Day: October 7, 2005

They are making it even easier to pick up on the waitresses at the Burbank Hooters with a script and a DVD under my arm. I choose to be, in most instances, shielded from deadly kitsch by hiding my face from anyone who might see me cross the threshold in that tacky yet unrefined ovarian Bastille. But when the manager wants to shut down the hockey game to run the trailer for my movie — and he doesn’t even know who I am — well, who am I not to swing my script through the boob factory and see what impacts.

They come like hummingbirds to sign the napkin, as a kind of appetizer. If a Hooters girl does not sign the napkin to make you feel welcome, they are so terribly fired that it’s upsetting for me to type. But if they see us “reading lines” they all come at once. I’m chit-chatting loudly with the manager. I want to run the trailer but I can’t run the trailer because it’s a psycho thriller about a black security guard who kills white men to win the heart of the woman he loves. (The trailer sucks, but my bluff is so good that I won’t have to screen it. I have given the manager — and the birds in earshot — the idea that it could have been screened were it not for stuffy customers. For all they know, it’s a ripped copy of SHORT CIRCUIT II: BACK IN HOT WATER.) But…since it can’t be shown, a surrogate mixture of trivia and BS will stimulate the grapevine. Shot entirely on location in Kathy Ireland’s former office. A perfect B movie with a digital L+F with a distributor.

I got 90% of my talent off craigslist. This is easier.

They squeeze into the booth, two and three at a time, beside us and in front of us. Describe some of them? Okay. Thin and young with nice racks, big eyes, big dreams and single, a tumbleweed blowing across the cranial steppes. Now multiply this by twenty-five, allowing for genetic variance within the Burbank population pool. That is what they look like. We read the scene where our main character inappropriately gooses his love interest on the first date. I picked this scene personally just to see if we could get away with it. Normally, a six hundred pound gorilla makes quick work of this behavior, but my sly dog produces his SAG card, which, in this reality, is a periapt of proof against lawsuit. Forsooth, derrieres scrounge into our orange casting couch in the midst of grumpy men eating taco salad and wishing they were younger and/or us. And although these beauties stammer over the main points, I direct them to give the part more feeling and imagine they are really getting their ass pinched by a good-looking serial killer. Sometimes it’s the way you let yourself be pinched that makes a difference on film. And… scene. I take a one mega pixel image with my wafer-thin RAZR of the hot nineteen year old who runs her hand up my thigh when she drops off the onion rings. (Say what you will about Motorola, the phone is worth its weight in nookie.) Numbers come in many shapes, sizes, and varieties, but why bother with the napkin when I can program them next to their pictures. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!

We stay an extra twenty minutes. And why not! I have kept my hands to myself, and my friend, who hasn’t, will be a fine acting coach to the ones still young in their parts. Because this is Hooters of Burbank! Where hotties remember our names, and follow us out of the restaurant and chase us to the car. This is the naked suburb of the big film town. This is how easy it is to get a Hooter’s girl when you are even 1% industry.

Now go back and read this article again.