DREW-HAHA
My Date With Drew

By Chris Knight

Brian Herzlinger is effusive yet self-effacing, cheery without being manic, and has a nice smile and fashionably gelled, spiky hair. With a warm, easy handshake and a tendency to refer to things as "cool" or "a blast," there's nothing stalker-ish about him. Which is good, because for 30 days in the summer of 2003, Herzlinger tried with enthusiasm (and in one instance quasi-legal persistence) to get a date with actress Drew Barrymore.

What made him different from, say, a crazed fan is that Herzlinger was making a movie, My Date with Drew. He and three friends had a budget of US $1,100 (money he won on a game show) and a deadline of 30 days (until the video camera he'd "bought" from Circuit City had to be returned) to get the movie star to agree to sit down to a meal with Herzlinger, who has fancied her since E.T. (Again, not as creepy as it sounds; they were both seven back in 1982.)

"It's a lifelong dream to try to get a date with Drew Barrymore," says the Ithaca College film grad and former Barrymore fan-club member during a stop in Toronto to promote his film. "And to combine that with the lifelong passion of wanting to make movies, and for it to come together where it involves my family and my closest friends in the world…" He searches for words. "We're very proud."

The film features Herzlinger's caustic mom (whose sole source of Barrymore lore is the tabloids), his ex-girlfriend (for background, why-did-you-go-out-with-me research) a Drew look-alike (for practice) and a succession of Hollywood behind-the-scenesters and hangers-on. The quest is deceptively simple: Herzlinger really just needs to talk to her and explain himself. But how, exactly, does one get past the publicists, bodyguards, secretaries and assistants whose entire job is to thwart those who "just want to talk" to Barrymore?

He tries to contact his quarry through six degrees of separation, at one point tracking down a guy whose boss's sister is engaged to McG, who directed Barrymore in Charlie's Angels—which proves a few degrees too many. The 30-day shoot resulted in a whopping 85 hours of footage, which Herzlinger and friends carefully whittled down. "Our first cut was five hours long, and we loved every frame of it," he says. "We were like, 'This is the epic of the year.' "

Thankfully, friends and family suggested a less Tolkienian running time, and the film came down to two hours, then 90 minutes. "And we couldn't be happier with it." Getting others to be happy took more time. Take the issue of music rights: Some of the most endearing scenes feature Herzlinger singing along with his car radio.

"We filled the film with our favourite songs growing up," he explains, "which happened to be the most expensive songs in existence, and we couldn't afford them." He wound up calling people like Eric Carmen at home to ask for the rights to All By Myself. We got a lot of songs because we personally contacted them, showed them the movie and told them it wouldn't work with any other song in this spot.

"Here's the thing," he says, suddenly intense. "What it was was the exact same reason why everybody who has seen the movie likes it and relates to it; they get it, they get the universal theme about it and they see that it's a sweet story about wanting to make a dream come true." Still, "It kills me, we lost two of my favourite car-singing sequences: Neil Diamond's Love on the Rocks and Abba's Dancing Queen. Those were two of my favourite moments, where I thought my voice wasn't going to break the glass."

Even thus deprived, moviegoers gave My Date the audience award at New York's Gen Art Film Festival and at HBO's Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., where it beat out Napoleon Dynamite, Super Size Me and Garden State.

"That was cool because the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, who are the Spielbergs of comedy, comic geniuses, handed us our award," says Herzlinger. "It was unbelievable. We were freaking out."

A quick troll through the comments at film site imdb.com shows that My Date with Drew indeed resonates with viewers, male and female, who have had an unrequited (or unrequitable) crush, or dreamed an impossible dream. "The best part of the whole experience," says Herzlinger, "was having audience members come up to you and telling you that you inspired them to follow their lifelong dreams."

And what about Circuit City, the electronics chain that inadvertently helped finance My Date with Drew with its 30-day, no-hassle loan of a video camera?

"They haven't admitted it was because of us," Herzlinger says, "but they have changed their 30-day return policy. It's now 14 days with a 15% restocking fee." He pauses for a comedic beat. "And so our response to that is just go to Best Buy."

(One fan wrote to his Web site: "As a Circuit City employee, you're my worst nightmare; but as a man you're my hero.")

Next up for Herzlinger and his filmmaking friends, Jon Gunn, Brett Winn and Kerry David, is to executive produce a TV version of My Date with Drew in which participants spend 30 days chasing their own dreams. Herzlinger will host.

But what of his quest? Did he get the date? Says Herzlinger: "We knew that we didn't know what the ending was going to be, and until we knew what that was going to be, we were hoping. We knew we'd figure out a way to end it either way. There was always Drew Carey."

National Post (Canada) / August 9, 2005