faculty advisors from the Literature Department . Pickett ’ s interest in film led him to take classes from the legendary film critic and painter Manny Farber , who had a significant impact on him . It was in one of Manny Farber ’ s wildly popular film classes that Pickett met his future ( now ex- ) wife , Barbara Schock , who he went on to collaborate with on two independent feature films . Barbara ’ s AFI ( American Film Institute ) thesis film , My Mother Dreams the Satan ’ s Disciples in New York , was an original screenplay by Pickett and won the 2000 Academy Award for Best Live Action short .
“ For the Visual Arts Department to bring in the iconoclastic film critic and artist Manny Farber from New York to sleepy San Diego to teach film was an unbelievably serendipitous thing for me and the many other students who were gravitating to this exciting time for film ,” says Pickett .
Before graduating summa cum laude with a Special Projects B . A ., Pickett was a founder and co-editor of UCSD ’ s first student-run literary journal , Crawl Out Your Window . Subsequently , he left for USC ’ s graduate film school , where he stayed for a year then dropped out to make two independent feature films , California Without End
Road Trip : Rex Pickett with actor Paul Giamatti ( left ) who starred in the film adaptation of the book , Sideways .
and From Hollywood to Deadwood ( Island Pictures ). The script for the latter led to his first studio writing assignment with then Columbia TriStar .
Pickett has written many more screenplays than he has novels , and in fact initially wrote The Archivist — which clocks in at a hefty 642 pages — as an eight-episode limited TV series . When Pickett had finished the teleplay , however , he got an offer from Blackstone Publishers to write the novel . Both the novel and teleplay are currently being shopped around Hollywood .
After Sideways the novel — completed in 1999 — was rejected by more than 200 publishers , it was finally published and released just before the movie . Sideways , directed by Alexander Payne , went on to become one of the most highly acclaimed movies in the history of film , winning more than 350 awards , including the 2005 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and two Golden Globe awards .
In 2013 , Sideways : The Play premiered to sell-out crowds at the La Jolla Playhouse . Extended twice , it broke all attendance records for a non-musical . The play is currently on a national tour in Spain , and Pickett has been invited to New Zealand to pen Sideways IV : NZ and to stage the musical . His other immediate focus — a three-volume autobiography titled My Life on Spec . “ It ’ s all in my archives at UC San Diego ,” says Pickett .
Did you read the book ? Tell us at tritonmag @ ucsd . edu
“WAIT , HAVE I BEEN HERE BEFORE ?”
It was still baking hot . A traveling sun burned butterscotch through the towering eucalypti . A flock of ravens was wheeling high overhead in lazy circles , croaking warnings to me before settling into the branches to rule sentinel over the sprawling university campus .
As I made my way from the Library , I glanced down at the gigantic tongue of the anaconda that balefully announced the start of the descent of the Alexis Smith Snake Path , the irony not lost on me that I was metaphorically entering some gaping maw of mythological peril . The colossal snake sculpture seemed in arrested peristalsis , its fanged mouth devouring me , pulling me inexorably down to Walden College and the Arts and Humanities Building where Professor Raymond West was waiting . Against the twilight sky , Bruce Nauman ’ s subversively colorful , pulsing neon Vices and Virtues art installation festooned the top of one of the engineering buildings in a frieze of ever changing word contradictions . Pairs of vices and virtues were superimposed in blue , yellow , pink , and white , composed of a mile of neon tubing in flashing composited arrangements : FAITH / LUST , HOPE / ENVY , CHARITY / SLOTH , PRUDENCE / PRIDE , JUSTICE / AVARICE , TEMPERANCE / GLUTTONY , and FORTITUDE / ANGER . The horizontally moving paradoxical word combinations wrapped around the eaves of the building , traveling swiftly like an electronic stock market ticker tape . Virtues moved clockwise and vices counterclockwise at a faster rate so that every conceivable combination of opposites could be displayed . “ Prudence ” was not uppermost in my mind as I made my way down the back of the enormous reptile . “ Desire ” for connection other than the life I was emotionally suffocating in was pulling me magnetically , and “ Hope ” teemed in my heart like a river overflowing its banks , the true siren that was calling me through the swaying and creaking trees .”
— Excerpt from The Archivist , available nationwide .
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