Abby Linford and Her Imaginary Friend

Around the time I accidentally interviewed Matt Damon for ACCESS HOLLYWOOD, I met online Christopher J. Smith, who was also hanging out in the forums at Project Greenlight's website. We soon started emailing each other about screenwriting and his work at a talent management company.

Nearly a decade later, I happened on a tweet in which someone recommended a book to read this summer. I clicked on the photo included with the tweet and saw the cover of Christopher's book, Abby Linford and Her Imaginary Friend.

That's how I reconnected with Christopher and now have his book to read on foggy, cool days this summer in San Francisco.

So far, the story is a treat, though I suspect Abby is about to discover all is not well in her imaginary friend's world.

How I Accidentally Interviewed Matt Damon for ACCESS HOLLYWOOD

In 2002, I went to a screening of The Bourne Identity attended by Matt Damon at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco, California.

After the screening, Matt sat on stage and answered questions from the audience, which seemed to be mostly students in acting school.

I'd just finished co-writing my first screenplay, Inclusion, a supernatural thriller set in Paris, with my friend, Isis Bouhraoua, an American who grew up in France. So, I stepped up to the microphone and asked Matt what was the best and worst thing about filming The Bourne Identity in France.

He said it was France, so it was gorgeous, and it was France, where no one seemed to care they were making a movie on a tight timeline, so there were delays in acquiring permits, etc.

After the Q & A period, my friends and I wandered up to the stage, where Matt was talking to audience  members. My friend Michael gave Matt his camera and asked that he take our photo.

That's the one you see here.

The next day at work, I was very surprised when co-workers and vendors across the United States called me to say that they'd seen me on ACCESS HOLLYWOOD interviewing Matt on his latest film.

More Than a Screenwriter

I am more than a screenwriter.

I began writing short stories in the fourth grade. My first story (which I carefully illustrated and bound with red yarn) was about a group of shipwrecked friends trying to escape a magical world hidden inside an iceberg.

I have always been drawn to stories involving magic, mythic beings and heroes who must navigate alien worlds to survive and, once transformed by their adventures, often find the people around them have also changed.

My all-time favorite film is Jean Cocteau's La Belle et La Bête (Beauty and the Beast), which was released in 1946.

It is everything I crave from film – from great storytelling.

I started screenwriting in 2001 and learned a lot online, most notably from Project Greenlight, which was a television contest with extensive online forums. It was produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Sean Bailey (a television and film producer now the President of Production at Disney) and Chris Moore (a film producer whose biggest hit to date is the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting).

For a year or so, I spent a great deal of my spare time commiserating with other newbie screenwriters on the hardships of learning our craft. I pursued several pros I suspect PGL paid to patiently share their knowledge with even the most recalcitrant of us newbies on the forums. And I read a lot of scripts from first-time writers and compared them to those of classics like Bladerunner and Chinatown.

I learned how to write in the proper script format and, most importantly, honed my writing until my voice was my own: concise, a bit ironic and more than a little darkly comedic.