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.
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