Flawless Logic and Lawless Logic

Finally picked up the DVD of “Law Abiding Citizen” and screened it last night. I can only imagine the development meetings behind this gem.

THE BOSS:

Okay people we don’t have much time to act. I just got word that both Gerald Butler and Jamie Foxx are available to star in our next Wasted Talent Production. Of course the script doesn't yet exist, but that has never stopped us before. We have to get something, anything for them or we lose our window of opportunity. What do we have in the slush pile?

DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE ONE:

Remember that western written for Lee Marvin after "Cat Ballou?" I think it was called “When Billy met Jesse." It’s about the years Billy the Kid rode with Jesse James when both were scouting for Custer. I guess we can make one of them black. The original writer left the business or shot himself or became a doctor.

THE BOSS:

Who's Lee Marvin? Maybe this has potential -- and we do have a bunch of Native Americans still on contract from the "Dancing with Wolves" sequel we optioned back in the previous century. Check to see if we’ve placed it in turnaround yet. On second thought, westerns don't appeal to the young unless we can attach vampires and video games somewhere. Kids today have no understanding of history.

DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE TWO:

I read a script during my last stint in rehab that has two lesbian detectives working out of Cleveland, Georgia going undercover to break up a white supremacy ring that deals crystal meth. We could get some A-list writer to do a quick touch up and pitch it to their reps. You know like a "Bad Boys" type thing.

DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE THREE:

I got this great script called "Boyd and Lloyd" about two gay guys who battle each other in court to adopt this kid from Tibet who might or might not be a reincarnated god. Hijinks ensue throughout. Doesn’t Jackie Chan have a kid we could use here? Maybe we can get Gary Marshall to play the judge?

DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE FOUR:

Don’t both of these guys sing and dance? I know that musicals aren’t in right now because of "Nine," but I read a couple of blogs that explained "Nine" tanked because it was about a bunch of foreigners. Let me check to see who has the film rights to that Huck Finn musical written by Glenn Miller. I remember from my Spark Notes reading that there are both white and black characters.

THE BOSS:

Butler might be too young to play Finn. Doesn’t Finn always scream out the word "mendacity" at his son Brick? I hate it when writers use big words unless they're English and it's a show for PBS. Anyway, wasn’t "Showboat" about guys floating down the Mississippi? It might work for our bottom line. Let’s check the tax credits for all the states that the river flows through. Better yet, see if we can borrow Cameron's green screen.

DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE ONE:

Science fiction is hot right now. Maybe we can do an updated version of "Alien Nation" or some other kind of buddy film set in outer space. I’ll post a log line on some bulletin boards over at UCLA and USC. Some student has to have a script like that lying around.

INTERN STRAIGHT OUT OF COLLEGE:

I’m just vamping here, but how about if we throw away Butler’s singing ability and his good looks and make him a crazed serial killer. He works as a brain for the CIA so he knows everything and can build the Panama Canal in his living room using tin foil and margarine if he needs to. But his family gets killed in a bungled home invasion, although we really don’t know why his place was picked and it is only the catalyst for the entire movie reprisal motif. Am I using the word "motif" correctly? Butler’s character is so smart that he spends 10 years planning his revenge on all the lawyers who helped get one of the bad guys off. He sets car bombs, murders a judge with an exploding cell phone, and buries someone with just the right amount of oxygen pumping into his nose to keep him alive until 30 seconds before rescue. Butler's character has accumulated enough C4 to rival Blackwater -- or maybe that's where he buys it all from. He digs into a maximum security prison by himself and knows exactly which cell in solitary will be his after he kills his prison bunk mate. And he goes in and out of prison without anyone suspecting anything even though he is on 24-hour lockdown.

We make Foxx an obsessed hot shot prosecutor who is married to a beautiful woman and has a cello-playing daughter to whome he pays very little attention. In fact, let's make sure no pianos are around for him at all. Viewers might then ask questions about why he isn't playing duets with his kid. We have Butler’s character go after Foxx’s character when all the other characters relevant to the case are killed in extreme ways. The audience will believe Butler has a partner on the outside but the surprise is he doesn't. It's like "Saw" meets "Phantom of the Opera," except no one sings anything. Maybe over end credits Butler and Foxx can perform an old standard like "Me and My Shadow" -- unless you guys think that might have some racial overtones attached to it. We can set it in Philly because that’s where I come from and I can visit my folks on the production’s dime. And…

THE BOSS:

Enough. I love it. Tight. Concise. Energetic. That’s why I hire kids with math degrees. You guys put everything down so logically, and I don't even need to understand the difference between algebra and trigonometry. Okay, we’re shooting next week. Where’s the rewrite already?

NOIR OBGYN is finally out of the ER

It seems like forever, but it wasn't really that long ago. On May 6, 2009 I posted a wacky little piece entitled NOIR OBGYN: FINGERS OF FURY. At that time, I mentioned the treatment itself was about ready to go online. As you can see, I was off by several months.

I have always hated the process of writing. Twisting my head 360 degrees and spitting out pea soup is so much simpler an act than plowing into the thought process of producing one paragraph that seamlessly leads into the next. I just don't process thought that way. Creative passages lurch and jerk away from me, perambulating like some befuddled drunk muttering in sotto voce, "I'd rather be lost in the Gobi Desert than be part of this mess."

Despite my meandering prose and run-on sentences, no one ever confused me with Jack Kerouac -- unless we're talking about Garness Kerouac, the petty sneak thief I knew in Mad City years ago.

I remember at Madison Central High School, a teacher, upon reading one of my essays when I was in 10th grade, stuck her nose so close to my eyes that my lashes cleaned off the last snack she'd eaten in the teacher's lounge. What a caustic dog! She asked whether English was my second language. I told her it would be once I mastered stick figure cave painting.

For me to compose even my John Hancock on a worthless check, I go "method noir," turning as paranoid as a bag of snakes, as alcoholic as a beat poet, and as angry as a vegan at a Coney Island eat-a-thon.

I start smoking around the clock and even next to the clock. I prefer the cheap, unfiltered cancer sticks that make your eyes water and your mouth taste like twice-burnt flesh, though two-bit bargain basement stogies found burning on top of dumpster piles do just fine. I like second-hand smoke from hand-me-down cigars.

I punch myself in the kisser and kick myself in the groin. I cut myself shaving, yet leave a two-day stubble growth to assert my manhood. I toss my apartment looking for a bottle of three dollar gin to start a four day lost weekend. Energy- saving bulbs are tossed out the window, replaced with flickering neon lights.

An apartment ain't no damn good for "method noir" unless asbestos fibers flake downwards from the ceiling into your day-old, cigarette-filled coffee mugs, bought years before on the boardwalk when you were the captive young swain of some beat up old madame. I go out and steal this lung angina from condemned buildings around town.

I scrap away two layers of insulation, making my walls so thin the silhouettes of those next door neighbors performing nastiness aerobics on each other displace the need to download porn. I go out and hire actors to simulate whatever I just said.

I make additional changes to the mise en scène: A toilet functioning both as a bath tub and a dishwasher comes straight from a green web site called "Why Waste Water Fool?"

I collect dirty dishes from around the neighborhood and pile them sky high in the sink, then call in some favors and have a pest service deliver cockroach carcasses to throw around in a feng shui manner. For good measure, I cut up my "euro-trash furniture" to give the sense that either a drug cartel or the DEA has been rifling through my place looking for some blow.

I play the low cool bass of Charlie Mingus and rumble it against the wet cobblestone streets of that mean hydra the paparazzi call the City of Angels. I purchase both the rain and construct the cobble stoned streets. My back hurts; I now owe the mob plenty for they control both the rain and construction materials. And my last back alley crap game lost me my rent.

I stare out from cracked, shadeless windows and wait for the guns I've place strategically around the neighborhood to find owners that believe people do kill, not the Mach 10's in their sweaty hands. I hear a boisterous buxom blond knocking on my door, though any female over the age of 18 who doesn't outweigh me will do just as well. I get my babes from a new LA web site called "Los Angeles: Down, Dirty, Cheap and Free to be You and Me."

Now I'm ready to dance my fingers over my Underwood and compose sentences that don't resemble a schizophrenic's notepad. The end result: Noir OBGYN: Fingers of Fury.

So that's why this took so long. Oh that and I herniated a disc and found salvation in my cats trying to bury me as waste material in their litter boxes. According to this classy noir video I also need a sexy accent to go along with my stubble.