Cleaning out my closet, found this from the late 1990s. I’ll just leave it here, cause, you know, this blog is a wellspring of all the thoughts oozing from my head.
FALL OUT In Washington D.C., a young black female corporate-ladder climber hears about the “next crack” – “fall out” – and kills the old scientist responsible for it, making it look like his young assistant did it. The climber and her Latino helper, both of whose families were decimated by crack, force the assistant to burn every trace of the drug, but he manages to save a small dose, and when she finds out he has it, he swallows it (in a Ziploc). He escapes from them, finds sanctuary with his girlfriend, and tells the police about the destroyed lab. Then the killers catch up with them again, and the four of them drive around D.C., evading the law, kvetching about life, love, society, drugs, and rights, while waiting for him to defecate the goods.
THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS Love story in purgatory. Young adult Asian male and young adult Latina, both fatalistic, meet while renting their bodies to science; they pursue a relationship based on death-defying fun and occasional altruism. After some deep conversations, their love means so much to her that she wants them to stop with the risk taking. That only ekes him on, and eventually he jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge and dies. After a year of trying to get by without him, she jumps off the same bridge herself, and is picked up by an angel – him. After a difficult transition, she realizes that she really is dead, and apparently in purgatory with him. She has so many questions, and people she wants to meet, but he shoos all that away and they hang out as ghosts in San Francisco for a while. But physical contact with anyone is impossible, maintaining concentration is difficult, and she learns that he was unfaithful to her. He tries to be possessive; she leaves him and talks to other lost souls for big answers.
SLICE OF LIFE A wealthy investment banker, accustomed to bedding women half his own age, decides he wants his daughter’s best friend – partly as spite against his holier-than-thou daughter. When she won’t comply, he rapes her. His daughter learns of it and wants to kill him. Her friend, the victim, simply want to make sure the banker can never do it again. They both know his lawyers will beat any “he said/she said” rap. The two young women cut off his penis (!). They give it to a third friend and hold it ransom until he signs a confession detailing what he did to the victim. He has a few hours at best to have any chance at reattachment. He finally admits it, but then the daughter demands he admit all the rapes he’s done – at least where they can find the victims. The daughter knows of two, and they race through New York looking for them. Further complicating things: the president of Kazakhstan is in New York, ready to announce to the United Nations a new era of cooperation – if he meets with the banker and gets everything he wants. And there are Kazakh loyalists who seek to derail the deal – violently.
***NOTE: I realize now why this script can never work – the opening is just too violent for some kind of feminist romp. I wonder, though, if it was told in flashback…?
PUNKY’S DILEMMA The parents of a female high school senior have contractually agreed to divorce after the senior graduates. Upon learning of this, she makes sure that she doesn’t graduate. It’s a romantic comedy where the daughter is more committed to the romance of the parents than the parents – somewhat like Back to the Future without the time travel. Our lead manages to talk her best friend into seducing her father, and then dumping him, trying to convince him to stay with his wife. Family politics and kinks.
FUTURE PERIL (or “Plant Boy”) We’re 80 years into the future, and the world is running out of breathable air, and wealthy biotech firms are engineering bigger O₂-producing plants. One such firm employs a young idealist scientist; she meets an older mentor who is developing a backdoor solution. She has developed a serum that, in trials with rabbits, makes the rabbits breathe like plants (inhaling CO₂, exhaling O₂). The old lady takes her to her private lab to show her the serum. However, the now-totalitarian government has gotten wind of her serum, and they charge the lab. The old lady burns it down rather than let them have it; the old lady dies; the government agents do not see our young scientist escape with one remaining syringe of serum. Our scientist develops it some more and eventually tries it on herself. It doesn’t convert her to plant-breathing, but it seems to have that effect on…her fetus! She learns she’s pregnant – by her boss, from a mistaken one-night stand. The agents learn of it but decide to leave her until she has the baby – and then take it. Our heroine also has a young male sidekick/mentee. She brings the baby to term and that’s when the fur really starts flying. She and her sidekick must fend off her boss and his cronies as well as the web of government agents – even as one has become emotionally attached to her. Their only hope is the global underground.
FALLEN STAR An alien’s ship is out of gas and he/it must land on Earth, so he morphs into the person his computers identify as Earth’s most popular citizen: Michael Jordan. He even has Jordan’s memories. He sleeps around quite a bit, attracting more than a few tabloids; eventually, inevitably, the real Jordan challenges him to – what else? – a one-on-one basketball game. But the alien can morph, and morphs very slightly during the match, to win. He moves in on Jordan’s wife, and life, while the real Jordan wanders like Clark Kent in Superman II. Finally, Dennis Rodman approaches the real Jordan and tells him that this guy is from his home planet, and how to beat him. The rematch ensues. NOTE: Needs Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman
THE COLUMBUS SYNDROME An alien ship is arriving in New York, and the world’s leaders gather at the United Nations to face it head-on. The aliens arrive, explain that they simply want to extract the planet’s mercury and then they’ll leave. The aliens look just like us, but are albino-white. The aliens have vastly superior technology, including machines to extract the mercury, vaporizing rays, and something that makes them near-bulletproof; they have Pegasus-like beasts of burden, new foods, and new diseases. Like Columbus, they grant various gizmos to government leaders in exchange for relative subservience. In little more than a day, they set up their extraction machines all over the world. In some kind of Grand Chariot, the alien’s leader asks eight leaders to tour the world with her/it; after some dispute, she travels with the leaders of the U.S., Russia, China, India, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, and the E.U. On their world tour, it becomes clear that some aliens have no intention of leaving, and tensions begin to stir, echoing events in North America from five centuries before…
BEAT THE DICKENS Christmas Carol format, but our Scrooge is an anti-intellectual high-school African-American, and the ghosts of Past, Present and Future are his History, Math and Science teachers. After establishing how bored our hero is in all of his classes, we go to the local b-ball court, where much to his surprise, his English teacher shows up. Eventually, after some fouling, the kid gets tagged in the head by a randomly bouncing ball. He falls and has a long “dream” where the “ghosts” appear in each of the three worlds and explain why they’re so important. There should be ample special effects to accentuate everything; the past should “come alive” to show history, the court’s angles should be used to show math (and stretch to the wider world in more ways than one); the future should look dark without more application of science.