by Jeff Strand
And he didn’t stop until the first third of the script was complete.
(If you didn’t count restroom breaks, dinner, a couple of mandatory household chores, homework, a few text message exchanges with Gabe and Bobby, a bit of TV watching downstairs so that his parents didn’t feel abandoned, a cursory brushing of his teeth, and two more naps.)
Still, before his alarm clock made its horrific bleating sound to let him know that it was time to get ready for school, he was done!
He was so happy that he wanted to dance. So he did.
“What are you doing?” asked Mom, peering suspiciously into his bedroom.
“Dancing with joy.”
“That doesn’t look like any dancing I’ve ever seen. It’s more like staggering.”
“I haven’t slept much.”
When he met Gabe outside, Gabe said that he, too, had finished his third of the screenplay. “It was weird,” said Gabe. “I had this dream where an Australian zombie said that he’d finish writing it for me.”
Justin gaped at him. “Seriously?”
“No. You texted me about your dream in the middle of the night.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
When they met him in front of the school, Bobby revealed that he had also finished his portion. “It wasn’t easy,” said Bobby. “There were times, especially 4:13 a.m., that I wanted to give up. But I didn’t. I just took a deep breath, focused, and stuck my tongue in the connector of a nine-volt battery to give me the jolt I needed to keep going.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Justin. “We’ve got ninety-seven pages here! We decided to make a feature film on Saturday night, and on Tuesday morning, we’ve got a completed screenplay! We’re geniuses!”
• • •
“We’re idiots,” said Justin.
They sat in the lunchroom, reading through their script. The biggest problem with the script was that it was terrible. Unfortunately that was only one problem of many. It was also, in Gabe’s words, “One hundred percent unfilmable on our budget.”
“Not a hundred percent,” Justin insisted.
“Fine. I was exaggerating. But it’s close.”
“If you’re going to be an effective producer, you can’t exaggerate. You have to stick to facts. If you gave inaccurate numbers on the set, a stunt could go wrong, and somebody could die.”
“Then I won’t give a percentage. It’s completely unfilmable. There. Happy?”
“Why is it unfilmable?”
“Because it would cost trillions of dollars to make!”
“Didn’t we just have a discussion about exaggerating?”
“I could open up this script and point to any random part, and there’s going to be something that’s too expensive for us to do.” Gabe pulled a page out of the middle of the pile, closed his eyes, and then touched it with his index finger. He opened his eyes again. “Oh, look. I just touched a part where a burning Jeep drives off the top of a fast-food restaurant! How are we going to do that, Justin? Do you have a Jeep in your garage that we can set on fire? Do you know any fast-food restaurants that will be cool with us driving a Jeep off their roof? Should we just strap Bobby into the driver’s seat and wish him luck? Hey, if he dies in a gruesome ‘burning Jeep drives off a restaurant’ accident, maybe it’ll drum up some free publicity!”
“Now you’re exaggerating and being sarcastic. What’s your deal today?”
“My deal is that you didn’t give any thought to what we could actually accomplish. You wrote this script like it’s Star Wars with zombies.”
“Oh, wow, that would be—”
“I knew that we were going to have to scale things back, but you didn’t even try to be realistic. This isn’t something we’re going to play out in your backyard with action figures. It’s supposed to be a real movie. Do you actually think that Alicia is going to let us give her a purple Mohawk?”
“She asked for that.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Okay. But nothing else is realistic.”
“For the record, I never thought we were going to drive a real Jeep off a real restaurant and really set it on real fire. It’s all CGI. CGI is free!”
“Bad CGI is free. Are we making a cartoon now? We can’t do even one percent—and I’m not exaggerating this time—of the stuff that’s in the script and make it look decent. Since when are we masters of special effects?”
“I’m reaching for the stars.”
“Do you want to know the problem with that?” asked Gabe. “The stars are really, really, really, really, really, really high up. Do you know what the closest star is? The sun. Do you know how far away the sun is?”
“I can look it up,” said Bobby, taking out his cell phone.
“It’s almost ninety-three million miles away.” Gabe pushed back his chair and stood up. He reached one arm up toward the ceiling and started jumping into the air. “Look at me! I’m trying to grab the sun! Oooh, just missed! Just missed again! Maybe this next jump will be ninety-three million miles high! Nope, not that one.”
Justin glanced nervously around the lunchroom. Other kids were staring. It wasn’t like Gabe to do things that attracted this kind of attention, so he must’ve been really upset. “You’ve made your point. Sit down.”
Gabe sat down. “If you did touch the sun, it would melt your hand off, but that’s irrelevant.”
“I understand how the sun works.”
“It’s ninety-two million, nine hundred, and sixty miles away,” said Bobby, looking at his cell phone.
Gabe ignored him. “We should be ambitious, but not to the point of self-delusion. If we try to make this script the way it’s written, we’ll be laughed out of town. And then we’ll be laughed out of every other town with Internet access.”
“Everyone is laughing at you already for trying to jump up to the sun.”
“They’re not laughing. They’re staring. Do I regret jumping up in front of everybody and pretending that I was trying to grab the sun? Yes. But did I make my point? Yes.”
“You certainly did.”
“Also, the script bites.”
Justin nodded. “Yeah, it does.”
“My part too?” asked Bobby.
“All three parts,” said Justin.
“But my part was the best, right?”
“No, your part was the worst.”
“I don’t agree with that,” said Bobby. “I think Gabe’s part was the worst.”
“Why? Because mine had all the character development?”
“Yes. It would’ve been fine if it was in Justin’s section at the beginning, but half an hour into the movie nobody wants to see that.”
“Not true. The whole script is bad, but my middle section is the least bad.”
“Your section is the second least bad,” said Justin. “But we’re still talking about tiny degrees of awfulness. I’ve got to say, guys, I’m disappointed in all of us.”
“But me the least, right?” asked Bobby.
“No, you the most. We’ve already established that.”
Bobby looked sad.
“I think what we’ve shown here is that trying to write a script in two days with no sleep doesn’t give you the best end result,” said Justin. “Still, I think we have a solid foundation.”
“We don’t have a solid foundation,” said Gabe. “We have quicksand.”
“Okay, you’re done saying negative things for the rest of this meeting. The next time you have something negative to contribute, say, ‘Happy dancing panda,’ instead.”
“All right.”
“If we scale things back to accommodate our budget, tweak some of the dialogue, and get rid of a couple of the dumber plot twists, we’ll be fine.”
“Happy dancing panda,” said Gabe.
“Yes, we all wrote some lines that human beings would be embarrassed to say out loud, some of us more lines than others, but the framework is there.”
“Happy dancing panda.”
“The script isn’t perfect. Nobody is claiming that it is. But underneath the blobby layers of incompetence is the skeleton of something that could be amazing,” said Justin.
“Happy dancing panda.”
“Enough. The next time you need to say, ‘happy dancing panda,’ say, ‘fluffy snuggly malamute.’”
“I’m done complaining for now,” said Gabe. “Next topic—what did Ms. Weager say about us filming in the school?”
10
Justin shifted a bit in his chair. “Excuse me?”
“You were supposed to get permission to film in the building.”
“Right.”
“Did you?”
This felt like a situation where one lie could turn into another lie, and that could turn into another lie and another and another until he was buried beneath an avalanche of deceit. In most cases, being buried beneath avalanches of deceit was not the way to go. This was the time to be truthful and explain to his partners that Ms. Weager had denied his request.
Except that…
No. No “except that.”
Except that…knowing they lost their primary location would be a major blow to their morale at a time when their morale was already suffering from the whole “our screenplay is awful” thing. What if they decided to pull the plug? Justin couldn’t let that happen. He’d only spoken to Ms. Weager once. Maybe she’d just been in a foul mood. Maybe her water heater at home was broken, and her frustration had taken the form of disapproval of zombie cinema.
He’d talk to her again and do a better job of pleading his case.
In the meantime, why add stress to Gabe and Bobby’s lives? They had enough stress already. It would be irresponsible to add more. Only a total jerk would add more. He had this completely covered, no problem at all, so there was no conceivable reason to instill gastrointestinal distress into his best friends over this particular issue.
“Yep,” he said. “We’re fine.”
“We’re fine” was not technically a lie because they were fine. He’d get permission. First thing tomorrow, when she was beginning instead of ending a day of dealing with unruly students, he’d talk to her. She’d change her mind. Definitely. There was nothing to worry about. Justin was sure of it.
“Yep,” on the other hand, technically was a lie because it was in direct response to Gabe’s question about whether he’d gotten permission to film in the building. However, if Gabe called him out on it, Justin could pretend to misremember the conversation and say that his answer of yep had been because he thought Gabe was asking if he’d talked to Ms. Weager, not if she’d actually given permission, which was still a lie but a little white lie.
If she said no a second time, he’d blurt out a tearful confession to Gabe and Bobby and deal with their reactions tomorrow. Until then, he was going to be optimistic. Everything would work out perfectly.
“Anyway,” Justin said quickly but not so quickly that it would seem like he was trying to change the subject, “back to the script. We can still do the auditions today. I think we’re all underestimating how much an actor can bring to the role if they’re not locked into the words on the page. Why handcuff them? Why chain them to a big rock and throw it in the lake? We have genuinely talented people at our disposal, so what’s the point of turning them into mindless robots? Let them bloom.”
“Fine,” said Gabe. “They can bloom.”
“The script needs tinkering, but that’s no reason to hold up the rest of the production. I think we’re in good shape to move forward.”
“I’ll go along with that,” said Gabe, “on the condition that we all make a solemn vow that nobody but the three of us will ever see this version of the script. I mean, nobody. It would be disastrous. It doesn’t have to be a blood vow where we cut our palms and press them together, but it has to be a really serious vow. I mean it. I’m not playing around.”
“I vow,” said Bobby.
“I vow too,” said Justin.
“Didn’t you tell Alicia that you were going to give her the script today?” Bobby asked.
Justin frowned. “Yeah, I did. She’s going to think I’m unreliable if I don’t give it to her like I promised.”
“Let her think that,” said Gabe.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. No good can come from letting her read it. Pretend it’s got an ancient spell that summons evil spirits to our plane of existence. Don’t be the guy who lets people read the ancient evil book, Justin.”
“I have to give her the script. She has to know that I’m a guy of my word.”
“Catastrophe,” said Gabe. “Fiasco. Debacle. Cataclysm.”
“Fluffy snuggly malamute,” said Bobby.
“It’ll be fine,” Justin assured them. “I’ll figure something out.”
• • •
“Here you go,” said Justin, handing Alicia the script.
“Untitled Epic Zombie Movie,” she said, glancing at the title page. “Still trying to think of a name?”
“Yeah.”
“How about calling it Veronica Chaos?”
“Maybe.”
“Veronica Chaos, Zombie Slayer.”
“Still maybe.” Actually Veronica Chaos, Zombie Slayer sounded kind of cool, but he was already testing Gabe and Bobby’s patience and didn’t want to commit to a final title without running it by them.
“I’ll read it as soon as I…” She flipped through a few pages. “Ummm, everything’s blacked out with Magic Marker.”
“Not everything.”
Alicia read aloud. “Veronica Chaos, fifteen and stunningly beautiful even with all of the lacerations covering her body, crawls out, wearing a shredded white wedding dress. She’s holding a cat. She has a purple Mohawk, a pierced eyebrow, and a pierced nose. That’s all there is.”
“Actually, the cat probably won’t make the final draft. Cats aren’t cooperative.”
“Why did you cross it all out?”
“My partners and I are concerned about script leaks. Unfortunately these days it happens all the time. Scripts are getting leaked to the world before you’ve ever started the first day of shooting. It’s a constant headache for people in our industry.”
Alicia continued flipping through the pages. “Then, um, why did you give me the script?”
“I promised that I would. It’s not you that I don’t trust,” Justin assured her. “It’s just that we can’t let our guard down. I’d do the same thing for Jennifer Lawrence.”
“I’m not offended,” said Alicia. “I’m confused.”
“I wanted to prove that the script was done. And you’d said that you needed your mom to see the part about the hair and body modification.”
“You could have just given me that page. This isn’t very environmentally friendly.”
“You’re right. It’s not,” Justin admitted. “But it’s the way Hollywood does it.”
“Are you sure you’re not thinking of the FBI?” She smiled when she said it. Her tone of voice implied, I’m amused by you, and perhaps even a little charmed, but don’t push it.
“Hollywood and the FBI work in similar ways,” said Justin, whose brain was screaming for him not to push it, while his mouth fearlessly forged onward. “It all seems kind of ridiculous, but if we get hacked, it can sink the whole project.”
“How would they hack a paper printout?”
Justin didn’t recall having been such a terrible liar in the past. Maybe he always had been but only lied to people who didn’t challenge his truth.
His mouth started to offer some sort of explanation involving satellite photography, but his brain successfully defle
cted it in time. “You’re right,” he said. “That was kind of silly. I wasted a lot of paper and went through two Magic Markers. It wasn’t a good use of our planet’s limited resources. Maybe you should…”
Justin was going to suggest that Alicia become one of their producers. His brain, which was on high alert, tackled the thought and held it down until it lost consciousness.
“…be the production’s environmental awareness consultant?”
“Nah,” said Alicia. “I care about the environment a lot, but I also litter.”
“Really? I litter too!”
“Seriously?”
Justin’s shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. “No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Anyway, I hope you enjoy the script.”
• • •
This was exciting. They’d never done an actual casting session before.
Justin’s traditional casting process was to go up to one of his friends and say, “Hey, wanna be in my movie?” But for this project, he needed more actors than he had friends. And unlike previous ventures, this film would require actors with talent.
He, Gabe, and Bobby sat behind a small desk in a conference room in the library. About thirty kids were outside the room, studying the page of hastily rewritten dialogue they’d been given. As far as Justin could tell, they were all from the drama club. He’d hoped for more of a variety, perhaps a few football players or even a standard-issue bully, but he could definitely work with what he had.
11
“Name?” Justin asked.
“Tina Smith.”
“Do you like zombie movies?”
“If they’re not too bloody.”
“This one may be bloody. Is that an issue?”
“Nah.”
“You personally may be covered in blood,” said Justin. “Are you okay with that?”
“How much?”
“It could be a few bathtubs full.”
Tina smiled. “That’s fine.”
• • •
“Name?”
“Butch Jones.”
“Do you like zombie movies?”
“Do you like zombie movies?”
