The Orcas Island Film Festival is this weekend.
The Orcas Island Film Festival starts Friday night and runs through Monday evening.

I went to the very first Orcas Island Film Festival three years ago, where I saw The Imitation Game before it hit theaters. I'm so happy to be going back this year. I don't care if it's going to rain on Orcas all weekend, I will be hiding out in Eastsound's movie theaters, bars, and bakeries.

The novelist and memoirist Stephen Elliott will be at this year's festival with his movie After Adderall, which is about what it's like when James Franco makes a movie about your life.

Elliott is an amazing writer, and he's willing to divulge anything. He's also the founder of The Rumpus. Read this piece he wrote for The Stranger in 2008 about Britney Spears.

Last night at the reading party I started reading The Adderall Diaries—the book James Franco bought the rights to and made into a movie of the same name, which Elliott did not think was an accurate reflection of the material.

Playing on Sunday at the Orcas Island Film Festival, followed by a panel discussion featuring Stephen Elliott.
Playing on Sunday at the Orcas Island Film Festival, followed by a panel discussion featuring Stephen Elliott.

I haven't seen the movie yet, and I haven't finished the book, but I read the first 60 pages last night like they were nothing. Here are some of the sentences I underlined as I was reading.

I know everything there is to know about fathers who root against their sons.

My breathing would slow down when the blade opened my skin. I would close my eyes and feel my body lift from the mattress.

I got work as a driver and stole all of the presents out of Leonardo DiCaprio's fan mail, which I was delivering from his agent to his publicist.

I had been on streets for almost a year, sleeping in hallways and on rooftops. On particularly cold nights I had broken into boiler rooms.

It all made sense at the time, twenty-two years old, a year out of college, graduate school, the rapprochement with my father, the nights and weekends spent dancing on a box bathing in anonymous attention, the rigs full of heroin. But when I try to make sense of it now it's like soup. How could I be so many different people?

And there are a bunch of renowned literary figures in the movie, including Susan Orlean, Nick Flynn, Marie Howe, and Jerry Stahl. Plus Six Feet Under star (and personal favorite Cabaret emcee) Michael C. Hall.

Anyway, I can't wait to see this movie, along with all the other films that are showing. A friend recommends a short called Everybody Does It, which plays on Saturday. There are way too many movies for one person to see. Full schedule here.

The festival starts Friday night and goes through Monday.

Individual tickets here and weekend passes here.