Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling (2011)

Hollywood: My Good Friend Who Is Also a Little Embarrassing

Somewhere in Hollywood Someone Is Pitching This Movie

AFEW YEARS ago I sat down for a meeting with some executives at a movie studio that I will call Thinkscope Visioncloud. Thinkscope Visioncloud had put out some of my favorite movies and they wanted to hear some of my ideas, so I was naturally very excited. All television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. We long for the glitziness of the movie world. I’ll put it this way: at the Oscars, the most famous person in the room is like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys, the big exciting celebrity is Kelsey Grammer, or maybe Helen Hunt if she decided to play Emily Dickinson or something in an HBO miniseries. Look, Frasier Crane is awesome, but you get what I’m trying to say. It’s snobby and grossly aspirational, but it’s true. So, I left work at The Office early one afternoon with a “See ya, suckers!” attitude and headed to my destiny.

The junior executive’s office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room in a fifty-mile radius of The Office studio. The stuffed chair I was sitting on was expensive leather and looked like the one a judge would sit on in his private chamber on a TV show. I was so nervous the sweat from the back of my legs was making me stick to it. Oh yeah, I was wearing shorts to this meeting. What? For a television writer, this was a classy business casual outfit. After I finished sharing one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs.

EXEC: Yeah, we’re really trying to focus in on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.

For the rest of the meeting we talked in earnest about if there was any potential in a movie called Yahtzee! I made some polite suggestions and left.

I am always surprised by what movie studios think people will want to see. I’m even more surprised how correct they are a lot of the time. The following movies are my best guess as to what may soon be coming to a theater near you:

✵ Bananagrams 3D

✵ Apples to Apples 4D (audiences are pummeled with apples at the end of the movie)

✵ Crest Whitestrips

✵ Sharks vs. Volcanoes

✵ King Tut vs. King Kong

✵ Streptococcus vs. Candidiasis (Strep Throat vs. Yeast Infection)

✵ The Do-Over

✵ The Switcheroo

✵ Street Smart

✵ Street Stupid (Street Smart sequel)

✵ Fat Astronaut

✵ The Untitled Liam Neeson “You Took My Female Relative Project”

✵ The Untitled Jennifer Lopez Sonia Sotomayor Project

✵ Darling (Peter Pan from the point of view of the Darling family’s alcoholic dad)

✵ The Bear from Those Toilet Paper Ads Movie 3D

✵ Gross Catastrophe

✵ Hate Fuck

✵ Fat Slut

✵ Sex Dude

✵ Bad Dog Walker (You can see the poster already, can’t you? Heather Graham in booty shorts, pulled in eight different directions by dogs on leashes and smiling a naughty grin.)

✵ Grandpa Swap

✵ Stepmom Finishing School

✵ Human Quilt (horror movie)

✵ I Ain’t Yo’ Wife!

✵ You Ain’t My Dad!

As much as it may seem like I am mocking these movies, if any movie studio exec is reading this and is interested in any of the above, I will gladly take a meeting about them. I have an almost completed outline for Crest Whitestrips.