It's time for him to make a dumb teenage comedy (not because I want to see it, but more to clear the cobwebs).
 - Roger Ebert on Tobey Maguire in his review for Ride with the Devil
 
"You Can't Go Home Again... But You Can Shop There"
I took a few days off and went home to Kansas City.
 
I say that I went "home" to Kansas City, despite the fact that my basement bedroom has been completely transformed into storage space, and my mom continued the "When are you going to Jersey?" routine.  I watched Daria and Weird Science (the show, not the movie).  I took Chelsey to the movies.  I spent way too much money hitting all the area comic book stores.  I got my Marvel submission together.  Brent took me to I, Robot.  My high school friends and I played Frisbee in a schoolyard on Friday night.
 
All in all a great little trip.
 
"The Truth about Cats and Dogs"
When Cats and Dogs was coming out, I was living in the dorm with My Beloved Tin-Tin, and he was far more excited about this flick than I thought a college freshman should be.  Seriously.   He had a Mr. Tinkles desktop theme on his fruity little iMac.  (Let me clarify, I call it fruity more as a reference to the Fox Trot iFruit thing than as unabashed gay bashing, which I don't believe in as a rule.)
 
Anyway, Justin has a history of loving any movie, no matter how awful, as long as it involves puppets or stupid costumes.  He loved Death to Smoochy.  He's the biggest Muppet fan I know.  It's sad.  So of course, being the great friend that I am, I mocked him mercilessly about Cats and Dogs, and I never saw it.
 
Well, I rented it while I was home, for reasons I won't go into but should be rather apparent, and I must admit, I got a real kick out of it.  The Siamese ninja cats with he night vision goggles?  Hilarious!  And when Butch the Dog sees the cats' crazy scheme and says "Son of my mom," I actually plotzed.
 
(It was a terrible mess.  Those stains don't come out.)
 
"The Further Adventures of Tobey and Clark"
I started working on Tobey and Clark episode 1.02, "Batclan Forever," but I stopped.  And for a number of reasons...
 
ONE:  Prewitt threatened to kill me.  And while he does this sort of thing all the time, and he's always kidding when he does it, one of these days, he's not going to be kidding, and we'll all have no one to blame but ourselves, because -- come on -- he warned us!
 
TWO:  I couldn't figure out how to get Tobey and Clark to the comic book convention where the Batclan was going to kidnap Katie Holmes and demand for Tobey to come in costume to get her.  I'd worked out everything else, like having Burt Ward and Chris O'Donnell steal the Spider-Man costume from Columbia Studios to give to Tobey, and the bit where Tobey refuses to get mixed up in this insanity, so Clark goes in his place, kicks Keaton's ass, kicks Kilmer's ass, and kicks Clooney's ass only to get pummelled to the edge of death by Adam West.  I'd worked out the part where while leaving the comic book convention, Tobey runs into Monty, the elderly woman who runs the comic store I rode my bike to throughout high school who would have -- in a very Aunt May way -- would have explained to Tobey how much movie Spider-Man makes a dream a little bit more real, inspiring him so that when West unmasks Clark and says "Hey, you're black!  You're not Spider-Man!" it would have been so fucking cool when Tobey shows up and says "No.  He's not.  I am."
 
I worked all that stuff out, but I couldn't figure out how to get Tobey and Clark off of Tobey's couch and to Wizard World's LA Convention.  I tried having a beaten up Neil Patrick Harris to tell them what was going on, but that was too much.  I tried to get a beaten up Christian Bale to tell them what what going on, but I couldn't figure out whether I wanted Bale to be on the Batclan's side or not. 
 
THREE:  While circling down the drain of my episode two plot hole, I started thinking about episode 1.03, and decided that Clark would be watching Tobey's apartment (you know, like watering the plants and feeding Lou the Beagle) when Alexis Bledel stops by and the two of them would take a day and fall in love (complete with Clark's sixth viewing of Spider-Man 2) to set up the long-running Clark-Bledel-Dunst love triangle (which is the revised version of the Clark-Holmes-Dunst love triangle).  Well, I was watching West Wing on Bravo, trying to work out some reason for Tobey to be out of town -- he can't be making a movie because the running joke is that Tobey never makes movies -- when they had a commercial for Celebrity Poker Showdown, and I got the vague idea that Tobey's plot for the episode should be that he's cleaning up at Celebrity Poker Showdown, and his toughest challenger -- the hardest card shark at the table -- is ten-year-old Dakota Fanning.
 
Now, the oldest rule in writing is to write what you know, but I don't know shit about poker, so I'm thinking to myself, I'm going to have to do some research to get it right, when it hits me -- I should partner up with Will on this.  I can write the Clark and Bledel stuff, and he can do the Tobey-as-Maverick bit.  It seemed like a great idea...  and that's when I realized that I had crossed over into the bad place.
 
...
 
I bought the Ultimate Spider-Man Scriptbook this week.  It's exactly what you'd think: a couple of Brian Michael Bendis' scripts for Ultimate Spider-Man, which I thought would be a good reference for studying the format of full script comic writing.  Well, in the introduction for the script for issue #45 -- this story about Aunt May talking to her therapist -- Bendis reveals that when he wrote it originally, it wasn't going to get published, he was just writing it to clear some cobwebs and really figure out who this character was for him.  Now, as I've said -- though he may be the hottest writer in comics right now -- I'm losing my love for Brian Michael Bendis.  I'm having a hard time deciding whether it's that I don't like him, but I respect him or vice versa.  It's an ongoing "debate" for me and Prewitt (who remains the only person I know with whom I ever really want to talk about comics, because everyone else I talk to about comics just wants me to explain stuff, and I think they do this under the assumption that it'll make me feel important or smart about this one particular thing, but really, I always feel dumb saying stuff like "Well, in comic continuity, it's been presented that Mary Jane saw Peter climb out of his window as Spider-Man to apprehend his uncle's murderer, so she always knew he was Spider-Man, though she didn't tell him she knew until Amazing Spider-Man #26-something," because come on... I sound like an asshole!).  In fact, I've bet him $50 that in five years, Bendis' star will have fallen, and he'll be as generally disregarded as Scott Lobdell.  (Man, I am packing in the useless comic geek references today, ain't I?)
 
Anyway, I told Prewitt that Ultimate Spider-Man #45 -- an issue he likes way more than I do -- was just supposed to be this throwaway story, and he used it to launch into this whole thing about how if this is the type of story Bendis just writes on a whim and it's still good enough to get published, he must be a great writer whose appeal will last for decades and blah, blah, blah...  And I think he missed what really got me about the whole stupid little anecdote:
 
Here this guy is, the critically and commercially celebrated King of Marvel Comics -- writing five books a month (and most of them even come out on schedule) -- but he'll take the time out to just write something for himself every once in a while -- screw whether or not it's publishable or whatever else.  And, while Bendis' little exercise is definitely a little more productive than, say long-running stick figure saga's or writing the next season of a show that's been cancelled, maybe this is the type of thing that writers do sometimes to shake out the cobwebs and flex those creative muscles.  So, I'd like to think that writing Tobey and Clark isn't the horrible waste I first thought.
 
It's got me excited about writing again...  It's got me back into a creative mindset and out of Grand Funk Railroad...  It's fun...
 
But when I've reached a point when I seriously want to drag poor Will down with me -- even with all that said -- it's probably best to move on to better things...
 
Besides, I have my doubts that I could have collaborated with Will on this series without a Tobey-makes-dirty-love-to-a-horse scene getting written, and that's not good for anybody.
 
SUMMER SEQUEL WEEK continues with:
"Songblog II: Electric-Boogaloo" & "37 Life Lessons from Watching Spider-Man 2"!