User:Daxelrad

Brigitte Talevski, is sixty and married to David Axelrad in Toronto. She is also a former social worker turned screenwriter after a chance meeting in 2003 with a fellow writer in a Continuing Ed screenwriting class.

At the time, Brigitte needed feedback on her draft of Love on the Side, then called Deluxe Combo Platter, and the fellow student wanted her thoughts on his screenplay.

As the student, William Scott Eldridge, a music video producer, read Brigitte’s screenplay, he busily made red notations in the margins as suggestions to improve the script.

Then, his phone rang. It was a director friend of his asking what he was up to.

William said he was just reading a friend’s script. “Really,“ said the director, ”I’ve just read seven scripts and hated them all, what’s this one about?” William told him. “Sounds good!” said the director, send it to me.” So, unbeknownst to Brigitte, William whited-out all his notations, Re-photocopied the sheets, made a cover page for the script and sent it off.

A day and a half later the director had read it and called back. “I love it, I want to meet her!”, he said.

Apparently, he had a movie ready to shoot but it had just fallen through because it’s star, Val Kilmer, had pulled out at the last minute. He had everything in place to make a movie but couldn’t move forward on that project and needed a script that would be easy and quick to shoot. Turned out Deluxe or Love on the Side fit the bill. Within six months the cameras were rolling.

Another interesting tidbit about Brigitte’s story, is how in that same screenwriting class that got her script into production, she met her future husband. She likes to joke that for the $200 class admission fee, she got a movie made and a husband!

However, what is even more remarkable, is that if she had stayed healthy it wouldn’t have ever happened at all.

Back two years earlier, Brigitte had a undiagnosed back injury that she had been living with since she was a teenager. It finally had become unbearable to live with and she needed to have it taken care of.

During this same time, she had started taking screenwriting classes but hadn’t yet managed to complete anything. She had also intended to take a dialogue writing class but had to put everything on hold.

Under doctors orders she was instructed to stay in bed for a year in hopes that her back would somehow correct itself. In agony, Brigitte begrudgingly did as she was told and remained in bed.

To distract herself from the pain and considerable boredom, she decided to pickup a pencil and over her head started to write what would ultimately become Love on the Side.

Unfortunately, bed rest didn’t help Brigitte’s worsening back pain. So, she was forced to undergo extensive back surgery that required another full year of recovery.

What’s interesting is, had her back injury not happened, she might not have ever completed the script. She would have likely taken the dialogue writing class earlier and not met either William, the man who got the draft to the director. Moreover, she would not have met her husband to whom she’s been happily married for more than fifteen years now.

It just goes to show, when things look their bleakest, hold on, you may just find yourself sitting holding the hands of your best friend on one side of you and your future husband on the other, in a theatre that’s at capacity with eight hundred people laughing and cheering on the movie you wrote.