Casually Cruel

Red

Alison Madeline Owens grew up dreaming of magic. 

The kind of magic that you make with lighting and clever angles. 

She was four years old when she started making movies with a Tyco video cam. Her older brother got the camera for Christmas wrapped up in shiny green paper, but by the New Year, she had claimed it as her own. She'd 'borrow' it anytime she could get away with it to make low-fi black and white shorts about her swingset and her mother's gardens.

She was a whirlwind of a child with knotted golden hair and perpetually scraped knees. Ali insisted on dresses - even in the winter - and preferred being in charge whenever possible. 

One summer, she set out to catch the faeries in the backyard on camera; the next, she started writing scripts and casting the neighbourhood kids. She'd make costumes from hand-me-down clothes and bits and bobs of discarded sundry. Ali would be perfectly convinced that she had created a spot on Cleopatra's costume and that conviction led others  to believe it too. That's how Ali met Steve. 

Steve liked making movies too. The two were inseparable before they were 8 years old. They were always, filming scenes, planning movies, sewing costumes. They would spend the week passing notes about their various projects and the weekends finding the exact right angle to cast their spells.

Ali won her first film award in Brownies, Steve ran the camera. Ali's parents were proud of her hobby and happy to indulge her so long as she kept her grades up. Steve took it all a bit more seriously. He studied movies and directors more than he studied his textbooks, he aced the film option in high, but the rest of his grades suffered; as soon as he graduated, he worked three jobs and scrimped and saved and studied, all in pursuit of a degree in cinematic arts from USC. He worked hard, he took out loans, and he did it.

Ali didn't go to film school; she pursued engineering: biomedical engineering. There was never any doubt that she would. She came from a family of Engineers, and that was the expectation. While her best friend followed their dream, getting into serious debt, she was living in Canada and working as a Graduate Assistant with a team working on a new kind of soma prosthetic for the heart - a new type of pacemaker.

Steve had begged her to take the summer off and help him with a short film. So she did. She could afford to take a summer after graduation with the Graduate Assistant job lined up for the fall. 

Ali loved every second of that summer, but she didn't expect to win anything. That's something that all the big stories have in common - no one sees it coming when their life is about to change. Ali won her second film award in South by Southwest. Truth be told, she didn't expect to get into any festivals at all. They won South by Southwest in the narrative fiction feature category as a breakaway underdog hit. Suddenly, everything was different. She was expected to be on a press tour, junkets, parties, and interviews. She had offers. Agents and celebrities were calling her to get her attached to projects. And apparently, she held Steve's career in the palm of her hand. They were a double act.

One day Ali Owens was set to fix broken hearts with science, and the next day, she was holding an embossed invitation to the Pear Party.