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Living In Missouri
was written while Connor Ratliff was actually living in Great Britain,
where he was an acting student at the prestigious Liverpool Institute for
Performing Arts.
The screenplay was developed
using some unorthodox strategies: during the writing process, the
main characters of Ryan, Todd, and Amy actually had “real” identities on
the Internet. In early 1998, Ratliff created a website, “Ryan
Johnson’s Star Wars Prequel Rumors,” which featured journal entries
from the fictional Ryan, who described his day-to-day activities and often
wrote at length about his wife and best friend. The site also contained
often-erroneous predictions and rumors relating to the world of science
fiction movies. |
| The site attracted thousands
of curious and often irate sci-fi fans who often took issue with “Ryan”
and his renegade brand of web journalism. In a bizarre turn of events,
several media outlets were fooled by the site, and many of Ryan’s rumors
began to appear in print, most prominently in SPIN magazine. |
| Ratliff used the website
as a kind of “character workshop” to help develop the characters while
fleshing out the screenplay, and several key events in the film first appeared
as entries in Ryan’s web journal. When the first draft of the screenplay
was completed, he contacted director Shaun Peterson, whom he had been friends
with since high school. Peterson put his own self-penned project,
Climax, Kansas, on hold to helm Living In Missouri. |
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