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ANDREW LENAHAN'S
STARBLIND
FAN CLUB
FAN FICTION

ANDREW LENAHAN'S NOTES ON "FADE IN"

The screenplay here called "Fade In" is a bit of a mystery, to say the least.  Even the original title is unknown, if indeed it ever had one.  I call it "Fade In" (because those are the first two words of it) only for clarity's sake.  More puzzlingly, the author is also unknown.

One may wonder how exactly I found the screenplay in the first place.  It came up during a web search for "Andrew Lenahan" on AltaVista.  I know that there are at least two or three other Andrew Lenahans out there in the world, so that by itself isn't so surprising.  But a quick reading of the first few pages proved that this was an interesting document indeed.

Rather than being a straight-ahead fanfic, the story involves a man rather improbably named Roy Darlin, who pretends to be Andrew Lenahan in order to win the love of a girl named Grace.  It's a gimmick, but an interesting one, seeming rather like a fanfic equivalent of Being John Malkovich.  I fully admit that I've never read the whole thing, it being a rather punishing 114-or-so pages in length, but what I read wasn't all that bad--though some typos and such hindered its readability.

Here's what we do know with reasonable certainty: the screenplay was written as an assignment at a Drexel University screenwriting class.  The name at the top, Erika Rubin, is the professor.   The name at the very end, Thomas Mann, is the source for the quote on the previous page, "No one remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.".

So, who wrote it then?  Since it comes from Drexel, where I was active in the theatre, it could be from someone who knows me in a personal capacity... but surely they would have mentioned it to me at some point if that were the case.  A sliver of possibility exists that it isn't a fanfic at all, and that the name "Andrew Lenahan" was picked from the ether and not meant to suggest me specifically.  However, this seems unlikely in the extreme since it originates from Drexel and the physical description of Roy as his Andrew Lenahan alter-ego fits me exactly.

And so the mystery remains.  Unless someone comes forward to claim it, this piece will remain an intriguing but mysterious oddity.

--Andrew Lenahan

LINKS

Original document on Drexel's Server:
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/faculty/ina22/382/382-Rubin-0329.html

Our copy, in case the above is down:
"Fade In" by Anonymous