Pamela Ribon's Blog: the latest from pamie.com, page 10

How to Rock a Film Festival (and my AFF panel info)

In less than a month I'll be at the Austin Film Festival, where I will once again attempt to balance seeing friends and schmoozing, which will result in some terrible hits to my liver.

The schedule for AFF just went up and it's so very exciting! Are you the kind of person who would attend a film/tv writer conference? Do you go to AFF? If not, you must change that immediately, as this thing is awesome. So here's where you can find me at the festival, and what to do (and, perhaps more...

Mother on the Orient Express: Part Seven (The Train)

(I broke the train into two parts. The first part of the train (part six of the story) is here.)

We take the long walk toward dinner. Now we're a little less sure on our feet. Mom's getting tired, and I'm a little tired, and it's darker. We make it to the bar car, which we have to go through to get to our dinner car.

We open the door. It's different in the dark, more mysterious, more like a lounge, like you'd imagine. The piano abruptly stops and — "Sentimental Journey" begins playing. And...

Mother on the Orient Express: Part Six (The Train)

So here's what my mother didn't know: that months ago I'd asked the Orient Express travel agent if she could help me make even more of Mom's dreams come true. If you don't remember, Mom wanted to sit in the bar car of the Orient Express, drinking a pink squirrel while listening to them play "Sentimental Journey."

"I think we can try to figure that out," said the agent, understandably hesitantly. Just in case, I emailed her two YouTube links to the song, plus a link to purchase the sheet...

Mother on the Orient Express: The Update

Look, I went through a redesign and then I was in the dictionary and then I was really busy with multiple pitches and if I finish this script I've got due in the next couple of days I'll have turned in a pilot script, a manuscript and a screenplay all in the past six weeks. So I don't want to hear it! My fingers have been typing! And I still updated here! What do you people want from me?!

But: I wanted you to know that I'm about to start working on the next installment of Mother on the...

Confessions of a Mighty Summit Convert

Full disclosure: I thought it was going to be stupid.

Maybe not stupid-stupid, but it seemed to have the potential to be pretentious, self-indulgent, a little too much for me. Look, this is all I knew going in:

Mighty Summit is an annual getaway weekend for professional bloggers and content creators. We're asking all of our attendees to draw up Mighty Lists — lists of about 100 things they'd like to do in their lifetimes — and share them with each other over the course of the weekend. Too...

An Open Letter to Matt Damon's Character in Contagion, from His Character's Ex-Wife

[Note: there will be spoilers]

Hey, Mitch.

I heard that skinny blonde bitch you left me for was Patient Zero. Way to fucking go, dude. Nice environment to expose our daughter to. And speaking of Jory, thanks for keeping her during the whole "Mitch is in Quarantine" time. That sounds like a fantastic idea. Why not force her to live in a place where everybody just died of a mysterious, seemingly unstoppable, uncurable illness? Did you even Purell that shit before you had her sleeping in...

Hollywood Reporter: Mom Edition

INT. PAMIE'S CAR — LAST NIGHT

MOM

[MOM'S CALLER ID IS ON HER TELEVISION. IT IS EXTREMELY DISORIENTING IF YOU DON'T KNOW THAT, WHEN SUDDENLY THE SHOW YOU'RE WATCHING IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY "BUG GUY."]

PAMIE

MOM

PAMIE
It's...

Tales from the Accidental Asshole: The TV Critic

This story is old enough now that I feel like I can talk about it without incriminating anyone involved, other than me, which is fine, because I'm the only one in this story who comes out looking like an asshole.

We go way back to 1999 for this one, back before there were blogs, before there was Television Without Pity, when there were just online journals and the invention of Mighty Big TV. I was lucky enough and honored to be one of the initial writers for MBTV–>TWOP, and due to network scheduling, my recap ended up being the very first one posted on the brand new, shiny site. It was for a little show called "Get Real." You probably don't remember it because you were watching this other little show that premiered in that same time slot: The West Wing. Consequently, I've never seen an episode of TWW, although I did get to visit the set one day and Martin Sheen told me I had a "black soul," adding: "In the good way." But that's another story for another day.

This one is about recapping "Get Real."

Not surprisingly, I'm having a hard time finding clips from this series (though I did find this adorable blast from the past) (Kids, it's called a "splash page"), but here's one.

Recap that, bitches. Anyway, you may have noticed the lead girl in this series was Anne Hathaway. And that was her first on-screen role. The series also starred Jesse Eisenberg, Eric Christian Olsen, Jon Tenney, Christina Pickles, Taryn Manning, and even Mila Kunis at one point. (And MC Lyte. And Tom Arnold.) It was about the Green family, a group of good-looking suburban people and the things that happened to them as they went about their day thinking they were the only people who truly mattered in the entire world.

You guys, I was not nice to this series. I recapped it with a special fury. I remember at the time of the earliest recaps I didn't have a laptop, so I would write my recaps in long hand on a notebook, then take that notebook to work with me and type it all into a word doc to mail over to Tara (who then I only knew as "Wing"). Each recap took something like twelve hours. It was a true labor of love, because I loved Mighty Big TV, and I loved how much we all hated that show. And if you clicked that EW link above for MBTV, you'll see that all the hatred was well-received, as my recaps got a shout-out in that review.

Well, not everybody loved the recaps. One person in particular wasn't a fan. I got an email from someone calling himself an "insider" to the show, who started by reminding me that I was just a girl sitting on a futon in Austin, TX, and that I had no idea how hard it was to make an episode of television. That I couldn't comprehend how difficult the process was, from just getting a show on the air to casting people with chemistry to finding a writing staff to budgeting and marketing to ratings — that I was being unfairly harsh and a little naive. He asked me to give the show another chance and perhaps back off just a bit.

In this "insider's" defense, at the time I believe we had made a site-wide voting contest to determine which character was the "most annoying" on all of television. The winner, beating out Dawson, was Anne Hathaway's character Meghan Green, which we also called "The Center of the Universe." I believe I called Eric Christian Olsen's face "simian." I renamed one girl, due to her voice, "Ferret."

I don't remember much about the episodes now, but I sort of remember there might have been an entire episode that revolved around Eric Christian Olsen's character having a huge after-school fight with a character of the week, and in the end the "twist" was that their beef started during a little league game. The point is, I couldn't go easier on the show because it just kept getting worse. Meanwhile, my "insider" continued emailing me. He said he couldn't tell me his name, but he wanted me to know that as the show progressed, he was starting to get just as frustrated as I was. That things weren't going in the direction they'd hoped, and there were pressures from all sides for things to change. Then he told me about the day one of the actors looked up from his script and shouted, "I can't say this. Pamie will kill us!"

This was one of the earliest times we learned that Mighty Big TV was being read by the people who make the shows we recapped, and it was a very surreal feeling. It also added a strange pressure. Part of the fun of recapping was getting to publicly rag on guilty pleasure shows like you were eating popcorn on the couch with your friends. Knowing that the people behind the show were now reading (ON SET!) made it feel like I was egging their houses and then signing my name on their lawns in pee. ("Love, Peeme.")

Get Real was cancelled before the final episodes aired, and I just want to say, for all of you who have ever wrote saying I'm responsible for the cancellation of Wonderfalls that I had nothing to do with the demise of either. Remember: I was just a chubby girl on a futon, furiously typing away into a blueberry clamshell iBook, chain smoking Marlboro Lights, trying to make it to improv rehearsal on time. (But, hey, Mr. Sorkin, I didn't wear a muu-muu, and I intensely dislike Parliaments. Then again, I never got a chance to watch your show, so I choose to believe you weren't referring to me.)

Just after the cancellation was announced, I got an email from my insider, letting me know that he was going to send me copies of the final two unaired episodes, just so I could have a full set of recaps. I found that to be very nice. He asked me not to say how or where I got them when I posted them, and that he was doing it in appreciation of the relationship we'd formed over the time I'd been recapping the show. He also warned me that they weren't very good.

The episodes arrived, I recapped them, and I sent a final thank you email to my insider. He wrote back, saying not to worry about all the kids on the show, that they were all set out for rather promising careers. That Jesse Eisenberg had things on the horizon that would make him come out from under the shadow of being known as "The Pepsi Girl's brother." Eric Christian Olsen was set to star in a sequel to Dumb and Dumber. And the young, talented, beautiful Anne Hathaway was off to Vassar, but had several promising offers to mull over while she worked on her studies.

"And off the record," my insider concluded, "I'm her father."

My ensuing scream could be heard from so far away there's no doubt I woke up Heisman-trophy winner Ricky Williams' mother, who lived in the apartment just below mine. I'm sure my scream was heard all the way in Toronto, where Tara lived, and where I forwarded that email with the subject line: "AND OFF THE RECORD, I'M AN ASSHOLE." Tara's scream woke her husband Dave, and there was much agonizing screaming from both of us after that, because never have I ever felt as much like an asshole at that moment, and Tara, who is Canadian and therefore unceasingly polite, felt directly responsible for my assholocity.

I sent, I'm sure, an incredibly apologetic email reply about the job and not the person and nothing was ever supposed to be about how his daughter can't "act" per se, and when I wrote that she used her hair as her one and only acting tool, I kept in mind that she was young and… um… well, uh… hey, sorry about your kid's show getting cancelled.

Joke's on me forever, however, because Anne Hathaway's dad, who is gracious and apparently forgiving on the level of Buddhist monks, emailed me not long after to ask if I'd written any screenplays. I hadn't moved to LA yet at this point, and I hadn't written a feature screenplay, either. I was sitting at my desk at a software company, and had to reply, "No."

"That's too bad," he said. "Because Disney's looking for something to do with Annie, and I thought of you." So, I didn't have anything to submit, she and Disney went on to do The Princess Diaries so I guess that worked out for her. And Disney.

Probably about every three months or so I will get hit with a pang of stomach guilt over reading the words "And off the record, I'm her father." I'm getting sweaty just typing this story up right now. This is exactly my biggest fear, each and every day, that I'm just cackling and blabbing my fool head off thinking I'm being oh-so-funny and aren't we all joking on the same page, and it turns out I'm shit-talking Anne Hathaway to her father.

This happens a lot more once you live in LA. I can't remember who I was talking to about Rufus Wainwright and the two notes his voice sings over and over, but I do remember that person said back, "Yeah, he's like, my best friend." Over the years I try to keep my snark more and more to myself. Because, after all, Anne Hathaway's dad had a point, and one I would eventually learn the hard way. The process of making a television show is really very difficult, and it's a miracle one even gets on the air, and I've actually had to sit at a table while people pulled up recaps or forums of the show we were writing on the very same site where I used to post my originally hand-scribbled bitch-fests. It has made me wince, more than once, to read, "Who wrote that? It's HORRIBLE," and know exactly how that line got in the script beyond my control but with my name on it.

As I sit here halfway through pitching season, simultaneously awaiting the fate of my ABC Family pilot script, I can't help but think: "When will my bad Wonderfalls Karma run out? Is there more coming for Boomtown? Tarzan? I have done this to myself!"

Oh, God. Another wave of guilt over Anne Hathaway's dad. Be careful, people on the Internet. Learn from my mistakes of the year 2000. You think they don't know what you're saying, but they do. They do.

Calling Off the Jam

This weekend my league is holding try-outs for subpool, the tiny team of no-longer-rookies who practice with the team skaters and sub on bouts in hopes of getting drafted to a team. It only happens about twice a year. It's the first time there have been try-outs since I came back to derby last winter.

I didn't sign up.

I'm not really one for announcing things, particularly right at their very start. Perhaps it's from years of Hollywood almosts, where I've found myself shouting, "This is happening! Wait! No, now it's not anymore! Sorry! Go back to what you were doing!" I tend to wait now until I really, really, really know it's happening.

This isn't just in my work-life. I'm this way in my personal life, as well. I'd rather you asked in three months why I look like I've lost weight, and then I'll be more than happy to tell you all about this thing I was doing that worked. But if I was posting pictures on the Internet and blogging about some new exercise routine or diet, it feels like I'm just setting myself up for a lot of public failure. I didn't tell too many people when I started roller derby for the same reason. What if I only did it for a week?

When you first start roller derby, particularly for the first six months or so, it's all-consuming, and the temptation is to tell everyone all the time about every aspect of this new, exciting life you've got and all these friends you made and how exhausted you are from the commitment, and you show off your bruises and you basically become a person who can only communicate using two syllables: der and bee.

Because of this "jumped in" feeling once you've joined this world, it can become a huge decision to leave it. To even take a break from it. You guys, I tore a ligament in my knee and I still went back. If you'd asked me ten years ago if I'd ever go back to a place where I once lost the ability to walk for six weeks and be unable to crawl for seven months, I'd tell you that you have the wrong person in the first place because I don't play team sports. I was, however, fully indoctrinated in the other cult of my life — a comedy troupe — and no doubt if I somehow shattered my tibia during a particularly rowdy rendition of "Party Quirks" (which, given my propensity in the moment to forget that even though I was given "Kerry Strug" I wasn't actually a sixty-three-pound gymnast, was actually more than a little possible) I would have been right back on that stage pushing myself in one of those one-legged rolly-carts. (The comedy troupe would have delighted in having an actual gimpy girl in the troupe, because they were going to tell those jokes anyway, most likely about me.)

But I came back to derby at the end of last year because after all the book-touring, after meeting all those derby girls all over this country, I missed it. Much like when some of you other women decide to go ahead and have a second child grow inside your body and then fight its way out, I'd forgotten how much time it took out of my life, how much it hurt, how much it took over my entire body and schedule and required visits to the doctor and special equipment and advice from seemingly everybody and you stop caring about things like your nails and your clothes get simplified and suddenly one drawer in your dresser has outfits in only two colors.

I came back with the renewed interest that is important to make it through fresh meat. I had to try-out again because I'd been injured long enough that I had to start over. And I didn't really write too much about it because I write about derby a lot, but what's happening to me on my track is a little more personal. It would feel like telling you what I did when I went to the gym. But I came back feeling stronger, feeling better, and had a fantastic time meeting a mostly all new-to-me group of Fresh Meat girls, and I skated in another Baby Doll Brawl and then they moved subpool try-outs to three months later than they were originally scheduled and things started to fall apart.

I could list a million excuses here (I'm very work-busy and often prefer to write at night and on weekends, Sara moved to New York and a lot of my other derby friends have long since dropped out, it hurts more than it used to, at my last practice a girl broke her foot and I feel like it was maybe my fault, I don't feel ready, I don't feel like a strong enough skater to make a team, I like my non-derby schedule, etc.), but every single one of those excuses comes out of guilt. I feel guilty for leaving derby, so I've left it the same way I came in: like a secret. Most people don't know how I mostly snuck into Fresh Meat three years and some change ago. I was just there and now I'm just not.

I had a feeling my time skating was coming to an end about two months ago, but I didn't tell anyone. Word spreads too quickly, and I didn't want to become either an invisible skater ("She's basically on her way out") nor someone who needed saving. I wasn't one hundred percent sure I wanted to stop, but I knew if I told anybody I was thinking about it, it could become A Thing. It's only now that people are starting to notice. For the first time ever I didn't make my attendance requirements. I'm having to make the transition from a skater in training to a skater in retirement, one who can play pick-up scrimmages in our wRECk league, but no more.

I could tell that I wasn't as good as I'd been a few months earlier. And that feeling of getting worse instead of getting better (and by that I mean my recovery from injuries was taking longer, my steps were getting slower, my endurance was getting worse even when I was training harder) made me feel like an aging boxer or something. I'd never thought about my age as a limit before. Never. But there were times when I'd look next to me and see a girl in her mid-twenties and I'd just think, "I wish I got to start this when I was her age." Because — and here's what it all comes down to –

I don't think I want to play full-contact sports anymore.

A million excuses, a million reasons, but when I made myself answer a simple question: "Do you want to keep doing this?" that was the only answer.

The only person who's really going to be celebrating the end of my playing roller derby is my mother. But I've got a surprise for her. Before she can dance too hard and cheer too loudly, I've already set up her disappointment for the next couple of years: I cut off my hair. That's right, I got the derby haircut after I stopped skating. (Helmets cause breakage.) The last time I cut it this short she never saw me without asking right off the bat how much longer I thought it would take before it grew out to something she'd like again. It caused her to say the now famous: "It's just that this haircut makes your head look like a little girl. Like you've got a girl head on a woman's body."

Big life changes call for big hair changes. It's easier to move forward when there's lots of change in the air, when everything feels different.

If you can't tell by now, it's difficult for me to leave derby behind. So I did lots of things I wanted to do before I left the building. I helped set-up the new track. I helped with junior derby camp and got really excited about the future of roller derby. Those girls are going to take this sport to the next level. They're the ones who will turn this from an underground, sometimes campy, extreme female sport to simply: another sport. One that has players and fans and sponsors and leagues and championships and you can find it on television and you can go to college on scholarship with it and you can learn to play it when you're seven and you can keep playing it until your RoboKnees Dual-Action Quad-Grip Version 2.27 get rusty. Then I knew I had to write this entry, which I've also been putting off. Because now it's real. Now it's the announcement. When I hit "publish," I'll have told you, and that means I've taken a very real step away from that life. And it makes me really sad. I have tears right now, because I keep thinking back to the girl I was when I started out, when I first stepped onto that track, and how different I am now because of it.

It doesn't matter if you've been skating derby for six years or six weeks. Once you've done it, leaving it makes you ask yourself a lot of questions. Maybe because it's so hard, maybe because it's filled with women who want to talk to you all the time about everything you're feeling, or maybe because in the end it's all about what you can give it, and then somehow managing to give it way more than that. There are few things in life that can be so instantly rewarding, so personal and yet so universal.

It's hard not to feel like a quitter. It's hard not to feel like I'm disappearing from a place that's been a home to me.

I keep trying to remind myself that I've gotten everything I could have asked for out of roller derby. I've gotten more than I could have dreamed. (OPRAH!) It's changed who I am, what I think of myself, what I know I'm capable of, what I've done in my career, and what I can accomplish both when I'm alone and when I partner up with someone who's got my back. I'm pretty sure I'm still not cleared to talk about such things, but there are derby writing projects in the works, so just like when I was on the injured bench, derby is still very much a part of my life. I just have to adjust to the fact that this is where I skate less and write more.

Every time one of you has written to say that through this site or the novel you've found your way to derby, or I talk to one of you out there who maybe already knew me and because you knew a dork like me could find a way out of the dark pit of sadness through this surprising answer, you tried it too and found a whole new passion, a new way to see yourself– that's the best thing I've ever done in my derby career.

I never got to wear a team uniform, but you're the reason why I have no regrets.

PS: To my fearless sisters trying out for subpool this Sunday: Kill it! Kill it! Kick it in the face!

Please Help the Bay Area Derby Girls

Dear friends:

Saturday, July 9, was an evening of mixed blessings for the B.A.D. Girls. After a successful Championship event at the Craneway Pavilion on the Richmond Harbor, league members who were transporting the money raised from the event were robbed at gunpoint.

Thankfully our league members were not injured. However the robbery was not only a shock to our community, but it took our entire financial reserve and profit for the event, totaling thousands of dollars that would have gone towards both future events and our practice venue.

The B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls is a 501(c)(3) and has been entirely volunteer-run since inception. To be robbed of badly needed funds is devastating; to have our league members' lives threatened is irreparable.

Due to the ongoing investigation, we cannot release further details on the case but we have absolute confidence in the San Francisco Police Department to bring us justice.

While the SFPD works on the investigation, the B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls are in dire need of fundraising. We have always depended on the kindness of our fans and our community. In this time of need, we are reaching out for your generosity once again. Like the strongest jammers, we do not fall after one hit, and we have no intention of allowing truly despicable scumbags who would steal from a non-profit organization to stop us from rolling. If you can please donate to the B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls to recoup some of these financial losses, we would greatly appreciate any amount. Your donation will be fully tax-deductible. In addition, if you can donate items for us to raffle or venue space for us to hold a fundraiser, we promise to make it worth your while and continue to bring you the best roller derby in the Bay Area.

Like the community that we all practice and play in, we are strong. We have always been a league of extraordinary women who are undaunted by obstacles.

Roller derby is a sport that embraces challenges, enables resiliency, and celebrates the spirit of the best in humanity. We intend in honoring that spirit and moving forward from this crime toward a much brighter future with all of you. Thank you again for your support. It means more to us now than it ever has before.

To support the B.A.D. Girls, please donate by clicking the "Donate" button on

our home page. Your donation is tax deductible.

To donate a product or venue space, please email pr at bayareaderbygirls dot com

For press inquiries, please contact Katy Lim at katy at bethechangepr dot com