So I'm pretty much doing a chapter for each scene break in the movie- the first one was the cafeteria scene, now this one is the one where Josh/Robbie meets up with his teacher to talk about the film festival. If there are any really short scenes in the movie, I'll combine them and make them into one chapter. That sound okay to everyone? Good.
Writer update: Still working on Chapter 10 of FTS. It'll probably be finished by next weekend at the latest depending on how much time I have to work on it. I'm alternating days on writing these chapters now. I worked on FTS yesterday, and now I'm working on this. Also still waiting to hear back from my co-author about ideas for "Where's Robbie?" and going to a P!nk concert tonight! And I just got a HUGE scholarship yesterday in the mail from one of the colleges I applied to! What else could be better?
Anyway, back to the story! :)
A bald man with tufts of grey hair coming out the sides of his head was playing Ping-Pong in his office, bouncing the small, white ball against the wall as he played against himself. Bookcases filled with books on how to invent every piece of equipment possible lined one wall, stopping when they reached a big window with bright morning sunlight streaming through it. Across the other walls hung mementos of his international travels and pictures of his family and past stellar students.
Sikowitz was the Technology and Design teacher at Hollywood Arts. He was a wise but eccentric old man, occasionally drinking coconut milk and claiming to suffer from erratic delusions because of his addiction to the delicious drink. Nevertheless, he was a well-respected professor and Robbie's favorite teacher at Hollywood Arts. The best part about him was that he was so outrageous with his teaching techniques that Robbie never knew what to expect from him!
Hearing a knock on the door, the professor put down his paddle and wiped the sweat off of his brow. "Come in!"
Robbie cautiously peeked his head around the corner. "Mr. Sikowitz?"
"Robbie," Sikowitz greeted him and picked the ping-pong ball up, which had fallen onto the ground. "Please, call me Sikowitz. You know I hate anything with abbreviated honorifics in front of it."
What? Robbie thought, but he decided not to say anything about it. This is Sikowitz we are talking about, after all. Who knows what goes on in that brain of his?
"Okay… Sikowitz," Robbie corrected himself slowly.
He handed Sikowitz the application to the Full Moon film festival. Sikowitz smiled at him, took the paper from his hands, and held it up to his face so he could read the tiny print. "I like this…" he murmured. Robbie followed him to his desk, which was covered with scattered core assessment papers and literary journals. "Great…great…"
Sikowitz sat down in his chair and kicked his feet up onto the desk. He grinned contentedly at Robbie. "I can't wait to see what my star student has come up with!"
Robbie waited anxiously as he read his application more carefully this time, scrutinizing every little detail. "It's a documentary about the evolution of…" He raised his eyebrow in skepticism. "Robot voices in the science fiction genre?"
"Yeah!" Robbie exclaimed. "You know how two robots never sound exactly the same in every sci-fi movie?"
Sikowitz gave him a blank look, but he continued explaining his side anyway. "You have your 'I-am-a-ro-bot' voices…" He said in a mechanical voice and stiffly moved his arms in front of him like a stereotypical robot would. "Then you have these futuristic ones that make sounds like 'bee-boop-ba-dee-dee-doo-boop-bee-"
The professor shook his head and cut him off as Robbie started making squeaky noises that had the ability to get on someone's nerves really quickly. "Robbie… your artistic vision is robot voices?" He pursed his lips together into a straight line, obviously disappointed in Robbie's choice of documentary topic.
"Yeah…" Robbie sighed and sat down in the chair adjacent to that of Sikowitz's. "Look Sikowitz, I'm really struggling here. I've got all these great ideas, but none of them are good enough!"
"You really want to win that trip to Hollywood film camp, don't you?" Sikowitz nodded his head thoughtfully.
"More than anything."
Sikowitz maneuvered his body so that he was sitting upright at his desk and rested his elbows against the table. "Then challenge yourself, Robbie. Choose a documentary subject in which you stretch your limits, explore new territory, DISCOVER the truth!"
He slammed his first down on the table in his excitement, startling Robbie. "How about instead of using robots…use a human subject," Sikowitz suggested with a big, goofy grin on his face. "Or llamas. Llamas are fun to film too, especially when they spit in people's faces."
He cackled at the image of a llama spitting into an innocent passerby's face, and Robbie mulled over the professor's advice in his head. The one about the human subject of course, not the spitting llamas. "A human?" Robbie clarified.
Sikowitz nodded. "Okay, so challenging…truthful…but human," Robbie said slowly, thinking out loud to himself. "Got it."
He couldn't help but doubt his teacher's advice a little bit. It was good advice, but people were just so hard to work with these days, always wanting what wasn't their decision in the first place. More screen time, complementary food and beverages, money… etc., etc. Machines were so much easier to work with. They didn't fight back, they didn't try to insult you or pressure you into making things their way, and they most certainly were more predictable than humans were.
But then again… This might be his only chance to get into that film camp. If he didn't come up with something unique, mind-boggling, creative, something that no one else had ever thought of doing before… he was toast. Goodbye fun-filled summer, hello lazy father who lived six hours away and made him do all the household chores and didn't care a shit about his existence.
He had to win this. It could be risky, but it was his only choice. He had no idea what he wanted to film having to do with people yet, but he'd come up with something in time.
At least he hoped he would.
"Now I need a real proposal by tomorrow," Sikowitz told him, snapping him out of his thought process. "Otherwise I'll have to give our school spot to another student."
He stood up and handed Robbie back his application. Robbie looked down at his paper, rereading his turned-down old proposal wistfully, and breathed out forcefully. "Okay, I'll see what I can come up with."
Sikowitz patted his shoulder. "Good boy. Now you be best be getting off to class now, or else I may just have to throw coconuts at you and shoo you out myself."
A mixture of confusion and alarm flooded Robbie's expression. Seeing this, Sikowitz laughed and clapped him on the back. "I'm just kidding!"
He smiled sympathetically at Robbie and started playing ping-pong again, leaving the boy puzzled and in deep thought. He read the paper over and over, trying to look for clues that could be the key to winning the trip of a lifetime- well, in his mind at least. How the heck am I going to pull this off?
Hehehe, a shorty. A quick and easy one to write :)