On The Meta Act of Storyline Creation: the Movie.
Jul 15, 2019 16:18:26 GMT -5
The Anarchist likes this
Post by Sicko on Jul 15, 2019 16:18:26 GMT -5
"Alright, boys, time to show me what you got," said the executive, broad and foreboding as an airship (an airship with broad shoulders, a bull neck, and a fat cigar poking out of his lips, specifically) as he placed his palms on the ends of the table. The writers around the oblong had pulled out their notepads in a hurry, some of them still scribbling notes or frantically trying to work out the fine details of their ideas. The studio had optioned the rights, but, as always, some idiot had signed up for a deadline without giving any thought to a pitch for what the actual story would be this time around.
(Cough, cough.)
And so they were weathering here, under the gun, each of them fidgeting under his expectant gaze. It was this exec's "vision" that had carried the studio to dozens of hits, but reviews for their last few affairs had been, well... busts. To be frank, there were many who worked in the lower levels who were wondering what the creative direction of this studio was even supposed to be, what made it similar or different from it's sister companion who produced thought provoking art pieces that meditated on the metaphor of life. Who was their studio representing? Dark, nihilistic drama? Reality bending psycho-babble? Atavistic horror?
"Okay, I'll start," said Marvin, nervously twiddling his pen between his fingers and not meeting the exec's gaze.
"We zoom in on a souped up ice cream truck. That's how it starts, that's what our character, Sicko, has to be. I'm talking giant exhaust pipes, the wheels chopped and screwed, the car looking like it's been pimped out, in the place of the ice cream advertisements he has a wizard riding a dragon on the side of the truck. High octane, uber macho, all man. We establish that as we pull in, the engines gunning, 70's classic rock playing, we zoom in on his hands on the steering wheel, they grip it tight. We see his nicks and scars. He shifts into third gear, speeds up, guess what, the gearshift for the ice cream truck is a flaming 8-ball."
"Nice," the exec grunts, and the other writers muttered their agreement at the setup. Licking the sweat off his upper lip, Marvin continued, "Total badass from jump street, we see the touchstones. The clown face paint, .45 on the dashboard, empty beer cans on the floorboard. We want Sicko to breathe all man, the kind of swaggering, kick ass and take names brick that would make Rambo and John McClane take a second thought. He has a girl in his passenger seat. We pan over to her, and he says to her -"
" -Where are we going, Nikki?" Sicko asked, his raspy voice exuding harsh, brooding mystery and complex emotions. Per writers fiat, just a glance at him would intimate dark passions, hidden depths of shade... some real, traumatic backstory they'd be getting to in act 3. For now, Nikki, the carte blanche, the hitchhiker he'd picked up at a roadside cafe, was leading him somewhere. She laughed, devil-may-care. She casually bites her pinky in trepidation, not knowing what to say, almost, then "What are you running from, Ephrain?"
Annoyed, he glances over at her. "I'm not running from anything, and I don't really answer to that name much these days. Bigger question is, why should I trust you, Nik?"
She nods her head and shrugs, holding her hands up in supplication as if this was the most normal reaction in the world, "Why shouldn't you trust me?" she asks. Absently, she rolls the window up.
"Because the one constant of my life has been lately that everybody around me has tried to use me for their ends, to make themselves feel better, and I'm sick of it." he snaps back, "I am nobody's toy anymore, and I will not be jerked around or played games with. Now... it's obvious from the way we met back there in the diner, that there's more to your story than you're telling. Who sent you, girl? And what do they - what do YOU - want from me?"
She rolls her eyes with an 'oh please' smirk and says, "Use you? God, that's so BORING. Ephrain... I don't want to use you for anything. Tell me, what's the get out of a simple girl like me making you bend to my whim? Why make you do something you don't want to do? Forget it, that's so out-dated and boring. You should do what you want to do, all along. Here, let me. Move over." She's unbuckling her seat belt. She slides out of her seat and slinks, so slowly she almost seems to be SLITHERING, across the divide, pouring herself until she's straddling him, legs wrapped around his hips and rocking ever so slowly, ever so seductively, as she draws her face so close to him, lips brushing his, body shivering almost with anticipation. Face to face, she sits in his lap on the steering wheel, as he stares at her as if she's fucking insane. He cranes around her to look out the window, but she grips his cheeks and pulls his eyes to face her. She almost hisses in his ear "Tell me what gets you off, Ephrain."
"Are you fucking HIGH?! Move out of my way, we'll crash!"
"YES!" intercuts the exec. "I like that. It has everything we want. It has sex, darkness, drama, it..."
"Um..." starts Pete, down at the end of the oblong, and he wilts as everyone turns their attention to him, his eyes as big as the rest of his face and him looking like a little, lost version of Dobby the elf. "...it's been done."
Marvin blinks at him. "...It has?"
"Yeah, we. Already produced something like that, it - it turned out that the girl was... just a disassociative hallucination trying to push Ephrain into giving in to his own dark side, and -"
Marvin looked as winded as if he'd just gotten punched in the gut and had his liver removed. Pete stopped talking.
The exec sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose and taking a pull on his cigar. "Oh, we don't want to be 'derivative' even if it is taking on an unfinished story from however many years ago that nobody gives a crap about... what else we got?"
"Oh, oh, you are gonna like this, BJ," said Kendra, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her nose and holding her notebook dear to her heart. The exec took notice of her, in her cardigan and sensible dress, if only because he just assumed Kendra was here to take orders for a bagel run. He pointed at her, piqued, "Go."
"We establish Ephrain as having recovered some of his lost humanity, rehabilitated through the care of his doctor, we move away from the - the macho hard rock trappings and show a different side of him. Domestic. Softer edged. I think you'll like this. We open in the kitchen of a brownstone, Daniel Shomron's apartment..."
The steam on the cup of coffee is rising lazily in the air as the lithe figure of Daniel Shomron bustles around his kitchen. He's stirring, throwing some things into a pot. Ephrain comes walking down the trestle stairs, shirtless, his tensed muscles stretching and he yawns, working the kinks out. He rubs his head, groaning. Daniel pushes the cup of coffee closer to him, which his partner accepts, gratefully. Ephrain's eyes turn to Daniel. "You sleep alright?"
"Yeah, I slept like a rock. You?"
"Hard to get accommodated. We took a beating when we fought Shadrach's minion's and skeletons. Still, I was..." he paused, his voice hitching curiously, and he looked reflectingly into his cup, "I was glad you had my back, doctor."
"Yeah?" Daniel said nonchalantly, and he took a spoonful of a fiery red sauce out of the pot and shoved it right into Ephrain's mouth. "Tell me what you think about that?"
"Wha - MMMMMM!" Ephrain groaned, and he fanned his tongue in anguish at the burning sensation, "What the hell is that?"
"Egg mac chili," Daniel said with a giggle, "Didn't you like?"
"No, you idiot, I barely even woke up yet and you're stuffing my face with chili?!"
Daniel came closer, daringly, and pulled a strand out of his eyes. "Would you rather I stuffed your face with something else?"
Ephrain's hand came up and caressed Daniel's face, and -
"GAY."
Interrupted Josh, rudely. Kendra looked put off, huffing angrily, "It is not! It's exploring a deep relationship. You know that we can seriously tap into a Fifty Shades marketing with these two. We can explore entire new dynamics of - "
"Yeah, no, that was - " Marvin fidgeted, trying to appease Josh's boorish nature by seeing if there was maybe a nicer way of putting it, " - that was really gay."
"Yeah, pretty much," Pete said, apologetically.
"Okay, Josh, then please," Kendra said, waving her arms angrily at the offensive bro in the room, "why don't you tell us what you pitched."
"Here's my pitch: Sicko fights the devil."
Everyone around them exploded in "Awwww," and "what?!"
"No, look, it would be really cool because like he's supposed to be called the beast, right?"
"Josh, stop talking," said the exec from the head of the table.
"Yes sir," he replied, not more than a little hurt.
Pete, sighing a little bit, and then he meekly spoke up, "Why don't we find a way to bring Mariah back?"
Kendra and Marvin, the soft-spoken little man's only support in the room, turned to him interestedly, and Exec BJ twirled his fingers in a spinning out motion, as if leading him to go on. "It's just that - she was a vital part of the Sicko mythos, and we took her off the board because we wanted to explore Sicko becoming his own man, and build him back up from there, but without her, a big part of his character seems unfulfilled, I don't know, I think we may have caused some serious limitations in where we can go without her. Maybe."
Kendra patted Pete's hand, assuringly, but she said, in a serious tone, "True enough, but dead for her is pretty definitively dead... how would we even write her back in?"
Pete froze, his anxiety nailing him like a runaway semi, and he was caught in the gap of logic, unable to think of a good way around that. At length, he squeaked, "...the Devil?"
Sighs and Josh cursing and running his hands over his faced filled the room.
BJ stood, and he loosened his tie. The writers looked around the table at each other, but the bigwig just went over, crossing to the window. He closed his eyes, and everyone looked to him for guidance. "We are out of time. We have to get this filmed now, we can't spend anymore time debating this. It's time to make a harsh judgement call."
"Okay, but..." Marvin said, the only one brave enough to speak up to the boss, "what can we even put together this late in the game?"
"Eh, just throw together some crap about vampires, how it usually happens," said the boss, and, like it or not, whether it sacrificed artistic integrity or not, hell whether it was BJ's fault for waiting so long or not, his words were law.
"Kendra, go run and get us some coffees, will you? Mine's two sugars," intoned the executive, and with a sigh of nothing ever really changing, the writers looked at each other with disappointment and began to get to work.
(Cough, cough.)
And so they were weathering here, under the gun, each of them fidgeting under his expectant gaze. It was this exec's "vision" that had carried the studio to dozens of hits, but reviews for their last few affairs had been, well... busts. To be frank, there were many who worked in the lower levels who were wondering what the creative direction of this studio was even supposed to be, what made it similar or different from it's sister companion who produced thought provoking art pieces that meditated on the metaphor of life. Who was their studio representing? Dark, nihilistic drama? Reality bending psycho-babble? Atavistic horror?
"Okay, I'll start," said Marvin, nervously twiddling his pen between his fingers and not meeting the exec's gaze.
"We zoom in on a souped up ice cream truck. That's how it starts, that's what our character, Sicko, has to be. I'm talking giant exhaust pipes, the wheels chopped and screwed, the car looking like it's been pimped out, in the place of the ice cream advertisements he has a wizard riding a dragon on the side of the truck. High octane, uber macho, all man. We establish that as we pull in, the engines gunning, 70's classic rock playing, we zoom in on his hands on the steering wheel, they grip it tight. We see his nicks and scars. He shifts into third gear, speeds up, guess what, the gearshift for the ice cream truck is a flaming 8-ball."
"Nice," the exec grunts, and the other writers muttered their agreement at the setup. Licking the sweat off his upper lip, Marvin continued, "Total badass from jump street, we see the touchstones. The clown face paint, .45 on the dashboard, empty beer cans on the floorboard. We want Sicko to breathe all man, the kind of swaggering, kick ass and take names brick that would make Rambo and John McClane take a second thought. He has a girl in his passenger seat. We pan over to her, and he says to her -"
" -Where are we going, Nikki?" Sicko asked, his raspy voice exuding harsh, brooding mystery and complex emotions. Per writers fiat, just a glance at him would intimate dark passions, hidden depths of shade... some real, traumatic backstory they'd be getting to in act 3. For now, Nikki, the carte blanche, the hitchhiker he'd picked up at a roadside cafe, was leading him somewhere. She laughed, devil-may-care. She casually bites her pinky in trepidation, not knowing what to say, almost, then "What are you running from, Ephrain?"
Annoyed, he glances over at her. "I'm not running from anything, and I don't really answer to that name much these days. Bigger question is, why should I trust you, Nik?"
She nods her head and shrugs, holding her hands up in supplication as if this was the most normal reaction in the world, "Why shouldn't you trust me?" she asks. Absently, she rolls the window up.
"Because the one constant of my life has been lately that everybody around me has tried to use me for their ends, to make themselves feel better, and I'm sick of it." he snaps back, "I am nobody's toy anymore, and I will not be jerked around or played games with. Now... it's obvious from the way we met back there in the diner, that there's more to your story than you're telling. Who sent you, girl? And what do they - what do YOU - want from me?"
She rolls her eyes with an 'oh please' smirk and says, "Use you? God, that's so BORING. Ephrain... I don't want to use you for anything. Tell me, what's the get out of a simple girl like me making you bend to my whim? Why make you do something you don't want to do? Forget it, that's so out-dated and boring. You should do what you want to do, all along. Here, let me. Move over." She's unbuckling her seat belt. She slides out of her seat and slinks, so slowly she almost seems to be SLITHERING, across the divide, pouring herself until she's straddling him, legs wrapped around his hips and rocking ever so slowly, ever so seductively, as she draws her face so close to him, lips brushing his, body shivering almost with anticipation. Face to face, she sits in his lap on the steering wheel, as he stares at her as if she's fucking insane. He cranes around her to look out the window, but she grips his cheeks and pulls his eyes to face her. She almost hisses in his ear "Tell me what gets you off, Ephrain."
"Are you fucking HIGH?! Move out of my way, we'll crash!"
"YES!" intercuts the exec. "I like that. It has everything we want. It has sex, darkness, drama, it..."
"Um..." starts Pete, down at the end of the oblong, and he wilts as everyone turns their attention to him, his eyes as big as the rest of his face and him looking like a little, lost version of Dobby the elf. "...it's been done."
Marvin blinks at him. "...It has?"
"Yeah, we. Already produced something like that, it - it turned out that the girl was... just a disassociative hallucination trying to push Ephrain into giving in to his own dark side, and -"
Marvin looked as winded as if he'd just gotten punched in the gut and had his liver removed. Pete stopped talking.
The exec sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose and taking a pull on his cigar. "Oh, we don't want to be 'derivative' even if it is taking on an unfinished story from however many years ago that nobody gives a crap about... what else we got?"
"Oh, oh, you are gonna like this, BJ," said Kendra, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her nose and holding her notebook dear to her heart. The exec took notice of her, in her cardigan and sensible dress, if only because he just assumed Kendra was here to take orders for a bagel run. He pointed at her, piqued, "Go."
"We establish Ephrain as having recovered some of his lost humanity, rehabilitated through the care of his doctor, we move away from the - the macho hard rock trappings and show a different side of him. Domestic. Softer edged. I think you'll like this. We open in the kitchen of a brownstone, Daniel Shomron's apartment..."
The steam on the cup of coffee is rising lazily in the air as the lithe figure of Daniel Shomron bustles around his kitchen. He's stirring, throwing some things into a pot. Ephrain comes walking down the trestle stairs, shirtless, his tensed muscles stretching and he yawns, working the kinks out. He rubs his head, groaning. Daniel pushes the cup of coffee closer to him, which his partner accepts, gratefully. Ephrain's eyes turn to Daniel. "You sleep alright?"
"Yeah, I slept like a rock. You?"
"Hard to get accommodated. We took a beating when we fought Shadrach's minion's and skeletons. Still, I was..." he paused, his voice hitching curiously, and he looked reflectingly into his cup, "I was glad you had my back, doctor."
"Yeah?" Daniel said nonchalantly, and he took a spoonful of a fiery red sauce out of the pot and shoved it right into Ephrain's mouth. "Tell me what you think about that?"
"Wha - MMMMMM!" Ephrain groaned, and he fanned his tongue in anguish at the burning sensation, "What the hell is that?"
"Egg mac chili," Daniel said with a giggle, "Didn't you like?"
"No, you idiot, I barely even woke up yet and you're stuffing my face with chili?!"
Daniel came closer, daringly, and pulled a strand out of his eyes. "Would you rather I stuffed your face with something else?"
Ephrain's hand came up and caressed Daniel's face, and -
"GAY."
Interrupted Josh, rudely. Kendra looked put off, huffing angrily, "It is not! It's exploring a deep relationship. You know that we can seriously tap into a Fifty Shades marketing with these two. We can explore entire new dynamics of - "
"Yeah, no, that was - " Marvin fidgeted, trying to appease Josh's boorish nature by seeing if there was maybe a nicer way of putting it, " - that was really gay."
"Yeah, pretty much," Pete said, apologetically.
"Okay, Josh, then please," Kendra said, waving her arms angrily at the offensive bro in the room, "why don't you tell us what you pitched."
"Here's my pitch: Sicko fights the devil."
Everyone around them exploded in "Awwww," and "what?!"
"No, look, it would be really cool because like he's supposed to be called the beast, right?"
"Josh, stop talking," said the exec from the head of the table.
"Yes sir," he replied, not more than a little hurt.
Pete, sighing a little bit, and then he meekly spoke up, "Why don't we find a way to bring Mariah back?"
Kendra and Marvin, the soft-spoken little man's only support in the room, turned to him interestedly, and Exec BJ twirled his fingers in a spinning out motion, as if leading him to go on. "It's just that - she was a vital part of the Sicko mythos, and we took her off the board because we wanted to explore Sicko becoming his own man, and build him back up from there, but without her, a big part of his character seems unfulfilled, I don't know, I think we may have caused some serious limitations in where we can go without her. Maybe."
Kendra patted Pete's hand, assuringly, but she said, in a serious tone, "True enough, but dead for her is pretty definitively dead... how would we even write her back in?"
Pete froze, his anxiety nailing him like a runaway semi, and he was caught in the gap of logic, unable to think of a good way around that. At length, he squeaked, "...the Devil?"
Sighs and Josh cursing and running his hands over his faced filled the room.
BJ stood, and he loosened his tie. The writers looked around the table at each other, but the bigwig just went over, crossing to the window. He closed his eyes, and everyone looked to him for guidance. "We are out of time. We have to get this filmed now, we can't spend anymore time debating this. It's time to make a harsh judgement call."
"Okay, but..." Marvin said, the only one brave enough to speak up to the boss, "what can we even put together this late in the game?"
"Eh, just throw together some crap about vampires, how it usually happens," said the boss, and, like it or not, whether it sacrificed artistic integrity or not, hell whether it was BJ's fault for waiting so long or not, his words were law.
"Kendra, go run and get us some coffees, will you? Mine's two sugars," intoned the executive, and with a sigh of nothing ever really changing, the writers looked at each other with disappointment and began to get to work.
