BEHIND THE SCENES WITH BRAD P.

My Big Black Cock pointed something out to me the other day. As did Phelicity and Classics.

It's been a year since I quit updating the Brad Pitt diary.

So maybe, after a year of not being updated ... maybe, maybe, maybe Brad and his lawyers will let me just talk a little bit about the site.

First off ... why did I do it?

At the time, to the best of my knowledge, nobody else was doing a fake diary. I had been doing Uncle Bob for a few months and it had gotten off the ground, so to speak. I wanted to try and do something different than Uncle Bob and a fake celebrity diary was the first thing that came to mind.

So I immediately thought of Tom Brokaw. What we see on TV as a respected newscaster, I wanted to portray as a coke-sniffing ass hound, whose off-screen life was full of whores, gambling and drug addiction.

I could imagine Tom Brokaw getting into all sorts of crazy adventures.

Then I remembered Diaryland's main audience. Young girls. Young girls who probably didn't even know who Tom Brokaw was.

So I had to think of someone else. Someone they would know and could relate to.

I thought about Tom Cruise. But ironically, I didn't go with Tom Cruise because he was suing everyone and their mother at the time for saying he was gay. I thought it might be best to leave him alone.

I would have done a Backstreet Boy or N Sync member, but I didn't know any of their names.

So I went with Brad Pitt. Brad seemed laid back, cool. And I've gotta confess...I had never really seen any of his movies. I had seen "Thelma and Louise" and "True Romance" which he had bit parts in. I barely remembered "Thelma" but I had seen "True Romance" where he portrayed a lazy stoner named Floyd.

This was the persona that I gave the fake Brad. The happy-go-lucky stoner whose life wasn't all wine and roses like it was portrayed in the tabloids. He fought with his girlfriend and mother too. He would have his wacky celebrity friends over and they'd get into wacky celebrity adventures.

And Brad would talk about things that you'd never expect to hear him talk about. Like bad gas. Or humping Charo at a bachelor party and being embarrassed about it. This was his "Secret" diary that he poured his heart and soul into.

So I started writing it. And it became popular VERY quickly. Within a few months of writing it, it was getting well over a thousand hits a day. If you bothered to do a search for "Brad Pitt" on Google, it was the very first site that came up. THAT'S how popular it got.

...Ironically, that's how Brad's lawyers found it.

It was because of Brad Pitt that I got a gig writing for Mighty Big TV. I'll never forget when ... okay...I've already forgotten. I think it was Sarah from MBTV who sent me an email asking me to write for their site. At the time, I was getting A LOT of requests to write for other sites with most of them just personal sites that wanted my writings on their sites. I was either turning down the requests or not even bothering to answer the emails.

I was Brad F'n Pitt, dammit. I didn't have to answer emails.

So when Sarah asked me to write for MBTV, I almost turned her down. I had never seen the site at all and didn't know anything about it. I happened to mention it in conversation to my evil boss Wendi (who wasn't my evil boss at the time) that MBTV wanted me to write for them. Wendi almost choked on her own saliva and told me I HAD to write for them. They were the end-all, be-all website for snarky television recaps.

Oh. You mean, they're gonna let me be an asshole? Okay ... where do I sign up?

Anyway, got that gig.

And I was having more fun writing Brad's diary than I've ever had doing any writing. It seemed to write itself each day. I would sit down at the computer with no prior idea about what I was going to write. And it would just flow. A lot of times, the entries were ignorant and ended abruptly. That was part of the appeal to me. The only times I had an inkling of what I would be writing is when I was doing story arcs, such as the Willard Scott saga, the Steve Buscemi coming back from the dead storyline and the time Brad kidnapped Rob Lowe for being an asshole and keeping him locked in his trunk for several days.

My main concern was keeping it very quiet that I was the one behind Brad's diary. I didn't want it known. Basically, I wanted Brad's diary to stand on its own without my seal of approval.

I told Sinnamon after she had guessed that it was me and made her promise to keep it quiet.

Then a few others found out ... I don't remember how. And then it became an urban Diaryland legend...was I the one behind Brad or not?

Then a year ago, just as I was hitting my stride, Andrew sent me a lengthy letter from Brad's lawyers. I was told not to talk about it in the letter, but they basically gave me a cease and desist on the site. I was to make a formal apology or be taken to court.

The lawyers that I talked to agreed that I may even stand a chance of beating Brad in a court of law. But the costs to fight him were out of my league. Brad has the money to pursue these kinds of things. I'd be lucky to last a day in court against him and my budget for a lawyer would be spent.

I had clearly tried to let people know that the diary was a parody because of all the strange adventures he was getting involved in. They just kept getting weirder and weirder. That was my way of saying "C'mon people...this isn't really Brad we're talking about here...this is fake" without having to put a disclaimer on the page saying it was fake.

I knew that putting a disclaimer on the page admitting that it was a fake would take all the fun out of it.

Hindsight being 20/20, the diary may still be going strong had I just done that.

The really cool thing is ... I can go back and read portions of that diary and laugh my ass off, which is unusual because I don't normally laugh at my own stuff. But some of that stuff is just so ignorant and stupid that it hits my funny bone with a vengeance.

The day I shut it down, I remember I was out walking with the dog and trying to think how I could keep Brad alive. I was getting literally HUNDREDS of Brad emails, begging me to keep it going.

I realized...it wasn't about Brad. It was about all the stupid stories. It was the stories that sold the diary. The name really didn't matter anymore.

So I started another diary with the same look to it. "Dick Blow". I started it under the premise that it was a famous celebrity writing the diary who had another diary but shut it down when he found out people were reading it. This way, he could have a pseudonym and nobody would know it was really Brad.

I quickly found out...it was all about the name. While people loved reading Brad's diary, they wouldn't give Dick's the time of day. I was still getting a few hundred hits a day on Dick's diary, but it was nothing compared to the heights Brad had reached.

With Dick, the fun started to seep away. I wanted to end it so I had Dick die after getting hit by a truck while riding a tricycle in traffic.

I then tried writing Steve Buscemi's diary. That was a good idea that lasted about seven entries before I was bored with it too. The bad part was...I kept it going way past seven entries. I've erased most of the Buscemi era out of my memory bank and don't bother going back to read it because it was bad stupid while Brad was good stupid.

Anyway...it's been a year since that fateful day when I read the lawyer's letter and my heart dropped. Baby Andy was a month old and there was no way I was going to go to court to take on one of the most popular actors of our time over a silly website.

So I ended it. And because I was told to do so...I kept quiet as to why I ended it.

A year later, you know the full story.

But something tells me...did I already tell you all this??

If so, sorry. Forget I said anything.