Feeling compelled to post a blog entry I think it's a good time to share an excerpt from my current script (in development). I just got my first funding in April. The Herbert Family Filmmaking Grant from the San Francisco Film Society. Encouraging to know that someone has faith in me. Anyone else? You can actually make a tax-deductible donation to my project via the SF Film Society website right here (note that the project is either called Get Me Guinevere Turner or The Royal Road — depends on my mood). Read on and see if I'm worth it.

The Royal Road (script excerpt from a film by Jenni Olson)

I imagine California has this whole unique genus of greenery that thrives on, is actually nourished by, the exhaust of automobiles. The abundant scrub and extended stands of trees along the freeways are testament to this. It really seems a logical equation when you see, too, the thick vines and dense ground-cover that attach and crawl on the overpasses and freeway clover leafs.

Highway 280 South, the Junipero Serra Freeway, actually used to have a huge wooden sign just South of the city limits that said: “The World’s Most Beautiful Freeway.” But they took it down about a year ago.

It was a quaint wooden sign, the words gouged into it with this handmade quality. It always felt like a title to the show you’re about to see. Like a kind of promise, a notice about what lies ahead.

This ash gray ribbon of road stretches from the North to the South conveying a hundred thousand little cars like a giant slot car track set down upon this stunning natural landscape. And the more you think about it the sadder it seems. It’s not the freeway that’s beautiful; the freeway is a travesty, an eyesore. Maybe they realized this and decided to take the sign down. 

Half a cup of coffee and some pop music get mixed together with this spectacular view for a feeling of utter mania. I am exhilarated and invincible. I am so susceptible to the simple manipulations of bubblegum pop — completely transported listening to the joyful little voices of Hansen as I whiz Southward; enraptured with the poignancy of the lone persistent strand of telephone lines that follows the contour of the highway. The poles stand a lonely, heroic vigil; their arboreal heritage suddenly visible to my eye as I rediscover their analog qualities here against the unending backdrop of trees along Crystal Springs Reservoir.

They are the new endangered species, the telephone poles, in an era of urban deforestation known as under-grounding. Their wires, their aerial roots, are being buried — cutting off this previously ubiquitous, mundane, un-noticed feature of our daily vistas.