by Adam Novak
double life
Libra liked the idea of walking into Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, counting nineteen crisp hundred dollar bills, and zipping out with the royal blue leather Yves St. Laurent satchel purse she always coveted but never could afford. This particular handbag was not paid for by her sugar boss Rodney Muir, who was affectionate but sometimes stingy, which annoyed Libra greatly; certainly not from Lester Barnes, happy to give his sugar daughter a little something extra for the road, which made up for those nipple clamps she abhorred; the cheddar was not from Walter Nikolovski, whom Arthur Livingstone had ostensibly arranged for Libra to strategize about a CE gig at Paramount but instead they got a suite across the street at the Park Hyatt (she charged him triple for their clumsy hour and a half, waiting outside Wells Fargo for the sugar llama to hand over stacks of banded twenties). In truth, it was new regular Dollars Muttlan, (flavor-of-the-month screenwriter turned industry leper after Warlords of Arkadia bombed) who booked her every Friday night in August for a porn star experience at twenty-five hundred a pop after a midnight show at the New Beverly where they watched TRUE ROMANCE, THE LAST WAVE, NUDE NUDES, and THE 4TH MAN, ending up at Swingers in the Beverly Laurel Motor Inn, bemoaning the business over strawberry milkshakes and sweet potato fries with ranch dressing, checking into the “romance room” upstairs where Dollars would occasionally make Libra come.
TRUE FIBS
Screenplay by Bud Wiggins
Explosive actioner cares about its characters while delivering the carnage. On the trail of nuclear terrorists, CIA agent Jerry Trasker realizes his family is hopelessly dysfunctional because he’s been lying for years about his true profession to unhappy wife Lisa and college-bound daughter Skylar. When Jerry learns she is contemplating an affair with a “real 007” who’s a lying shoe salesman, he tells Lisa the truth about his actual occupation. A skeptical Lisa still doesn’t believe her husband when terrorists kidnap them and Jerry shows off his action hero chops and saves the world from Armageddon. There’s a nice subtext about deception that’s subtly woven into the narrative fabric. That Wiggins pulls off this feisty spy-family concept with such an affecting delivery is fucking remarkable. For Hugo Slater, relationship-driven script adds unexpected dramatic layers to its hi-octane set-pieces and memorably presents a dysfunctional family healing itself.
WHORE ON THE RANGE
Screenplay by Sherry Naing
Starkly compelling script about the wages of sin* through the lens of Lacy Keller, a self-employed writer going through a divorce, raising three girls on a small farm, can’t afford Christmas presents, can’t afford much of anything, fights with her bitter ex-husband over custody, faces foreclosure, hints of a lesbian romance with babysitter Perry, turns tricks in her basement, sells her livestock, converts her barn into a brothel, loses her kids in a custody battle, and recruits other mothers to join her prostitution empire. As a divorced ex-waitress and aspiring hog farmer Lacy discovers she excels at one thing: whoring herself out. Depressing ending has Lacy dreaming of selling her life story to Hollywood, attending the LA premiere, walking the red carpet when she wakes up, back to reality, selling her body to a migrant worker. For Betsy Yarborough, grim tale of an underdog hooker with her bootstraps in the air might not be prestige. Writer-director was at Sundance years ago with a similarly subtle woman’s picture called On The Rag.
wages of sin
Dental records identified Libra Livingstone as the murdered prostitute at the bottom of the Koi pond in the Bel Air residence owned by Benny Pantera; her father had no idea she was on IMDB.
5 DAYS/6 NIGHTS
Screenplay by Isaac Mazzola
Manipulative piece of romantic fluff fails to pull off its Castaway concept, needs a rewrite more than a life preserver. UTERUS magazine publisher/militant feminist Janine Roth dumps her self-absorbed tennis pro beau only to be trapped in the Caribbean with cocky pilot Freddy Galdiaz after their propeller plane crash lands on an uninhabited island. Predictable sparks and character-history conversations follow, with the pair constantly arguing, reluctantly copulating, trapped in the blue lagoon until their rescue, and return to the deserted isle a year later for their shotgun wedding. Dialogue is unspeakable. Worst scene is when Freddy and Janine read aloud and answer highly personal questions from her own magazine’s Cosmo-type sex questionnaire. Not funny*. Maybe if these two idiots were given a volleyball or some clever lines, we might want to watch them fish, fight, and figure out a way off this island. Think of the violence of Swept Away, picture Phyllis Diller and Don Rickles stranded together, and you get the idea of this irritating script.
Not funny
Arthur Livingstone, the object of a citywide manhunt, attends the 5 Days/6 Nights premiere in Westwood after killing his daughter Libra, a good-time girl whose client list astounds the industry. Fleeing the after-party, Livingstone carjacks a Range Rover on Wilshire, leads police and news helicopters on a televised freeway chase until the octogenarian runs out of gas, slits his throat, and finger paints in blood on the windshield.
WRECKING BALL
Screenplay by Yancy Drapkin
Prestige material resonates on a character level of American Beauty, Good Will Hunting, and Ordinary People. Moving script about a widow named Mavis who loses her husband in a senseless lawnmower accident and trashes her corporate law career, destroys her relationships with toxic friends, and finally, symbolizing her state of mind, bulldozes her house in suburbia with the help of an eager Mexican wrecking crew. Monsters Ball was like this script, ferociously well-drawn, exploring grief and shattered lives through a completely character-driven love story with flashes of unbearable drama. When Mavis meets a pot-smoking widower struggling to raise a son who’s a bully, she schools the boy on how to make a chocolate mousse and shows the widower how to be a better father. Turns out our one woman wrecking ball kept her terminal cancer diagnosis hidden from everybody and her late husband never told Mavis about his second family outside their marriage. Life is tough, life is weird, life is short, script seems to say, so figure it out before your number is up.
GEEZER
Screenplay by Franklin Brauner
Ludicrous but accessible comic book hero with global appeal could be a franchise actioner for Hugo Slater or Antwon Legion. Two-thousand-year-old Moe Reilly is half Highlander, half Deadpool. Tone is Sin City; action is over-the-top; plot about saving the world from an STD bomb unleashed by Moe’s loony ex-mistress from WWII is ridiculous. Tired, immortal Moe resides in Trump Tower with Tibetan servants and the urns of fifteen dead wives, a cross between Bruce Wayne and Mitt Romney. Script offers historical flashbacks of Moe advising Jimmy Carter, giving Hendrix a guitar, stopping Mussolini from acquiring the bomb, and sharing a cell with Nelson Mandela. In the end, Moe takes the STD nuke for the world, polluted but alive, keeping the door open for a sequel. Embryonic first draft needs work; lame dialogue undermines all the sweaty action. If this two-thousand-year-old superhero possessed the character complexity of Wrecking Ball, absurd actioner would be unbeatable.
CARAVAGGIO’S DEPOSITION
Q How are we today, Mr. Barnes?
A I’m fine. I can’t say how you are doing, for all I know your wife has left you and your children have stopped talking to you.
Q What was your reaction to the death of Libra Livingstone?
A I thought about the last time I saw her. We had a threesome with some Polish girl and Libra wanted me to take her shopping at Barney’s.
Q Was that something you did regularly?
A Shopping? Or paying for sex?
Q Answer the question.
A Which one? Threesomes or Barney’s?
Q Did you participate in an orgy with Libra Livingstone at Benny Pantera’s house in Bel Air?
A My memory is a little fuzzy but I think she wore a blindfold.
Q Can you recall the names of the other men there that day?
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br /> A I would never name names. Bramley Nazarian, Rodney Muir, Walter Nikolovski, Jerry Makos, and Arthur Livingstone.
Q How many times a week did you pay Libra for sex?
A Twice a week, never on weekends. Saturdays and Sundays were spent with the ball and chain. Mostly mornings with no staff meetings.
Q At your office in Beverly Hills?
A In my Bentley, in the elevator, at this hotel I liked on Wilshire, I forget the name of it, the Sixty-Nine? I remember one time waving at a Fox executive in the parking lot at the Riv while Libra was giving me head.
Q How much did Libra charge you?
A Five hundred bucks here, five hundred there, anytime she needed something, new tires, furniture for her apartment, I paid for it.
Q Would you say you had a hooker habit?
A That money changed hands every time we saw each other was inconsequential. Libra needed money the way I needed attention.
Q Which was?
A Desperately. And I liked the way she smelled.
Q I’d like to ask you about a dark chapter in the agency’s history, and there are many, but one in particular stands out for its savagery.
A I had nothing to do with year-end bonuses. That was all Arthur, talk to him.
Q What was your involvement with the assassination game known as KAOS?
A We lost a lot of decent people. I blame the janitors. They had the keys to our offices. I watched them burn effigies in the streets of Century City. You couldn’t eat anywhere without thinking about the poisonings at The Grill. That was the worst.
Q You retaliated and the janitors fought back with drive-by shootings. What started this war, does anybody even remember?
A Larry Mersault was approached by a member of facilities, the building manager who was close to the car wash guys, the automotive department, and those illegals who cleaned our offices every night. This African crime lord took my reader to lunch at Addis Ababa on Fairfax. Have you ever eaten Ethiopian food? No forks. You eat with your fingers. You think you drink from a water bowl at the table and it’s for washing your hands. The African told Larry he had a film fund from janitors all over Los Angeles, not just the Omniscience/Ragnarök gang, but the life savings of every cleaner from Boyle Heights to Santa Monica. Larry thought it was drug money or some criminal enterprise, so he brought them to our Independent Film Division as a retainer client and they ended up cofinancing Plasma Sluts with Bellerophon Pictures.
Q Wouldn’t you be upset if your life savings went into a piece of trash called Plasma Sluts?
A The original title was Somebody’s Daughter, which didn’t translate well overseas. If it wasn’t for Larry Mersault, we wouldn’t have had the Ojai Accords, which stopped the killings and outlined a general framework for peace.
Q Benny Pantera recently threw you a bachelor party where Libra Livingstone provided the entertainment.
A That’s not accurate.
Q Who was the bachelor party for?
A There’s never a groom. Benny just likes the ritual.
Q I want to show you a security cam video of Arthur Livingstone at one of his bachelor parties.
(clip plays)
(One angle. One room. One bed. 3:33 a.m. We are in Benny Pantera’s master bedroom in Bel Air. Blindfolded, grinning, a naked Arthur Livingstone lies on his back, monstrous erection, on top of the duvet, caressed by five young naked women. No one is aware they are being recorded. The women kiss Arthur all over, don blue surgical latex gloves, straddle, rub, suckle, then abruptly, they all leave the room; a young woman in crotchless lingerie enters, smoking a crack pipe, visibly out of her head, squats onto the blindfolded man’s penis after squirting her fingers with gel and shoving them between her thighs. The hard landing causes Arthur and the young woman to scream at the same time. Still inside her, Arthur lifts up his blindfold and recognizes his daughter—)
(clip ends)
A I think that was the end of Arthur’s deceptive sexual-relational-compulsivity reality.
GLOW JOBS
Simi Valley Forge
“No meat! No meat!” cries a soldier, ravenous, holding his belly. “Shut up Wilson!” shouts a rebel, scared he might be next. Starving Revolutionary War grunts huddle around a campfire at midnight, shivering in their long johns and frayed coats, drawn faces making them appear as animated corpses. The soldiers stumble over a rectangular crate covered with snow in the corner of a barn somewhere on a farm. Wiping away the frost, they realize the crate is a coffin with Cyrillic markings when a vampire leaps into the frame and claws their throats open, blood squirting from rubber tubing, death throes gurgling, unable to warn the others about the Strigoi slurping at the jugular fountain. A soldier enters the shot and strikes a threatening martial arts pose—
“Those were my men, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben, not your dinner!”
A light shower of Gold Medal flour shakes through the air from the rafters of a distressed farmhouse off Ventura Boulevard in Thousand Oaks. The hut floor is covered in so much flour if it rained they could make enough gruel to feed the entire Revolutionary Army at the real Valley Forge.
“Cut!” screams Thør Rosenthal. “Is that a burrito wrapper in the shot?”
The offending Baja Fresh wax paper is thrown away by a skinny PA wearing a Lucio Fulci’s Zombie T-shirt. An exasperated Thør turns to his cinematographer, who lights up a smoke: “We got it.”
(Below-the-line troopers, young, exhausted, devoted to their director, arrive on set with wheelbarrows of one-pound bricks of Gold Medal flour, shaking out “snow” all over the shed until the chain-smoking production designer is satisfied.)
“Moving on!” shouts the first AD. “Scene seventy-eight!”
Lips stained orange from stuffing his face with handfuls of Cheetos, Larry Mersault hangs out by the snack table, amazed at this ninety-nine-cent recreation of Valley Forge in Southern California.
“Craft service table is for the crew,” says Martha Washington, dressed in a Revolutionary War outfit.
Mersault: “Are they shooting your death scene next?”
“I don’t have a death scene. I’m the star,” says the saucy ingénue.
Mersault marvels at all the extras dressed in ragged colonial times gear; the FX guys applying claws and bald caps and white sclera contacts to transform Washington’s revolutionary soldiers into “feeders.”
“Quiet on the set!”
The FX mavens finish rigging the latex body suit with exposed ribcage and pulsating heart.
“Rolling!”
Thør Rosenthal notices Mersault lurking around the video village and slides the reader into his director’s chair to take in the feeding scene.
“Speed!”
The SAG-eligible actors take their places and bare their teeth, ready to tear the soldier apart.
Thør: “Ready, Martha?”
Martha: “What winks and fucks like a tiger?”
“Action!”
The soldiers at Valley Forge shred open the latex skin on the victim’s chest, howl at the top of their lungs, gnaw on the drippy flesh, and raise the fatty intestines between their hands. Thør encourages all of them to gorge more fervently, then he jabs a finger at “Martha,” her cue to enter the frame. Shadows of violence flicker over Martha’s expression of pure terror; on the video monitor, her mouth opens, but no sound comes out as she hides under a corpse and watches the creeps of Valley Forge slink away from the arrival of General George Washington flashing wooden teeth, revealing a pair of splintery fangs, giving a speech about the “dark winter.”
“Cut! We got it!” says Thør.
“Moving on!” yells the first AD.
On the video monitor, Martha Washington looks into the camera and winks.
BEACH NUTS
Screenplay by Esther Rofoli
Low rent suspenser suffers from too many nameless slasher victims, too many storylines with zero thrills. In more pro hands, maybe this erotica/shark movie could have been pulled off. The third season filming of a JERSEY SHORE-type reality show collides with a Hammerhead shark attack that closes their beloved beaches so the cast members go clubbing and tanning instead. One of the cast members, Josie, starts sexting with the psycho Petrizzi and they become fuck buddies, which thrills the beach nut, who knocks off the reality stars in the house, saving the cameraman as his last victim. Idiotic exposition is perfect for this riff on reality contestants, spooned with mouthfuls of Petrizzi ranting about the golden age of scripted television versus the banality of Bravo TV. The best moment no question is when a naked Josie realizes the guy she’s in bed with is the lunatic who murdered all her friends. Struggle in the sack ensues; Josie chases Petrizzi into the ocean; hungry Hammerhead ends his bloody reign. Dark script fails to exploit the shark-infested waters* for tension, and misses the real point of the script: on-line dating is scarier.
shark-infested waters
Boston, the limo driver for Omniscience/Ragnarök, extremely alert, checking for assassins, looks down the alley behind The Grill in Beverly Hills before giving the green light to Larry Mersault and Lester Barnes, who are ten minutes late for their lunch with the vice president of halitosis at Fox. Aware that every meal could be his last, Mersault sees his mentor remove the top of a magic marker before Boston goes first through the door at The Grill—
