Tuesday

 

Overheard at Chipotle

I hope no current NYU Film students are reading this via Jared's site, since they might know the people I'm about to mock. For that matter, they might be these people. It's a good thing I have so few readers then.

NYU Film Student 1: So the idea for my film is about how post 9/11 even the most free-thinking open-minded people take extra notice when an olive-skinned person is getting on an airplane with them.

NYU Film Student 2:
Oh, that reminds me of (Repeats news story about how Arab-American and Moslem-American groups have been angered by the current season of 24.)

Student 1:
(Agrees that this asinine story is somehow relevant)
And this one woman is boarding a plane and sees an olive-skinned man (Editor's note: My repeated use of the term olive-skinned has nothing to do with any problem I have with the word Arab or any other non-prejudicial ethnic identifier, but olive-skinned was the only word I heard Student 1 use to describe this person) who's on the security line with her. And we keep seeing her point-of-view being drawn back to him. So they're on the security line and the guards pay extra attention to the olive-skinned man, they check him over twice and don't find anything suspicious. And the woman keeps looking at him.

Student 2: Right, so she's being really paranoid. (Tells another story about how the villains in the book the Sum of All Fears were Islamic extremists, but in the movie they changed the villains to neo-Nazis).

Me: (Continues reading my law textbook, wonders what he was thinking sharing another pointless story).

Student 1: Yeah, and then they're on the plane and she keeps looking back, she makes eye contact with him and stuff. And then there's a dream sequence, except you don't know it's a dream sequence. In the dream sequence, she looks back, and the olive-skinned man is not in his seat...

Me: (Imagines a man whose skin is actually the some consistency as the outside of olive. Nearly vomits).

Student 1 (cont.): So she gets out of her seat to look around, and she walks down the aisle and pulls back the curtain to the stewardesses' station, but doesn't see anyone. So she makes her way to the cockpit and knocks on the cockpit door, and the Olive-skinned man opens it!!! And then she wakes up, and looks back, and... ... he's not in his seat! And she gets up again, and pulls back the curtain again, and sees a stewardess, so she thinks everything is fine. And then the stewardess falls down and we see the olive-skinned man coming right towards her. Fade to black.

Me: (Bites my arm off trying not to laugh in his face)

Student 2: But I thought the message you were trying to send was that people were being oversensitive.

Student 1: Or are they?

There were also two alternate endings pitched, one where the olive-skinned man surprises her while she's waiting for a cab after the flight and offers her his number, because she kept looking at him. The other one was where there's a swat team waiting for the plane when it lands, but it turns out they're waiting for some third person on the plane who wasn't the woman or the olive-skinned man. I hope this isn't a "You had to be there" story.

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