Bunny Man's Bridge

by Ted Neill

  CUT TO OUTSIDE THE VOUSCHS’ HOUSE

  BURT runs up his walk with his suitcase and finds a note on the door.

  NARRATOR

  One year, there were no summer classes due to renovations at the boarding school. Burt was overjoyed. He rushed home once sessions were dismissed. He could not wait to see his mother. But when he reached the house, he found that his parents were gone. His father had taken Deirdre to the Seychelles, thinking that being around Burt for the whole summer would be stressful for her. He said so in the note he left for Burt. Of course, he had not told Deirdre that their son would be left home alone.

  CUT TO KITCHEN

  We pan over a floor covered with discarded take-out containers and delivery menus from a variety of restaurants. BURT sits next to an open and empty refrigerator. There are empty bags and containers all about him. He chews on a Tupperware container, looking forlorn.

  NARRATOR

  His father had seen that the refrigerator was well-stocked, but in his loneliness Burt ate through the food and his remaining budget in one month. As he sat alone on the empty floor beside the empty refrigerator and empty cupboards, inside an empty house, he realized that without love, he too felt empty.

  The world was a large and lonely place. All Burt had were these feelings, this pain, an insatiable desire to chomp, and an inexorable hunger to go along with it.

  BURT stops chewing and looks upward. BURT goes upstairs and begins to kick at a locked door.

  NARRATOR

  It was his father that was behind all this, his father who had taken his mother away from him. And now Burt would get revenge.

  BURT pries at the door, but he can’t get it open. Finally, he drops to his knees and bites at the lock. The door opens. He enters. On the other side is his father’s studio. There are paintings all over. BURT begins to take bites out of each one.

  OUTSIDE THE VOUSCHS’ HOUSE, DAY

  HARLAND and DEIRDRE arrive home after their trip. They walk into the house and find it in complete disarray. DEIRDRE calls the police and reports a break in. HARLAND rushes upstairs to his studio. As he goes down the hallway, he sees that the paintings on either side of the wall have been chewed. Bite marks mar the frames and the canvasses. He bursts into his studio to find BURT, disheveled and dirty (he’s been at this all summer), sitting amid a pile of ruined paintings. HARLAND loses control and beats BURT. DEIRDRE tries to intervene, but HARLAND slaps her in the face, then recoils in terror.

  NARRATOR

  When Harland arrived home and found all his works destroyed, he went mad with rage. He beat Burt senseless. When Deirdre rushed to help her son, he struck her too. Suddenly horrified that he, by his own actions, had harmed his beloved wife and risked damaging the appearance of his most important inspiration, Harland decided that the situation was simply unacceptable. Something drastic had to be done.

  OUTSIDE THE VOUSCHS’ HOUSE, NEXT MORNING

  HARLAND carries BURT out and throws him to the curb. BURT lies there, stunned and shocked, sucking his thumb. As he lies there, his father comes in and out, tossing the ruined paintings down on top of him.

  CUT TO THE VOUSCHS’ BEDROOM

  DEIRDRE is locked inside, pounding on the door to get out.

  NARRATOR

  Harland disowned his son. He threw Burt out of the house with the paintings he had ruined, along with the weekly trash and recycling. Then he took Deirdre and moved away, hoping never to see his curse of a son again.

  OUTSIDE THE VOUSCHS’ HOUSE

  BURT is still on the curb, now sucking on the corner of a painting. HARLAND drags DEIRDRE out of the house. She tries to reach BURT, but HARLAND throws her into a waiting limo. They drive away.

  OUTSIDE THE VOUSCHS’ HOUSE, NEXT MORNING

  NARRATOR

  Burt waited outside his house all night, but his parents never returned.

  Time lapse. BURT remains, unmoving, in the midst of the pedestrian traffic, weather, and passage of the season. Leaves begin to fall. Finally, three ART CRITICS walk by, stop, and stare at the paintings on the ground. For a long while they are silent, assessing.

  ART CRITIC 1

  This work, it is astonishing!

  ART CRITIC 2

  Breathtaking! Pure genius.

  ART CRITIC 3 picks up one of the paintings and looks through a large bite hole in the canvas.

  ART CRITIC 3

  This is marvelous. Boy, who did this?

  BURT

  I did.

  The ART CRITICS look at each other, aghast.

  ART CRITIC 1

  This is revolutionary.

  ART CRITIC 2

  How much do you want for these paintings?

  BURT

  Well, I don’t know. I’ve never sold—

  ART CRITIC 3

  You’ve never sold a painting!

  BURT

  No. I’ve been in school and my parents—

  ART CRITIC 1

  He is undiscovered.

  ART CRITIC 2

  Well, of course he is. We have not heard of him, have we?

  ART CRITIC 3

  That means that we have discovered him! Imagine what this will do for our careers!

  All three ART CRITICS reach into their pockets, pull out cash, and give it to BURT. He sits there watching as the bills fall down into his lap, landing there among the leaves and litter that have gathered there. The day passes and the ART CRITICS bring more and more people to the curb. until all the paintings have been bought, and BURT’S lap is filled with hundred-dollar bills. With all that money, BURT goes to an art store to buy more canvasses and paints, then he puts them on the doorstep with a bow and card that reads, “For Dad. I’m Sorry. Love, Burt.” Then he waits. He sleeps on the doorstep beside the blank canvasses. Night comes, followed by morning, and still his parents have not returned. Crestfallen, he gets up and begins to wander down the street.

  CITY PARK, DAY

  BURT walks into a park. In the center of the park is a fountain with a stone statue. He climbs up on the statue and begins to bite down on it. A HOMELESS MAN gets up and stares. He continues to stare even after BURT has finished and climbed down. BURT walks through the city, wandering into parks, and eating at any and all sculptures. He walks by wall murals and gnaws at them. As he goes along, people begin to follow him and look at his work. He walks into a museum sculpture garden. It is later in the day now and POLICE OFFICERS follow him into the garden and begin to drag him away, but as they leave by the gates, they are surrounded by an ANGRY MOB OF ART CRITICS.

  MOB

  You can’t arrest him. He is expressing himself! He is an artist.

  MOB

  This is artistic repression.

  MOB

  This is oppression!

  MOB

  Down with militarized police forces!

  MOB

  Down with repressive totalitarian regimes!

  MOB

  Freedom for expression! Freedom from artistic oppression!

  MOB

  Freedom now! Leave him alone, you fascist pigs!

  CUT TO COURTROOM

  A JUDGE reads over the notes of BURT’S case, as BURT stands before him.

  JUDGE

  Well, Mr. Vousch, you have pled guilty to defacing public property, and it is my job and duty to sentence you. But, since the public seems to feel that there is some . . . well, some merit in your . . . in these . . . these . . . Oral Compositions, your sentence will be one hundred hours of community service, and that service will be in the form of using your artistic . . . talents to improve upon this city’s art work. Dismissed.

  The JUDGE bangs his gavel, and the ART CRITICS in the room get up and cheer. They carry BURT out on their shoulders.

  SCULPTURE GARDEN, NEXT DAY

  BURT sits with his legs wrapped around a sculpture and chews idly at it while an enraptured audience watches.

  NARRATOR

  And so began Burt’s career as an Oral Composer. He quickly acquired a loya
l following. Members of art circles everywhere began to talk about the new young visionary:

  ART CRITIC 1 (reading aloud what he is writing on a note pad)

  . . . on the cutting edge of art. He is a criminal, and outcast, who from the fringes of society brings us a new definition, a whole new paradigm, in which our experience and interaction with what we call art has been transfigured.

  ART CRITIC 2

  (speaking into a recorder)

  He is dangerous, and some would even say he is mad. To many he is an enigma, but what is certain is his art is astounding . . . .

  NARRATOR

  Soon Burt’s work hit the mainstream. There were knockoffs of his work, cheap imitations.

  CUT TO ARTS’ FAIR

  CUSTOMERS examine paintings and sculptures with pieces apparently bitten out of them.

  NARRATOR

  There were even a few people who tried to imitate his methods.

  CUT TO A SCULPTOR AT ARTS’ FAIR

  SCULPTOR holds up a piece of sculpture. He smiles and we see that his teeth are broken and chipped. A tooth falls out, and the SCULPTOR tries to catch it while keeping his composure.

  NARRATOR

  But no one had Burt’s touch or his natural gifts.

  CUT TO NEIGHBORHOOD STREET

  BURT walks down the street wearing a beret and chewing a toothpick. A growing group of critics and fans follow a few steps behind. BURT walks by a house with a sculpture in the front yard. As he stops, the entourage stops. He walks into the yard.

  CUT TO SAME YARD, A FEW MINUTES LATER

  BURT walks away picking his teeth, the sculpture in the yard behind him, a bite taken out of its base, falls over. The entourage surrounds it and begins to take photographs and notes. BURT walks farther down the street and ducks into his own house—the same as his childhood home. The homeowner at the first house emerges, sees the crowd and the sculpture on its side, and immediately starts taking bids on the new “work.”

  OUTSIDE BURT’S HOUSE

  A few devoted fans stand outside.

  NARRATOR

  As his fame spread, Burt became an international phenomenon. He received commissions to do work for corporate offices.

  CUT TO TRAFFIC CIRCLE OUTSIDE OFFICE BUILDING

  Men and women in suits cut a ribbon and clap at the dedication of an office building. BURT is wrapped around the artwork in front and is munching on it.

  CUT TO EXT. BURT’S HOUSE

  There are more devoted fans standing vigil outside his house.

  NARRATOR

  Soon he was asked to do an Oral Composition for the White House lawn. The Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts gave him a grant to come to their galleries and chew upon anything he wanted, as did the National Gallery, and MOMA.

  The public loved him. They said he had breathed new life into the art world. That there had not been such a revolution in art since the discovery of perspective drawing. He was the greatest genius since Sidneyo or Picasso.

  CUT TO TELEVISION SCREEN PLAYING A TALKSHOW

  ART CRITIC 1 (speaking to a talkshow host)

  BURT is the biggest thing in post-post modernism. He gazes upon the artifices and edifices of a capitalist society in decline, where endless expansion into exurbs has led to a collapse in cultural centers, leaving them to decay and rot, in need of rejuvenation, or rather, revolution.

  CUT TO GALLERY OPENING

  ART CRITIC 2 (speaking to reporters)

  Burt strips away the layers of hackneyed neo-classic tropes while permeating the boundaries of what is perceived as the conventional tableau, inviting the viewer on an inward journey, a quest for meaning, reexamining how we as consumers consume art, and how art consumes us, and consumption consumes the subject. This is the inevitable evolution that comes as subject, artist, and art become one, an ontogenesis from self-consciousness to meta-consciousness.

  CUT TO NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO STUDIO

  ART CRITIC 3

  While maintaining a subtext of visual and textual harmonies, Burt Vousch excogitates the contemporary and traditional into a pastiche of past, present, and future, leaving one with a feeling of sublime liminality vis-à-vis a deconstructionist point of view that is also, paradoxically, re-constructivist, posing the question of what is genuine versus what is contrived, what is authentic and what is façade.

  FAN GIRL 1 (buying a copy of Seventeen with BURT on the cover)

  He’s so dreamy.

  FAN GIRL 2

  I want to have his babies.

  CUT TO ART STUDIO

  HARLAND, older now, snaps closed an issue of Time magazine with a picture of BURT on the cover. HARLAND is surrounded by unfinished paintings of DEIRDRE, who looks forlorn. When he hears DEIRDRE coming, he shoves the Time magazine underneath a number of canvasses where he has hidden copies of The New York Times and New Yorker, each with cover stories profiling BURT. DEIRDRE enters, her clothes disheveled. She is carrying a bottle of whisky, and stumbles over to a seat under some lights where HARLAND is trying to paint her.

  NARRATOR

  Harland did everything he could to keep news of their son from Deirdre. He took extraordinary measures, moving them out into the country, to an abandoned eighteenth-century manor, with no connections to the outside world. They lived off the grid, without modern conveniences. No electricity. No running water. Harland said it was for his art.

  CUT TO INSIDE A DARK, DILAPIDATED BARN

  The door opens and we see HARLAND carry in another painting and set it atop a pile of paintings in an empty animal stall. The camera pans, and we see one stall after another, each one filled with more piles of unsold paintings.

  NARRATOR

  When, in truth, he had not sold a painting for years. He was broke, and his creditors were looking for him.

  OUTSIDE BURT’S HOUSE

  More and more devoted fans gather outside BURT’S house.

  FANS

  We love you Burt!

  NARRATOR

  But in time, there was no art work left in the States for Burt. So this young man, who had single-handedly reinvented art, was sent to where he would have enough art for a lifetime: Europe.

  CUT TO TARMAC AT EUROPEAN AIRPORT

  Cheering fans await Burt.

  HYSTERICAL FEMALE FAN

  Burt! Eat Me!

  NARRATOR

  Europe welcomed him with open arms. Crowds of thousands greeted him on his tours. He set to work at a prodigious pace.

  CUT TO OUTSIDE THE LOUVRE

  We see more PEOPLE gathering outside while the camera zooms through a window and we see BURT working within. Women wave signs outside reading: “Je veux avoir les bébés de Burt” and “Mords moi.”

  NARRATOR

  Burt snacked on Vermeer, he lightened up Rembrandt, he dined upon Sidneyo’s Last Supper. He licked the Mona Lisa with a grain of salt. He peppered the Sistine Chapel with his mastication, and he bit off David’s testicles with relish.

  STREET IN FRONT OF BURT’S HOUSE

  The street is completely filled with fans. Burt’s limo is escorted by police vehicles. Helicopters hover above, and the crowds of fans jostle with the paparazzi and security

  NARRATOR

  But in time, even Europe grew boring to Burt and he came home.

  A taxi pulls up to BURT’s house and he gets out looking jetlagged. The crowd cheers and screams. He and his handlers push their way through to his front door and enter. The crowd begins to chant his name.

  Time Lapse. We watch as people in the crowd come and go. Police motorcades and airport limos zoom in and out with BURT coming and going.

  NARRATOR

  The next year there was a tour of Asia, and a year after that, a tour of South America, then Africa, then Asia again. But after his last tour, Burt fell into a deep depression. Although his popularity remained high, and demand higher, he was tired of his Oral Compositions. After dining on the greatest works of the world, what was there left to do? He had money now, prestige, and fame. He had literall
y consumed the greatest works of art the world had to offer, but he felt empty, lonely. For a while he created no more Oral Compositions. Then of course, interest flagged, something, someone else new came along.

  Time Lapse. The crowds outside Burt’s house dwindle. The roadblocks are removed and regular pedestrian and then street traffic resume.

  CUT INSIDE BURT’S BEDROOM