Fashion Week, VMA Week, Toronto Film Festival

My head is spinning. Fashion Week starts tomorrow; the parties start today. The MTV Video Music Awards are Sunday, the stars start flying into Sin City Thursday. The Toronto Film Festival kicks off Thursday, I’ll be on a jet plane there that morning- yet I still haven’t picked the premieres I’m going to attend or the people I’m going to interview. I’m trying to organize all of the schedules now, and…

Happy hour today my friend Ali and I are having a small premiere for a short film we made. It’s a pet project that I was inspired to do while at my friend Joyce’s apartment for a screening of the The Secret. Five of us sat in Joyce’s living room enjoying her homemade guacamole and drinking margaritas while we watched The Secret. Oprah had recently touted the best-selling book and DVD on her show, so it HAD to be amazing! We all love Oprah. Brimming with excitement, we braced ourselves for the knowledge that was sure to be life-changing.

Now, I’m not sure what percentage of you have seen The Secret DVD, and let me preface this by saying, I DO believe the underlying principle of The Secret, the power of positive thinking, if you don’t have dreams they can’t come true yada yada, but, they’re not reinventing the wheel here. Granted, sometimes people need to be reminded, but I’m still not so sure what sets The Secret apart from any of the other self-help books, DVDs and CDs saying more or less the same thing – except maybe marketing? And an endorsement from Oprah?

It certainly wasn’t the quality of the product. When we watched the film for the first time we were shocked by the poor quality and how low budget it appeared. The same things were repeated over and over by ‘experts’ that were just given an endless string of letters after their name to justify their credentials. We looked them up and one of the ‘experts’ was an aromatherapist, one a visionary and another a chiropractor.

We laughed, a lot. I said, ‘This is almost a spoof of itself!’ Then it came to me. If this many people had been lured to buy, read, watch The Secret, there have been spoofs made of films that grossed less! So, I brought the idea to my friend Ali, a screenwriter and Stanford grad with an appreciation for a different kind of humor than myself. She was the perfect person to get this script quickly written – and, I’m just an idea girl, a busy one who often has trouble following through on my ideas when not partnering with someone to push me. Filmmaking is her area of expertise. She loved it and her excitement made me more excited. So, for the fun of it – and a measure of social responsibility, we did it.

We wrote it in a couple of brainstorming sessions, got a few of our friends – including OAR’s Benj Gershman and OK!’s own Rob Chilton - to participate in our two days of filming, then Ali edited it on her laptop, added in a couple of bells and whistles (too many would have made it better than the original), I found a bar to host a screening and it’s set for tonight. Hopefully by the end of the week you’ll all get to see it on Youtube and Myspace! I’ll keep you posted. Until then…