The Informed Nonsense of Johnny Zito

About three years ago I was shopping around a short film that I’d made as my senior thesis. It was about super-heroes; a handicap that kept us out of some of the more popular festivals. We tried everywhere, this is just before YouTube, and I end up sending 500 DVD copies of my short all over the country.

It got rejected from more screens than it played on. Oddly enough though, the judges who rejected us passed the DVD on to their friends. It must have been the professional packaging I sprung for but people took the thing seriously in a comedic way, I guess. Occasionally I get e-mails from people telling me they liked it, they gave it to they’re cousin, I should look into such and such a festival… Really encouraging stuff.

Eventually, someone interning at an LA production company tells me about another company they’re working with and that company is developing a property for Mtv about super-heroes. He’s going to get them a copy of my short. We don’t know what the shows’ about but Stan Lee is involved.

Fine, whatever. That’s a year of my life - show anyone who’ll watch.

After a long weekend I get a phone call. It’s a pleasant woman from “Stan Lee’s Super-Hero Project.” Wow. Cool. She tells me they’d like to have the main character from my short, for their series. Amazing. I still don’t know what the shows’ about.

The woman tells me it’s a game show where players compete to have they’re super hero published in a comic book by Stan Lee. We’d be dressed as our creations and live together for up to 16 weeks. During which time we’d have to perform super-heroic feats, like battling super villains.

Super villains?

They planned to pitch the show to Mtv and get some of the standard Mtv celebrities to guest as bad-guys. The nice woman tried to sell me on playing dress up with Carmen Electra and Andy Dick. I’ve always wanted to melt Andy Dick with my laser eyes but I was somewhat underwhelmed and despite having nothing else to fall back on, I politely declined.

Next day she calls back and she’s pretending like I didn’t turn her down already. She’s making plans to send me paper work and she wants to know if I still have the costume from the short. I’m expected to make an audition tape for the DVD casting special they plan to produce. I remind her that I’m not interested. She reminds me about Andy Dick.

There’s a valley between us.

She keeps telling me I’m going to regret this, it’s a missed opportunity. I should just put on the costume and make the audition tape. Just put on the costume and take some pictures of myself. I mention I didn’t even star in the short, it was some other guy. She doesn’t care, nobody cares, they need warm bodies.

It’s at this point she loses the pleasant twinge to her voice and she turned into someone’s mom. She scolded me for every other aspiring comic creator who turned her down. It was beyond her to reason why we were passing at this golden opportunity. She had confused us with the attention whores who’ll debase themselves to get on television.

I tell her straight, I know they’re going to misrepresent me. They have an agenda and I think it’s crummy. They prey on people who don’t know the difference between reality game show contestant, television actor and porn star.* Not in the pursuit of better television (as if such a thing as good television were even a regular occurrence) but to reinforce stereotypes about comic book fans that don’t even exist anymore. Comic book movies make bank, you’re making a super-hero television show, comic books are popular… Sort of.

We parted ways. It’s that easy to not wind up an idiot on national television.

I’m pretty sure that show ended up as Sci-Fi’s terrible Who Wants To Be A Super Hero?. And though I don’t regret passing on the chance to be made a fool of, I’ll always wonder what might have been had Andy Dick and I met on the field of combat.

*Actual order of their importance.