Two degrees away from Bryan Singer?

This has been the month of weird connections.

Back in 1995 or so when I was working at Lamb & Company (a defunct animation house in Minnesota), I got an email from a guy named Michael Dougherty, then a film student at NYU, who if my memory serves me right, had seen one of my posts to alt.tv.muppets newsgroup. He was interning and called me about getting a subscription of Post magazine. Anyway, we corresponded between 1995 & 1997, and perhaps a little in 2000. I still have the emails!

He went on to work for Nickelodeon, did some short films that were in Spike & Mike's Animation Festival. A few years ago I checked on his website, to see that he'd gotten into making more illustrations and making software for Palm pilots.

Flash forward to today, when I'm web-surfing, randomly. I remembered his name and decided to search for him.

Holy shit! He was the Michael Dougherty who co-wrote X-Men 2 with Bryan Singer and others. Now he's got an agent, and gigs to write the next Superman movie as well as Ender's Game.