Queen of PGL (Project Greenlight)

Project Greenlight was a great dream spearheaded by actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. They thought to back an online screenplay and filmmaking contest to "open the back door to Hollywood" for a deserving person of great talent who simply lacked any Hollywood connections to get them through that front door. Through access to Project Greenlight's messageboards and chat, hundreds of PGL members formed real-life friendships as well as participating in the online community which was the most powerful and the very best thing to ever come out of the Project Greenlight experiment. One thing the community did was to have get-togethers or parties a few times with folks flying in to Los Angeles from all points of the United States map. We were thrilled to meet each other. For our second party event, held at Mr. Pockets in Redondo Beach, CA., the PGL community decided to spoof the old prom king and prom queen "thing" and so we campaigned and voted for our favorites. Everyone who participated did so with a great sense of humor, making many jokes and silly campaign stealth posts in a competitor's messageboard thread. It was great fun and not for a second did any participant ever think they were really running for the king and queen of anything. It was always just a joke. I was campaign manager for two of the King candidates (FredCleveland and BadDavid) and did my duty, Photoshopping up some doozies for "campaign posters" to be dropped into various messageboard threads. Clearly, the whole thing was a spoof when I, a "campaign manager," somehow was named one of the finalists for Queen when I hadn't ever campaigned for the honor! And so three ladies and three fellas stood before the partying crowd at Mr. Pockets to see which of them would be crowned the King and Queen of PGL. That final determination would be made by a Senior Vice-President at Miramax Pictures who made his choice based on writing samples from each of the six finalists. We had been given a choice of several topics. I chose, "Why Am I A Writer?" In the next couple of years to follow, I was shocked to discover that there were PGL members who did not take such a lighthearted approach as most of us did to the whole King and Queen of PGL thing. They would express their jealousy and hostility and hatred many times over, across cyberspace, in numerous writing communities. Some of them, in fact, were quite consumed by their own envy even to the exclusion of representing themselves as intelligent mature adults to the rest of the online writing world. They..simply..went..crazy. Oh well. You can be friendly and helpful and welcoming and encouraging to the Nth degree and still, if someone out there in this world picks to not like you because of their own personal issues, there's not much else to be done other than be the best human you know how to be and leave it at that. And so, here is my "winning" entry and the reason I am the Queen of PGL...