Archive for the ‘Travelogues’ Category

• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 1
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 2
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 3
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 4
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 5
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 6

It's hard to talk about what happened on February 5, 2012. The day feels like a confusing dream, the kind you wake from in happiness and then sadly realize never occurred. The only difference is that it did.

I'm writing this nearly two months later—the first break I've gotten from the crush of work and responsibility that awaited me when I returned from Indianapolis. I didn't have time to adjust after that staggering week, or to savor its taste. Sometimes I doubt it happened. I've had lots of happiness in my life, but it's mostly been the flavor of calm satisfaction. Loss, failure, and grief are the only feelings I've had before with much actual intensity, and so the feelings of Superbowl night, and the recollections of it, take on a strange tinge of sadness, as one might wince when flexing a healthy joint that you remember once injuring as a child.

"It is in our idleness…in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top." —Virginia Woolf

I'll try to walk you through the day…

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• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 1
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 2
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 3
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 4
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 5

Sorry about the delay, but when I got home I had two major work deadlines I was running late for plus twenty plays to read. It's been over a week and I haven't unpacked from the trip yet.

Superbowl Morning

Now, the part you've been waiting for…

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• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 1
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 2
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 3
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 4

Saturday night before the Superbowl we were treated to a swank dinner where we met several more Doritos marketing and advertising bigwigs. It was in part to honor us, and in part to honor the team that put together the marketing strategy and the Crash event. Everybody was distributed into five large tables, each marked for one of the commercial finalists.

Check this spread out…

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• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 1
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 2
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 3

So last night Jonathan and I went to see Chronicle. The next morning the other guys showed up and I figured I'd hear about all the madness we missed out on. They said they spent the whole night looking for a place to eat because everything was overflowing, and wished they'd gone to the movie. When Frito-Lay isn't giving us something to do we have no idea what to do with ourselves.

Downtown Indy has been transformed into Superbowl Village. There's an NFL Experience expo, concerts, an astroturf field down an entire street, giant decals over everything, skyways connecting all the major buildings, and a zipline where people have been waiting for hours to swoosh down over the heads of thousands of crammed drunks and families. From our hotel we can not only see the stadium, but the highways where cars inch hopelessly slowly into downtown. The average wait for a taxi was an hour.

The city at night…

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• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 1
• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 2

During yesterday's TV interviews, one of the TV stations asked two of the finalists (who shall remain nameless) what their favorite Lonely Island song was. The first guy said "Iran From You"—and the second guy nonchalantly said "Jizz in My Pants." Everyone in the green room suddenly started chattering, "Did he just say Jizz in My Pants on live TV?" I bolted into the control room and found out (surely to the great relief of the entire Frito-Lay organization) it was being taped for later editing.

After the exhausting Media Day, where each finalist did somewhere around 15 satellite interviews with stations around the country, we went to a swank bistro for lunch and had the world's best sliders followed by heaping plates of chicken, short rib, and dessert platters. I met some of the representatives from Goodby & Silverstein, the giant ad agency that does Frito-Lay's advertising and helps run this contest, and they seemed just as excited about the contest as everyone else, though they're more laid-back and cool like LA movie producers. Then back to the hotel for naptime.

Then on to…

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• How to Crash the Superbowl, pt 1

We were on the way to the airport and a semi truck crashed in front of us, about a football field's length from the exit to the airport. We almost missed Crash the Superbowl because of a crash. Fortunately, nobody was injured (I checked) and in spite of blocking all the travel lanes with his sideways trailer, the driver kindly left a shoulder open for us to squeeze by.

We got to Indy and found that everything everywhere is branded Superbowl XLVI. It's on the floors, the walls, in every airport store, plastered 80 feet high on gigantic hotel decals. Even the pilot was talking about it. He apparently didn't know anything about sports, though; on the way in he came over the PA and welcomed everyone to Indy, "especially all you basketball fans."

And then…

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Somebody asked me whether I'd be chronicling my experiences heading to the Superbowl, and the answer is: poorly. I haven't been keeping up with my FilmTraveler blog because I have a backlog of entries about Charles Darwin that I felt honor-bound to post before switching to anything frivolous. It's no wonder honor is so rare; it's bloody inconvenient.

So I'll be resurrecting it a teeny bit in order to post some updates whenever Facebook status updates prove too restrictive. The trouble with Facebook is that it's given a lot of talented people the illusion that by posting an occasional thought they're fulfilling their gifts as writers. Can you imagine if Christopher Nolan had written a status update instead of Inception?

Why I'm Going to the Superbowl

I'm going to assume anyone reading this already knows my brother and I made a Doritos Crash the Superbowl commercial and it got picked as a finalist. So I'll skip to the details. I'm on my way to Indianapolis in three hours to jump on the Superbowl hype-train, and we'll be spending the game in the Frito-Lay skybox with the other finalists, corporate and creative bigwigs, and best of all, Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island (the creators of the famous Saturday Night Live digital shorts). There are several official events and social events planned, and other than an itinerary I don't know what's going to happen or how.

So, now…

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So in Part One I went to Maine, and in Part Two I went to Canada and got blown up at.

In Part Three I return to Maine and have a terrific week with Fancy Pants, FPS (Fancy Pants' Sister), and their assortment of very large dogs. I really like those girls. They're smart and goofy and kind of ruthless; they're full of odd personality combinations. They love the outdoors and have cynical senses of humor. They love their dogs.

We left Canada and headed back over the border. At the border checkpoint, I sat in the passenger seat. Both times. Both times I passed my identification over, and both times the border guard–up in a booth on the driver's side–examined it and waved us through without looking at my face. I could have handed them some other dude's ID while smoking a joint wearing a turban and they'd have given me a gift basket.

Marshmallow Fields Forever

The thing that surprised me most this trip was that in Maine they grow marshmallows on farms. They're lined up in rows, in field after field, each one the size of a cow.

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So where we left off in Part One, I was 1) struggling with whether to make the characters in my screenplay more sympathetic, and 2) in Maine.

After a day in lobsterland, we packed up and continued on into Nova Scotia. In case you were wondering whether they have a different set of values up in the Northeast with regard to their natural environment, the following two pictures are from a highway rest stop along the way:

Every writer needs something different to write their best. I need trees, water, and wildlife. (And the occasional shoulder rub doesn't hurt.)

This was my first view of the Nova Scotia coast:

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When I visited New York City several years ago, I went to the New York Public Library for the first time. I walked up between the giant stone lions, past which the Ghostbusters in the 1980's ran screaming. (photo: Wally Gobetz, used with permission) I hopped up an old staircase and found myself in a room filled with glass cases. In one of them was a small hardbound book, with yellowish-white pages, opened to the title page printed in that distinctive, spread-out all-caps old-timey typeface (you know what I mean)–it was Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

Just under the title and author was a small note, written in pencil. I don't remember the exact wording, but basically it said, "To my dear friend Ralph Waldo Emerson" and was signed "Henry David Thoreau."

What I remember most was the fact that it was written in pencil. I don't think Henry was giving much thought to how it would endure in museum displays; he was just writing a note to his buddy Ralph, who was more famous than he was.

But that's not an interesting story, so feel free to go back in time and not read it. The point is that I was thinking about Walden the last couple of weeks. Henry David Thoreau stepped into the New England woods and came out with one of the great beloved books in American history. Every writer is different, of course–some can write brilliantly in the middle of subway trains, NASCAR races, and leafblower conventions. Most of the ones I've met, though, are a little more like Thoreau and need their space. We can go anywhere to read Walden, but Thoreau had to go to the woods to write it.

So when I was invited to go to Maine and Nova Scotia for two and half weeks, I emailed all my web design clients, called a few friends to cancel plans, and left within three days. A dear friend got frustrated with me and said, "You don't have to leave to write! You can do it anywhere." We are no longer on speaking terms.

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