are scattered across the globe, so I will most likely not see them ever again. We were nervous about this one because it was in competition and was in a smaller venue, so it was going to be much harder to get in via the wait list line.
Well, we got our tickets, and headed up to a coffee shop on Main Street. Who should we run into but the director, Maryam Keshavarz, the DP and some of the actors! I told Maryam about our predicament and she said she could definitely get me in at least. Then, as we waited in the wait list line, Tricia overheard someone saying the likelihood of us getting in was slim, so I tried to call Maryam, but no luck. Suddenly, I saw her heading out the door, and just yelled to her. She was like “Oh, no! You don’t have a ticket yet?” and then ran over to someone she had just given a ticket to and got it back, saying “my script supervisor has to see the movie. Sorry!” and gave it to me. Now, here’s the best part. I get to the door, and because it was from the director’s pool of tickets, there’s a special sticker on it. So the lady at the door says to me, “Oh, you’re with the entourage? You can sit up there.” Ha! Entourage. I said thanks, but I was planning to sit with some friends who were not in the entourage. Luckily, both Julia and Tricia made it into the screening.
After the screening, I saw another friend of mine, the director Jamie Babbit, who basically taught me everything important about being a script supervisor. She directed the first feature I ever did, and she had also seen The Future the night before, so it really meant a lot for her to say that I did a really good job on both of them. She used to be a script supervisor, so she’d be the first to catch if there were screw-ups. (And for those of you who know about the head scarf, that was not my fault.)
After the movie was done, there was a good Q&A, I got to go say goodbye to all the actors, producers, etc. Sadly, we were unable to make it to the party because we had to hit the road for Tricia to get to work the next morning and it was snowing pretty heavily already. Got back to LA about 1am Sunday morning. Such a fun, whirlwind road trip and it all worked out perfectly.
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