Pitch and Toss ( or Another Good Reason to Shoot Hollywood Producers on Sight. )
After hearing about the upcoming Ninjas Vs. Pirates movie that’s in the works, Lung the Elder and I were seriously considering leaving our humdrum jobs and going to Hollywood to professionally pitch movie ideas. I mean looking at the piles of steaming crap that the studios have being spewing out lately, one has to ask oneself ‘how difficult can it be’? So here are a few of our accumulated brainchilds. (brainchildren?)
1. THE BLOOD VESSEL: A movie about a vampire let loose on a submarine: The Elder Lung’s idea. Pure genius. Huzzah for him.
2. WHITE FREEDOM: An American Kickboxer in Fallujah.
3. THE CRYSTAL PROM QUEEN: A movie about a meth addict in a trailer park starring Hilary Swank. Come on, it’s topical, she was born to play the part and it might swing her another Disability Oscar.
4. APOCOLYPSE COW: Chuck Norris tracks a sleeper cell of jihadi biochemists in Toronto who are cross breeding the avian bird flu virus with mad cow disease, creating a super-infected bovine which will destroy America’s food supply. They try to smuggle it over the border into New York; hijinks and high roundhouse kicks ensue. Think mountie jokes, hockey jokes, and jokes dissing the French Canadians. (LtE)
5. PARIS H., THE EARLY YEARS: TV mini-series. A heart-warming story on how a young heiress fought her way up from the jet-set yachts of St. Tropez to become an icon of loose-living trash and an inspiration to over-privileged hussies everywhere.
6. COME AND PARTY: A wacky comedy starring Ashton Kushner, Rob Schneider, Tom Green and Lindsay Lohan about an test tube full of genetically modified semen that gets mislaid at a frat party. Covers this genre’s full range of essential comic elements from facial mugs to pratfalls to bodily fluids.
7. BOBCAT: The road movie mentioned before.
8. ROLLERBELLE: Jessica Alba plays a gogo dancer from New Orleans who, after losing everything during Katrina and being shipped to Houston, decides to turn her life around and make a fresh start. Fate obliges by giving her a trial with the local All-Girls Roller Derby team. She is of course accepted and in the end, against all odds, captains her team to win the state championships and falls in love with the initially surly, young, handsome coach. A wonderful vehicle for Alba as it would combine Flashdance and Rollerball with Showgirls.
9. BEOWULF AND GRENDEL: Big production directed by Peter Jackson or Ridley Scott. Why? Well it’s obvious if you think about it. Times being what they are, right now most of the American public wants to be fed simplistic, moral tales about the battle between good and evil. CGI makes anything possible and a classical sounding title gives the movie a stamp of authenticity. Unfortunately there is a limit of classical tales with this theme and they’ ve nearly all been used up. The Iliad, War of the Worlds, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, the Arthurian Legends, all of which have already been given the CGI treatment. Beowulf is a vague, violent bit of folklore that’s ripe for butchering by the Hollywood screenwriting fraternity and Bruckheimer sycophants.
10. TETRIS, THE MOVIE: Directed by Uwe Boll and starring Freddie Prinze Jr. I'll say no more.
Remakes, sequels and regurgitations of old TV series:
11. I LOVE LUCY: It’ll be awful and surely flop but that’s never stopped studios in the past. And yet who'd get to be Lucille? Do you reckon Midler or Ulman would be desperate enough? Is Banderas sufficiently strapped for cash to play Desi Arnez?
12. V : Yes it was a pile of facile dross from the eighties but it’s a paranoid piece about battling with ugly aliens who eat cute bunnies and the Fox News viewers would pay top box-office dollar to go lap it up. They’re at war Goddamit. (see number 9)
13. GODZILLA VS. KING KONG: Nothing on Heaven or Earth can stop this remake from happening now. It’s just a question of time.
14. A remake of OPERATION PETTICOAT with pink submarine and all. Only this time the girls working in the sub will be Christina Aguilera, Shakira, Destiny’s Child etc. with George Clooney as captain. The film will take place in the Persian Gulf and the title will be changed to DAS BOOTY. (LtE)
15. THE CINCINNATI KID: Only this time the finale between the Kid and Lancey Howard will take place on Full Tilt Poker live television.
16. EASY RIDER 2 - GRUMPY OLD HIPPIES: Get Fonda and Hopper back together again whatever the price, and before it’s too late. Though of course we’d have to make some minor cosmetic changes to the original movie. Wyatt and Billy don’t actually get killed at the end of the first film and go on with their various lives. Wyatt stays true to the cause and works with the poor, whereas Billy becomes a shallow company exec. Now, Wyatt’s son is going to marry Billy’s daughter and the two old men have to cross America coast-to-coast to attend the wedding. Only this time they don’t do it on choppers but sharing Billy’s SUV. A zany, laugh-a-minute irony piece that somehow manages to stay true to the spirit of the original.
Other stuff could will probably get unnecessarily remade or resurrected for the cinema – The Six-Million Dollar Man (The currency factor in title will be adjusted for appreciation and interest) – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – The Waltons – The A-Team – Bonnie and Clyde – Day of the Triffids – The Odd Couple – The Streets of San Francisco – Hawaii five-o – One Million Years BC – Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - etc. The list goes on and on.
So there you have it, a multi-million dollar industry with writers who seem void of any original ideas and producers who are so terrified for their investment that they will only listen to the safety-net surveys of their marketing castrati. There’s got to be a heap o' money to be made here for an enterprising blogger with half a brain. So let’s have it – use the comments section to pitch us your most awful movie idea. But one that you reckon you could actually sell to one of those craven homunculi who run the Hollywood studios.
Our lines are open......
1. THE BLOOD VESSEL: A movie about a vampire let loose on a submarine: The Elder Lung’s idea. Pure genius. Huzzah for him.
2. WHITE FREEDOM: An American Kickboxer in Fallujah.
3. THE CRYSTAL PROM QUEEN: A movie about a meth addict in a trailer park starring Hilary Swank. Come on, it’s topical, she was born to play the part and it might swing her another Disability Oscar.
4. APOCOLYPSE COW: Chuck Norris tracks a sleeper cell of jihadi biochemists in Toronto who are cross breeding the avian bird flu virus with mad cow disease, creating a super-infected bovine which will destroy America’s food supply. They try to smuggle it over the border into New York; hijinks and high roundhouse kicks ensue. Think mountie jokes, hockey jokes, and jokes dissing the French Canadians. (LtE)
5. PARIS H., THE EARLY YEARS: TV mini-series. A heart-warming story on how a young heiress fought her way up from the jet-set yachts of St. Tropez to become an icon of loose-living trash and an inspiration to over-privileged hussies everywhere.
6. COME AND PARTY: A wacky comedy starring Ashton Kushner, Rob Schneider, Tom Green and Lindsay Lohan about an test tube full of genetically modified semen that gets mislaid at a frat party. Covers this genre’s full range of essential comic elements from facial mugs to pratfalls to bodily fluids.
7. BOBCAT: The road movie mentioned before.
8. ROLLERBELLE: Jessica Alba plays a gogo dancer from New Orleans who, after losing everything during Katrina and being shipped to Houston, decides to turn her life around and make a fresh start. Fate obliges by giving her a trial with the local All-Girls Roller Derby team. She is of course accepted and in the end, against all odds, captains her team to win the state championships and falls in love with the initially surly, young, handsome coach. A wonderful vehicle for Alba as it would combine Flashdance and Rollerball with Showgirls.
9. BEOWULF AND GRENDEL: Big production directed by Peter Jackson or Ridley Scott. Why? Well it’s obvious if you think about it. Times being what they are, right now most of the American public wants to be fed simplistic, moral tales about the battle between good and evil. CGI makes anything possible and a classical sounding title gives the movie a stamp of authenticity. Unfortunately there is a limit of classical tales with this theme and they’ ve nearly all been used up. The Iliad, War of the Worlds, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, the Arthurian Legends, all of which have already been given the CGI treatment. Beowulf is a vague, violent bit of folklore that’s ripe for butchering by the Hollywood screenwriting fraternity and Bruckheimer sycophants.
10. TETRIS, THE MOVIE: Directed by Uwe Boll and starring Freddie Prinze Jr. I'll say no more.
Remakes, sequels and regurgitations of old TV series:
11. I LOVE LUCY: It’ll be awful and surely flop but that’s never stopped studios in the past. And yet who'd get to be Lucille? Do you reckon Midler or Ulman would be desperate enough? Is Banderas sufficiently strapped for cash to play Desi Arnez?
12. V : Yes it was a pile of facile dross from the eighties but it’s a paranoid piece about battling with ugly aliens who eat cute bunnies and the Fox News viewers would pay top box-office dollar to go lap it up. They’re at war Goddamit. (see number 9)
13. GODZILLA VS. KING KONG: Nothing on Heaven or Earth can stop this remake from happening now. It’s just a question of time.
14. A remake of OPERATION PETTICOAT with pink submarine and all. Only this time the girls working in the sub will be Christina Aguilera, Shakira, Destiny’s Child etc. with George Clooney as captain. The film will take place in the Persian Gulf and the title will be changed to DAS BOOTY. (LtE)
15. THE CINCINNATI KID: Only this time the finale between the Kid and Lancey Howard will take place on Full Tilt Poker live television.
16. EASY RIDER 2 - GRUMPY OLD HIPPIES: Get Fonda and Hopper back together again whatever the price, and before it’s too late. Though of course we’d have to make some minor cosmetic changes to the original movie. Wyatt and Billy don’t actually get killed at the end of the first film and go on with their various lives. Wyatt stays true to the cause and works with the poor, whereas Billy becomes a shallow company exec. Now, Wyatt’s son is going to marry Billy’s daughter and the two old men have to cross America coast-to-coast to attend the wedding. Only this time they don’t do it on choppers but sharing Billy’s SUV. A zany, laugh-a-minute irony piece that somehow manages to stay true to the spirit of the original.
Other stuff could will probably get unnecessarily remade or resurrected for the cinema – The Six-Million Dollar Man (The currency factor in title will be adjusted for appreciation and interest) – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – The Waltons – The A-Team – Bonnie and Clyde – Day of the Triffids – The Odd Couple – The Streets of San Francisco – Hawaii five-o – One Million Years BC – Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - etc. The list goes on and on.
So there you have it, a multi-million dollar industry with writers who seem void of any original ideas and producers who are so terrified for their investment that they will only listen to the safety-net surveys of their marketing castrati. There’s got to be a heap o' money to be made here for an enterprising blogger with half a brain. So let’s have it – use the comments section to pitch us your most awful movie idea. But one that you reckon you could actually sell to one of those craven homunculi who run the Hollywood studios.
Our lines are open......
posted by Lung the Younger | 4:56 pm
10 Comments:
thats hilarious, particularly 1 and 4
You could try taking a Philip K Dick novel, all about identity and schizophrenia and what makes a person himself, and then casting Keanu Reeves as the hero.
Oh.
Rosemary's Baby: She is knocked up by the Devil as per the original, but in a life-affirming finale her husband, who has collaborated with the witches, repents his ways. Rosemary doesn't believe this until she accidentally sees his new sitcom on TV and laughs herself into a special-effects miscarriage. In a life-affirming epilogue, it turns out that the Devil's child has expanded her reproductive assets, which means that her previous infertility is a thing of the past. Meanwhile the witches are scowling and plotting the sequel...
Threads: Yes, there's a nookyulur hollycast; yes, lots of folks die. But (I'm thinking expansion into the 12-cert-and-minus certifiterritory here) here's the twist: one of the families has a dog, and the dog survives.
Dude, Beowulf is in production! I've been wanting to see that realized for decades. Err, um several years. [ahem]
No way! I had no idea. That's it, I'm packing my bags and going to camp outside Joel Silver's house until he gives me aa audience.
Eerm, that was me by the way.
Following Memoirs of a Geisha (a Hollywood treatment of a Chinese subject with Japanese actors), I'm looking forward to the Hollywood treatment of Monkey, directed by John Woo and featuring sundry Carradines for Kung Fu resonance and Madonna del Kabbalah as a semi-Scientological Judaeo-Catholic Tripitaka. Buddha, of course, will be played by Andy Serkis and some fancy electronics.
And, don't forget, next year it'll be three whole decades since the first Star Wars. Obviously, it will have to be re-made, longer, louder and considerably less intellectually demanding.
Re 13 - Maybe they will shock us and old King Kong will loose this time?
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