Write This Movie
Bob declines to offer a hot take on Will Smith and instead proposes a crowdsourcing project to upend next year's Oscars. Start looking for a formalwear designer now.
After the sudden slappery at Sunday’s Academy Awards, followers of filmdom are talking about little but Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith and Chris Rock. Meh.
Oh, it was shocking to see the Best Actor being the bad actor in a spasm of toxic masculinity/chivalry/aggravated assault/significant breach of decorum. And it was weird to see the oft-crossed Oscars line between gentle roasting and personal attack result in mayhem. Anybody who witnessed the Slap Heard Round the World in real time or playback is trying to solve the riddle of what exactly took place, speculating about everything from hidden medical secrets to — wink wink — “temper malfunction.”
But it doesn’t matter. Or, anyway, hardly at all, because it is a drama confined to a few individuals with little relevance, beyond gossip, to the rest of the struggling world. Just here to remind you that eastern Ukraine, democracy and the atmosphere are in ruins. Racist government policies, legislated and adjudicated against for decades, are being passed into law all across the land. Roe v. Wade is in hospice. The latest Covid strain is tearing through Europe. There is a fascist organization on the brink of majorities in the House and Senate. A solitary confrontation between two men has very little significance in the grand scheme of things, or even the petit scheme of things. So, though I’ve puzzled over the incident myself, I have no need to stake out an interpretation of an event so ultimately unimportant. I’m sure the rest of the media and the internet have got this one covered.
Instead, if I must think about Hollywood, I’m going in a different direction — which is to use the occasion of the Oscars to remind you of something that does have larger significance: the world’s biggest con.
You yourself are taken in year after year, when in the sparkling rite of spring the glitterati convene to honor the finest achievements in cinema. Sure. Why not? Great dresses. Some good jokes. Lots of cringey podium repartee. What an iconic event! Thing is, it’s a grift. Hollywood is not and has never been in the finest-achievements business. It is in the mass-sales business, like the wine trade, and every year they hand out statues to Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, Pauillac while getting filthy rich off of Barefoot and Sutter Home. The pre-Oscars chatter was about The Power of the Dog. The industry’s animating force, however, was Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Hit movies aren’t crafted; they are fermented in steel vats, with formulas that privilege consistency over genius, popular taste over artistic expression. Come on, you know this. It’s not a secret, and it’s been complained about by critics smarter than me for an entire century. Yet somehow, once that red carpet is rolled out, as if under mass hypnosis, we globally suspend disbelief. Bernie Madoff, may he rest in agony, ran approximately the same scam.
I’m not just bloviating here. I intend once and for all to prove it. I am herewith submitting the first two scenes of a screenplay — nearly 2½ hours in the making — for a 2023 movie that will take all the Sutter Home grapes I can think of and dump them in a vat. Animation mixed with live action, futuristic hellscape, anthropomorphic animals, post-modern wisecracks, digital effects, war, hot babes, precise multicultural casting and — just to be au courant — Chris Rock in the voice role of Clarence.
Thing is, I’m super busy staving off a nervous breakdown over the Republicans and Arctic ice, so, now that I’ve primed the pump, I’m turning the rest of the writing over to you. Tell everybody, of course, by all available means. This is their once-in-a-lifetime chance to author a blockbuster and rub elbows with the stars next spring. All everybody needs to do is write the next scene and send it to bullypulpit@booksmartstudios.org.
I’ll choose one and we can move forward, scene by scene, until the dramatic, inspiring and memorable denouement. How hard can this be? And when it wows the world, and is honored by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for Best Original Score and Best Makeup, maybe you can jog onstage at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles and slap the shit out of somebody.
PLANET TREYF
EXT. POST-APOCALYPTIC LANDSCAPE — DUSK
A barren, parched expanse of rural land is dotted by the wreckage of drought, neglect and vandalism. Dried brush blows around in a whistling wind, bristling with entropy. The carcasses of three ruined dwellings in the middle distance tremble in the wind, utterly at the mercy of the elements: a straw house, a wood frame house and a brick house. All of them are roofless, with collapsed front walls. Violence has occured here.
In the foreground sits a 55-gallon steel drum, stuffed with shattered lumber and thatch. It is disgorging smoke and flames into the breeze. Three bedraggled refugees try to warm themselves around the makeshift furnace. They are in rags. One, SAFIYA, wears a headscarf and fingerless gloves. Another, DAIYU, wearing a ski-cap pulled low on her sooty face, is vaping. A third, CLARENCE, with wild eyes, is drinking from a flask. Each is a pig.