Orang-U: An Ape Goes To College
© 2017, Matt Lee.
© 2017, Rogue Trader Motion Picture Company.
Initial book edition, June 2017
This book is sold subject to the condition that it
may, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold,
hired out, projected onto buildings, burned or
otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior
consent in any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published and without a similar
condition, excluding this condition, being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser. Again, if you don’t
like it, please shred it and mail it to Jim Savage.
First published in the United States by Perpetual
Monopoly Press, a “division” of Foo Communica-
tions in 2017.
Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
International License.
The characters and events portrayed in this book
are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living
or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the
authors.
“For Ryan, who eats when he is hungry.
“It’s our belief that history is a wheel. ‘Inconstancy is my very essence,’ says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don’t complain when you’re cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it’s also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away.” – Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus), The Consolation of Philosophy
Orang-U – An Ape Goes To College by Matt Lee
Based on a screenplay by Matt Lee and Ryan Dougherty – Now available in Cyber-Space. Visit us on the internet!
http://orangumovie.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt4607980/
http://facebook.com/orangumovie
http://twitter.com/orangumovie
AOL Keyword: ORANGU
This is the novelization of Orang-U, a movie Ryan and I wrote between 2012 and 2015, and finally made in the summer of 2015 for $6000. There are some things in the final shooting script we had to cut for budget reasons, other things we had to cut because The Wrigley Company didn’t understand, or (more likely) didn’t like our jokes about Altoids.
Editing a movie is hard, much harder than actually shooting it, and so while I was busy script editing it, and later editing it, I took a little time during the Christmas breaks of 2014, 2015 and 2016 and produced this book. At the time I started on this project, I didn’t think we’d ever get around to making the movie, and now we have made the movie, I am delighted with the output. And it comes out in June 2017! In fact, by the time most of you are reading this, the movie will be out. Many of you will have been given a copy of this book as a result of that fact. Hello, you look great today.
Also included in this special book version is the entire TV pilot for Orang-U that we didn’t get to include in the movie for financial reasons. Ryan likes to remind me that I basically wrote it in a few hours anyway, so like most TV pilots, it probably isn’t all that good anyway.
This book is dedicated to Ryan Dougherty, for all his tireless hard work, mask masking and defeated acceptance in appearing in the movie far more than he ever wanted to. And for allowing me[…]”
Excerpt From
Orang-U: An Ape Goes To College
Matt Lee (with Ryan Dougherty)
This material may be protected by copyright.
“And for allowing me to actually finish something in my life.
Also dedicated to all the wonderful people who worked on Orang-U:”
The anonymous bunch of producers: Rob Myers, Stevie DuBois, Don Robertson, Mark Cousens and Mark Stevenson (available for voiceover work at <teamvoiceover.co.uk>) for all their various inputs, suggestions, ideas, pints (many) and more.
Justin Baugh for giving us some of the money when we really really needed it. We’re still going to hit you up with the bar tab at the premiere though, probably.
To Sarah Osborn for taking a chance on our production and without whom we’d have struggled immensely.
To Steven Brennan who should really be making movies of his own given all the equipment and knowledge he has.
To Sam Kniskern, hustler of coffee, turned orangutan actor. We couldn’t have done it without you!
To our romantic leads: Geoff Van Wyck and Mikayla Bishop. You were both a delight to work with, and your ability to find space to do yoga in the most unlikely of situations was inspirational. Sorry about the milk.
To our loyal butler: Bailey Bishop (who was totally okay earning 80% of what we paid Mikayla) for showing up at the very last moment, for jumping into any situation, and especially the special “ultra sweary” version of the anti-Cambridge stuff.
To the immeasurable consummate professionalism of Wolfgang Schuler. (Proven by his sending me a comprehensive, highlighted PDF of typos of this book!)
To Jacqui Denski for driving up to Boston from Connecticut for what should have been a much bigger role.
And to Heather Huntington Stewart for being the only person who actually dies in the movie. And does it really, really nicely.
(Hopefully I can figure out how to remove myself from the footage before the final edit.)
Thank you to the folks at Breather.com for letting us use their various spaces for not a lot of money at all. And thank you to Evan Prodromou for helping us with that.
Thank you to Dr. Mike Patoska, Jim Savage, Ray Dunn, Heather Gallagher, Ryan Merkley, Sid Sijbrandij, John Sullivan, Hillary Stein, Aeva Palecek, Joshua Gay, Paul Bryant, Victor Lewis-Smith, M.J.J Cashman and Joe Benevento and the gang at J.J. Foley’s in Boston (21 Kingston Street).
Thank you to John MacFarlane, creator of Pandoc. Pandoc is the greatest thing in the world if you do a lot of things with text files.
Thank you to our lawyer, Jonas “Donuts” Jacobson and our accountant, Andy Goloboy.
Thank you to everyone who came to see my “Matt Lee Talks About Stuff” tour of the UK in 2014, special thanks to Matthew Bloch, Dave Green and Stevie Benton. I’ll probably tour again in 2018 if possible.
I write this final piece of the book, back in the UK on vacation in 2016, sitting at the table at the Exeter Picturehouse where I first dragged various people on countless Saturdays from 1998 until 2005 when various other scripts were being worked on. In a few hours time, my friends Chloe Phillips and Ed Tarleton will arrive, and we’ll meet again in a few years, and this book and movie will be long over. By then I hope to be back here once more, shooting pieces for a new exciting movie.
Finally, thank you to all the people who donated money on our Indiegogo campaign. I hope you enjoy this surprise copy of the book. If not, please shred it and mail it to “Jim Savage, General Delivery, Boston, MA” or leave it in one of those free libraries that are popping up all over the place these days.
Matt Lee
mattl@cnuk.org
Exeter, UK
December 2016
PS. We never did find a good alternative to Altoids, and in April 2017 I stopped eating candy. If you work at a candy company that isn’t haunted or owned by Wrigley, or you work for Wrigley and would just like to send me lots of mints my way, just email me and we can work something out.
