Padgett Arango:
I wanted to let you know that I've finished
work on a screenplay Jos and I started many years ago
"Because They Can't Shoot Us" (a hundred pages),
and thought you (and others) might be interested in reading it.
I've posted it on the Chucklehound site, if you're interested.
We started work on this in the Spring of '96, before he went to DC. The
idea was to make a dumb comedy that we could sell
in order to finance our other script
"Money, Hair, and Freedom" (a hundred pages).
We did a thorough scene breakdown,
but didn't get past the first 30 pages or so of actual writing.
Jos took a stab at it a couple years later
and finished another dozen pages or so.
I pulled an all-nighter a few weeks back and finished it up,
according to our scene breakdown
(except for a couple scenes where I couldn't quite remember
what we were thinking of -- a lot of this script was
written very late at night).
(Padgett also writes about Jos at their college radio station.)
[A decade later Padgett writes more:]
I remember this trip is when we finally discussed his name change. His previous name wasn't really a secret (since it was legally his name when he started), but we'd never really discussed how he actually went about changing it or how he picked the new name. He explained that he'd never liked Jeremy, so decided he'd legally change his name to Johannes once he was in college. Once he had the paperwork, he realized he could just as easily change his middle name at the same time, so changed his middle name to Dianovich to honor his mom and her Russian heritage (since he didn't want her to be slighted by his choice of a Dutch name).
I also see mention of "The Jos Claerbout Center for Worldwide Shenanigans" from November of 1996. This was a plan Jos and I concocted that basically consisted of establishing a steady headquarters for us and like-minded people that would serve as a permanent home base/storage unit while living a nomadic lifestyle. He says in the email "I have a plan. More on that later," but I have no idea to what he was referring.
[Two decades later Padgett writes still more:]
As I'm sure you are, I've been thinking about Jos a lot today. I went a little nuts talking about Jos movie projects on Twitter. If you'd like to read, it is available here at Threadreaderapp (recommended) and available here at Twitter.