• 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.

There are a lot of conversations about how the commercials were shot, what our chances are, and how the whole thing works. I think Bird of Prey was shot on a Red camera and the rest were shot on Canon 7D's or something similar. Some of us managed to pull it together in very little time, others planned for months and consider it a huge challenge to create a great spot and mobilize all possible resources. There's an agreement going around that if anybody wins a million, they have to stay out late and buy everyone champagne. But we're worried about all the other competition; even if we're lucky enough to be aired, we still have to measure up on the Ad Meter against every other Superbowl ad to win an actual prize. The one that terrifies me is the Chevy Camaro ad that won their commercial contest—it's the best Chevy ad I've ever seen. But overall, the conversation is mostly about how much we love each other's spots and at this point we'll be cheering for each other no matter who gets aired.

Joby and Jimmy are still leading the comedy charge, getting us all riffing about what the stupidest things they could possibly hawk at the Superbowl. "Hummus!" "Asparagus" "Reading Material! Get your reading material!"

We finally found a good spot to show the ridiculous size of this event. The JW Marriott is the hotel where a lot of the celebrities and premium media are staying. (We're in the smaller Marriott connected to it, and can wander around freely to soak it up.) There is an elite air in the good hotels, like some kind of upper-class Aspen ski resort, with shockingly gorgeous manicured women and indifferently suited power men all looking slightly bored and important. Like anywhere else, there's a lot of staring at smartphones.

Tonight we're going to the big fancy dinner, whatever that is, so we're dressing up. Then we're going to a concert with 50 Cent and Pit Bull, where I have to do my best to seem like I'm cool and like their music and didn't actually wish it was somebody like Coldplay or Fleet Foxes.

Right now, though, gotta rush downstairs and meet Danielle and Ryan, who won the State Farm "Discount Double Check" Superbowl contest and are getting treated to the Superbowl also! She works at Colley Avenue Copies and I walked in one day and found out that two Superbowl contest winners were standing in the same place, both from Hampton Roads. Amazing.

• 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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1. I was cast in Glengarry Glen Ross, which opens tonight at The Generic Theater and runs till Feb 10. You try keeping up with a blog while rehearsing a play and see how it goes. I'm playing Kevin Spacey.
2. I went to Georgia twice, Charlottesville 4 or 5 times, Baltimore once, North Carolina once, D.C. twice, and almost went to Florida.
3. I'm not allowed to write; it's a writer's strike, after all.
4. Okay, I'm allowed to write. But I tried to get permission to reprint a great article from Creative Screenwriting about the strike and why it's important, and they were all enthusiastic but never got back to me.
5. I watched a bunch of Oscar screeners with my dear friend Ginny and her son Matt and his awesome girlfriend Joan. They're voting members so they get the magic DVDs.
6. Cloverfield is going to be the most profitable movie in years. I know this has nothing to do with why I haven't been writing lately, I just wanted to point it out. Want to make massive cash? Shoot a movie for <30 mil, cast unknowns, shoot handheld camera, and only use 10 minutes of the expensive kind of CGI. NOTE: this will only work if you put talented people in charge.
7. I got two baby sugar gliders and have been raisin' 'em up. You try keeping up with a blog while being a daddy. It's impossible. What? Lots of people do it? Fuck.

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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In 2003, I was selected for the Sundance Screenwriter's Lab. The Sundance Institute does not just put on a massive film festival every year; they have fabulous all-expenses-paid artistic development programs in film, poetry, theater, and more, and provide a kind of fertile creative soil which I never knew existed and might not have believed had I not been lucky enough (and believe me, it's more luck than talent) to get planted in it. You're housed for a week in the Sundance Village in Utah, surrounded by woodfire cabins, forested mountains, and Academy Award-winning screenwriters. The airfare is paid, the expenses are paid, and there are three grade-double-A buffet meals a day plus social events and–if you stick around a few days beyond the Lab–some free Film Festival tie-ins. There is no industry talk except around informal dinner tables, no producers, no worries, no focus on anything except the art and craft of screenwriting. Plus there's a THX theater where you get to watch prior films by your fellow participants, and get sneak-preview 35mm screenings of films that are about to premiere at Sundance. It was among the very best and happiest weeks of my life.

How did it happen?

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