Warning! This blog contains unnecessary name dropping.

One of absolutely very few perks of my job is that part of the company I work for designs for Disney and their flagship theatre, the El Capitan. Its a beautiful theatre at Hollywood and Highland next to Jimmy Kimmel and across from Grauman’s Chinese where before the shows instead of slides for plastic surgeons like most L.A. cinemas they have an organist playing the most ambidextrous versions of Disney tunes (utilizing all 4 limbs). When the feature is about to begin they lower him under the stage where I’m assuming he is prodded back into his cage to perfect his rendition of “It’s a small world after all” on Casiotron until he is needed to warm up the next High School Musical sequel premiere. I’m gonna get so many random hits on this page for posting those last few sentences. So one of the perks is that my co-workers and I get invited to fill seats for special events. The first time we got to be in the first domestic audience to see the final Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Jerry Bruckheimer gave a speech before the feature.

I’m not going to tell you what movie we were invited to tonight. I’d rather not incriminate myself. It was a premiere, it was 2 blocks from my house and we were offered passes; I don’t turn that down. Even though it was a … cringe, family movie. OH GOD IT BURNS! Ok so the movie was bad, to me, because i’m a too cool for school asshole who hates 90% of all children ever and despises anything that’s “Fun for the whole family!”. But I suppose if you had kids that were between 8 and 16 then you could take them to this and they would have a good time. Oh look a baby pig, oh they makin’ silly faces, hilarious! I laughed a couple times and mostly because of Donny Osmond. Yeah I might as well tell you the cast and let you IMDB it on your own. Notably Martin Lawrence, Raven-Symoné (the Cosby Kid from when Rudy got too old to be the cute one), Will Sasso (MADtv’s giant), Kym Whitley (from that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry picks up the Hooker so he could use the carpool lane to Dodger’s Stadium), Jessica St. Clair (gorgeous blonde from Best Week Ever) and a couple Sopranos-related Italian stereotypes.

But perhaps more importantly I met TOM EVERETT SCOTT on the red carpet! I guess it’s only important to me because That Thing You Do! is my favorite movie. Yeah you can take away all of my cred right now (as if I had any). What can I say, I love good fake band movies. That makes an even 2 of 4 of the Wonders that I’ve met so far.

So the best part of the night was of course the after party. There is so much nonsensical hoo-hah for these movies that its kind of a slap in the face to all of the really amazing movies that are made with absolutely no budget and aren’t very well received and have tiny premieres if any at all. But I enjoyed the free booze and Wolfgang Puck catering that this party had to offer. The highlights of our celebustalking besides the stars of the film were brushes with Home Run Record Holder* Barry Bonds, Random Disney-owned celebs that I had no idea who they were, some duder from Nick Cannon’s Wild N’ Out and Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine). Everyone but Barry Bonds was smaller than I’d imagined. He and Guy “Shades” Patterson were both pretty tall. Martin is about 5′ 5″ but his bodyguards were 6′ 3″ and 250 lbs so we didn’t fuck with him. He looks great! I heard that Raven is loaded (Theres a teen vogue in the can at work for some reason) but she didn’t project that air of celebrity/ego that radiates off of some famous people. She seemed very non-diva (actually kinda self-conscious in a way). Well I’m not sure if there is anything else to say. Now that I read it back, i’m not sure that any of ths was very interesting to begin with. Well feel free to email admin@avanttrash.com and invite me to your premiere. Especially if its for a better movie.