Meme-oirs

Thanks to writergurl for tagging me with the Fun Joel meme. My responses:

ONE (1) earliest film-related memory:

My father taking me to see Disney's The Legend of Lobo at the Palace Theater on Main Street. I must have only been about three or four. It's about wolves, which on the big screen to a tyke must have looked scary as hell because I apparently spent much of the movie hiding under the seat.

TWO (2) favorite lines from movies:

"Ya, ya, ya!" Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey. Obviously not much of a line writing-wise but the way she delivers it and sells her character as a total loon makes it memorable.

"Get busy living or get busy dying. That's goddamn right." Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. There are so many good lines in this movie that it's hard to pick one but this moment might be favorite of the film.

THREE (3) jobs you'd do if you could not work in the "biz":

Lawyer
DJ
Teacher

FOUR (4) jobs you actually have held outside the industry:

Lawyer
Retail lackey
Golf course grounds worker
Caddy

THREE (3) book authors I like:

Jane Austen
Nick Hornby
P.G. Wodehouse

TWO (2) movies you'd like to remake or properties you'd like to adapt:

Remake: Although the original holds up so well I'm not sure it really needs to be remade, 1987's The Hidden is a sleeper favorite that sort of screams for an update. A little like Men in Black but cooler, Kyle McLachlan plays an alien chasing another alien, which has the ability to jump from host to host as it goes through bodies on a thrill-kill crime spree in Los Angeles. The key would be maintaining the original's low-key black humor, which keeps it from becoming just another formula sci-fi/buddy-cop action picture.

Adaptation: Possibly my favorite book of all-time, On Love by Alain de Botton. Better known for his later book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, On Love is a fairly straightforward "boy meets girl on a plane from Paris to London, boy dates girl, boy and girl break up" story, but filled with varied philosophical musings on the nature of attraction, destiny v. chance, and what in our nature as humans drives us to love another, often despite ourselves. All with spiffy little diagrams and illustrations to visually demonstrate the author's points. A sort of Annie Hall in London, but even smarter.

ONE (1) screenwriter you think is underrated

I'm not sure how underrated he is, but he does seem to fly under the radar while consistently producing a wide range of excellent scripts, original and adapted: John Sayles. Baby It's You captures perfectly that time between high school and college when you realize that person you thought was the love of your life is most definitely not the person you are going to be spending the rest of your life with. Matewan is riveting drama set in the coal fields of West Virginia (state of my birth) as unions attempted to organize the miners, and were met with savage violence by the coal companies. Eight Men Out, his adaptation of the book detailing the Black Sox 1919 World Series scandal may be the best baseball movie ever made. In addition to his own works, Sayles makes no bones about his "other career" as a highly-sought script doctor on more commercial pieces. His collected interviews will be one of my next screenwriting book purchases. I admire the balance he's been able to strike between writing what he wants (and writing those works well), making the movies he wants to make, and still being able to pay the bills in between. We should all be so lucky.

I don't know who hasn't answered yet, but if you haven't, consider this an open-ended license to meme. Tag, you're it.