All the varied entries in the pantheon of great first lines ("Call me Ishmael." "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.") have one thing in common: They entice the reader to read further. So it is rare to happen upon a great first line that begs the reader to stop reading, and, if possible, to reverse time in order to erase the horrific first line from memory entirely. The following is one of those first lines.
From Contact Music (the Melville of trashy gossip sites):
Moviemaker BRETT RATNER lost his virginity to a paraplegic dangling from a tree – and now he has turned the sexual encounter into a scene in his latest film, New York, I Love You.
Sure. Sure he did. He can't remember her name, but they totally did have sex in a tree. You could ask her, but she, like, moved to Canada immediately afterwards. It's true!
Ratner explains, "It's probably my most personal film. When I sent the original script, which is autobiographical, the producers would not let me film it because, in the original ending, she (the girl) is a cripple, and they have sex as she's hanging from a tree in Central Park.
"Everyone was freaking out over my short, so I changed it to where she wasn't a cripple, but an actress pretending to be a cripple."
Oh, well if it's an actress pretending to be a cripple, then problem fixed!
God, people in Hollywood can be so uptight, you know? All Brett Ratner is trying to do is tell the truth about the one time that he had sex with a paraplegic as she was dangling from a tree—and that's not even the whole story. It gets so much better, you guys. See, a couple days after he totally did it with a lame girl in a tree, young Brett Ratner drove out to the same tree with a different girl. So, you know, they were in the car making out, and just when Brett was about to give her a rusty trombone (Brett's signature move, and a totally real thing that people do all the time!), they hear this scrape, scrape, scrape noise on the top of the car. The girl gets really freaked out cause earlier they heard on the radio that there was an escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand out roaming the woods. She starts crying—not just because they were almost out of Magnum XLs—but cause she was sure it was the mental patient making the scraping noises and that he was going to kill them. Brett was like, "Baby, baby, calm down," cause he's a take charge kinda guy who has done sex so many times.
But the girl was still scared, even more scared then when Brett showed her his really large penis. (BTW, guys: this other time, Brett had sex with some lady from the Guiness Book Of World Records on a ferris wheel after breaking into Six Flags one night, and the lady told him, "Brett, your penis is so big, we're gonna put an honorable mention for you and your big penis in the Guiness Book Of World Records." But Brett was like, "Naw, baby. I don't need that kind of recognition. I know what I got." Cause he's HUMBLE.) So Brett opened the car door, and stepped out to investigate the creepy noises, and guess what he saw? It wasn't the escaped mental patient with the hook-hand at all! It was the paraplegic girl that Brett had sex with a couple of days earlier—Brett had totally forgotten to cut her down from the tree! So then Brett and the paraplegic and the other girl had way-hot three way sex in the car. Oh, and turns out one of the girls was actually a dude!
Crazy story, right? Just another day in the life of Brett Ratner: Living Urban Legend.