FOREWORD

A few years ago, I began writing for the first time. Now, I had written a few things before, and had been told by a college English professor that my style of writing was too imaginative. I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that, but as you can understand, I was quite bothered for it.

After college I grew up. I started my career in the video business. Not so much because I wanted to, but because I had to. Movies had always been everything in my life, and when the teaching profession began to fail, I turned to video. It was while I was employed at this mom and pop video joint, and managing the place, that I met Meighan.

I based my first true writing attempt, outside of poetry and song writing, on how I met her. After all, the circumstances and the comedic potential were too good to be true. Meighan has half a brain. I know, it's really not that funny. As a child, she had a few problems and the doctors performed some unprecedented surgery on her. They took out a good chunk of her brain.

As I bragged to my partners in crime, the various friends I had around the video store, I soon found out about this. I was scared to death. I had essentially set myself up on a blind date with this girl with half a brain. I had never even had a conversation with her. Was she stupid? What was in her head? These were things I had to find out and explored with The Other Half of Me.

I elaborated on the entire concept of a girl with half a brain and wrote the screenplay around my fears. Mainly, I wrote of complications that may or may not arise in a girl with half a brain. Seizures. The thought of these scared the hell out of me, until one night it happened.

Meighan had a seizure while sleeping. She was choking. She was screaming. She was scared. When she came out of it, she was in a world all of her own. She was frightened of the cat. She had forgotten the name of her childhood teddy bear. She couldn't count, nor recite the alphabet. I was genuinely scared for the first time in my life.

When I began to film The Other Half of Me, I took all of this in. I memorized every aspect of that night. I put it into the script. I put it on screen. Those moments of the film are genuinely scary. And I am proud of that. I truly captured the fear I was going through.