Hello from the Writer/Director!
Thanks for checking out Other Almosts! I'm so passionate about this film and I can't wait to see it on the screen.
Other Almosts has been a part of my life - as a screenplay - for nearly four years. It was the first film I wrote upon entering my MFA program at the University of Southern California. I had just moved to Los Angeles from Illinois, where I grew up, attended undergrad... and pretty much did everything.
Los Angeles - if you're not familiar - is quite different from rural Illinois.
In high school, I had a great group of friends - all guys - who were probably the nerdiest people in the school. We called ourselves the "Brain Trust." Everyone in the group was smart, driven, and unafraid to geek out about the newest Marvel movie or Halo video game release. We spent countless weekend nights in my friend's basement consuming way to much Mountain Dew and pizza while we battled for supremacy on the six pinball machines along the back wall. Days were lost to Risk and Dungeons & Dragons.
We graduated and everyone went their separate ways - some to community college near by, some to universities far away, and a few of us to the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. I started strong, but by the second semester - when the closest of my friends had dropped out and gone home - I felt very isolated. To make matters worse, I had to do volunteer hours with children.
The volunteering wasn't the bad part, but because I was going to be working with kids, I had to get a physical. Being in good health, I went to the free clinic on campus, just before a midterm exam. The nurse practitioner found a lump on my thyroid. A big one. Most thyroid tumors are millimeters in size - mine was four centimeters.
I took my midterm and waited to hear if I had cancer.
Other Almosts is a coming-of-age story about feeling isolated even in a town where everyone knows who you are. Especially in a town where everyone knows who you are. It plays on these themes: friendship, isolation, fear, connection. It looks at how we live our lives - the things we remember, the things we experience, and the things that almost happened.
