Interesting coincidence to the FOX story.

I should point out before launching into this little tidbit that this kind of thing seems to happen to me on a fairly regular basis. Something similar actually just happened to me yesterday, which I can't really talk about at the moment, but this was one that sort of struck me as freaky.

Back in February or March of last year, I was invited to the Boston screening of a film called "A Kettle of Fish". My good friend Hilary Barraford, (an actress that works regularly with Kevin Anderton's Midnightchimes troupe) was there and introduced me to a screenwriter named Randy Steinberg. It was a great evening, and Randy and I managed to trade a lot of good writing stories and information on screenwriting in general. Since Randy teaches screenwriting at BU, I was curious to know what he thought of my material. I offered him a deal; read and critique one of my scripts and in return, I'd do the same for one of his.

So we did the script swap thing, and he gave my stuff pretty good marks overall, which was cool. I enjoyed reading his stuff as well, and sent him back a pretty extensive set of notes. Overall, it went really well, and we started to rely on each other as that extra pair of eyes that writers so often need as part of their quality control.

Fast forward to late August.

It had been a while since Randy and I had spoken, so I figured that I'd drop him a note and let him know about this way cool development with FOX Atomic that had fallen into my lap. Without mentioning who the exec was, I told him about my barter deal for a meeting. Here's the excerpt from his email reply (the exec's name is left out for obvious reasons):

"my cousin, [insert name of guy I'm supposed to meet with here], works at fox atomic. not sure he's the exec you're meeting with but if so that would be funny..."

So it turns out that Randy's cousin was the guy that I was supposed to meet with! Tell me that's not at least a little Twilight Zone... Randy said that I could mention his name in my discussions with them, which hasn't helped. Even Randy didn't think it would help, but it was still really nice of him to let me drop his name.

Anyway, I thought that was pretty interesting the way it all came together and actually sort of random because, I almost didn't go to the screening in Boston for that film. I knew Hilary was going, but I'd no idea that I'd get an introduction to Randy... At that point I hadn't worked on the Silver Eagle documentary, which is how I ended up getting the connection that I needed to do "The Rocker" in the first place... So to me the way it all came together made for an interesting little story on its own.

It will be an even better story to tell if something actually comes out of the meeting FOX..