Acceptance Speech
To the cast and crew of Shootout at Red Rock Ranch who, on instruction from the offshore production team, herded three hundred panic-stricken black-tailed antelope through the makeshift movie ranch saloon just prior to the filming of the climactic barroom scene, unwittingly setting off the poor creatures' fight or flight response, resulting in extensive damage to the vintage set and numerous bruises and contusions to the buckaroos and gun moll extras—To Chantelle, the alcoholic trophy wife of veteran character actor Charlie "Smashmouth" MacShane, who lay passed out in their backlot trailer while her husband traded stage blows and fake whiskey bottle head bashes with his swarthy, scar-cheeked counterpart in the aforementioned barroom brawl, who was rudely semi-awakened when the cocaine-crazed star of the film, Micky Sledge, burst through the trailer door wearing nothing but his Stetson and spurs, slipped under the satin sheets and tried to force his hirsute hulk on his liposuctioned hostess, who then stabbed him in the right buttock with a corkscrew left on the nightstand after her second bottle of Blue Nun earlier that morning, necessitating an anonymous call to 911 and ensuing visits from the on-site security team and local law enforcement interns—
To the news anchor at the nearby Albuquerque television station who reported the above-mentioned savage attack, but not the accidental shooting out behind the corral when cameraman Vincent Takamatsu aimed what he presumed was an unloaded Colt 45 in the general direction of the director's ten-week-old shih tzu, hitting the puppy square between the eyes, requiring him to drop the still-warm body through the toilet hole in a nearby honey bucket when he was suddenly called to the set to shoot the previously referenced antelope stampede disaster—
To the county sheriff who sat in his government-issue Ford LTD smoking cigarillos waiting for his shift to end so he could stop guarding the only road into the roped-off setting for the blockbuster wide-angle cattle drive scene during which six-thousand longhorn beef got spooked by a makeup artist's inadequately trained pit bull, which then stampeded off the pre-choreographed trail, over the hood and roof of his squad car, down an adjacent arroyo and across the irrigation dam into the district's only potable water supply—
And last, but certainly not least, to the inexplicably large number of movie-going patrons who sat bemused in air-conditioned multiplexes all across the country, blissfully unaware of anything except the over-acting, the digital post-production special effects and the 3-D Old West charm of the year's most unexpected Oscar-nominated action film, who have no idea in hell what goes on behind the scenes, who slurp their Dr. Peppers and smack their buttered popcorn while holding hands with their acne-ravaged dates in the flickering dark, who then remark afterwards over green chile cheese fries at LotaBurger how blown away they were at the action sequences but were somewhat disappointed by the relative lack of bloodshed—
—Don't you dare start that segue music! I've got a loaded Montblanc in my pocket, and I know how to use it!—
To all of them, and to the absolutely arrogant and unbelievably inept director and producer, I say thank you from the bottom of my poverty-hardened heart for taking the dream of my original screenplay and turning it into the nightmare of my professional life, for trashing the fifteen seconds of fame I've been waiting for ever since I survived my childhood in the slums of Beverly Hills, under-graduate work at North Dakota College of the Pitiful Cross, my unpaid summer apprenticeship at Disneyworld writing impromptu responses by underpaid wannabe actors in oversized animal costumes, and my three miserable decades in Hollywood trying to get anyone at all to take me seriously, and I especially want to thank my parents, who thank God had the good grace to get divorced just before their highly publicized mutual suicide pact last year, and my fifth wife, Margie, who has stayed with me even after I wrecked the Edsel in a haze of crystal meth insanity, and my little boy, Busby, who at age nine can finally walk and talk and who—this is so cute!—told me before I flew out here on standby from my rehabilitation facility, "Daddy, can I learn to ride a horse through a burning barn just like that man in that movie you made in New Mexico while Mommy was sleeping with Uncle Fred?"
