This all just reminded me of a story that I haven't thought about in
years. I think I might have told it on this board before, but I can't remember. Either way, I figure it's appropriate on the eve of the final movie's release...
About a year before the first X-Men movie came out is when I really started getting into screenwriting for the first time. And because the first X-Men was such a big deal back then, there were a ton of rumors all over the internet, and for some insane reason I started organizing them all into what I thought the order of the movie was going to be, parsing through what seemed real and jived and what didn't. I think we had one trailer to go off of eventually, and before long I basically had the entire movie laid out from various sources, and decided to put it all into a loose/rough screenplay format. I then threw that "script" up on my first-ever website, which was devoted solely to the movie/script, complete with corresponding images inserted from the first trailer. I then linked to it on a bunch of message boards and people went nuts. It was mostly positive, but some negative as well - people were definitely pissed that I was "spoiling" the movie, even though the site had clear spoiler warnings. A bunch of sites ended up running with it, and I was getting all kinds of random attention, again, some of fairly negative. This was 1999, and probably the first time a movie this big had ever been spoiled in such a manner.
Anyway, one afternoon, to my utter shock... I randomly get an email from Bryan Singer himself. I just dug up the printed version I kept, and this is all it said...
I didn't know if I was getting played or not, so I reached out to this webmaster guy I got to know through this process - this guy named Lincoln, who ran a couple of the big Star Wars and X-Men movie fan sites - and he confirmed that he had reached out to Singer himself and asked Singer to send me an encouraging email, since I was getting so much sh*t from certain people online. Which was weird, because I truly could not care less what any of those people were saying. But it was still super-cool of Singer nonetheless, since he had every right to be pissed, but instead he
corrected the script, which I thought was hilarious. (I also remember thinking the "x" in the "thanx" was the coolest thing ever.)
Anyway, I kept in touch with Singer a bit after that - I'd ask him random questions now and again about how to make it in the industry, and he'd always graciously respond - but now it all kind of has this creepy vibe of course, given everything he's been through and all of the allegations since. For the record, he never hit on me or anything even remotely like that - he couldn't have been cooler - but preying on young, high school/college-aged boys was obviously something he's never had a problem with.
What a weird, crazy time in general. The internet was like the wild west back then, and this movie basically ushered in the modern era comic book movie craze.