More On That Heartbreaking Pitch Rejection

I just spent an educational moment watching CNN, which is going on about this whole Democratic nomination business, with this handsome chap Barack Obama winning a chance to go up against the unstoppable Firefly/Pilager team that I seem to have been alone in pimping on the blogosphere. Why can no one see their brilliance? Their vision? Their anarchic free spirit? It baffles me. Just after watching the Democratic nominee make an entire room lose its shit just by turning up, Rufus T. Firefly was busy reacting to Obama's win with a song, penned by his ace speechwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby:

These are the laws of my administration
No one's allowed to smoke
Or tell a dirty joke
And whistling is forbidden...
If chewing gum is chewed
The chewer is pursued.
And in the hoosegow hidden...
If any form of pleasure is exhibited
Report to me and it will be prohibited.
I'll put my foot down, so shall it be.
This is the land of the free.
The last man nearly ruined this place
He didn't know what to do with it
If you think this country's bad off now
Just wait 'til I get through with it
The country's taxes must be fixed
And I know what to do with it
If you think you're paying too much now
Just wait 'til I get through with it...

After Firefly and his mumbling and incomprehensible enigmatic running mate Dickie Pilager had left the stage, they showed footage of Hillary Clinton. She was backed up against a wall, her flashing blade repelling wave after wave of pirate attack. Or I sat on the remote and ended up rewatching Captain Blood on Sky Movies Classics. I have this weird thing where Hillary Clinton and Errol Flynn look the same. It's like colour blindness or something.

Anyway, while watching that blade endlessly whirring through the air, I realised I only told half the story of my pitch rejection. I can't leave out the next chapter, even though I again come out the loser. A year or so after being thrown out of Viewlane Pictures with my first draft sitting unread in a large cardboard box that I was having trouble carrying, I got another idea about the deadly Divider and his zombie politician brother. Still determined to get this twosome team-up of terrifying treachery and torture onscreen, I called Trip Dorfner III and Zack Wackman with a new proposal. Heeding their advice that having a horror movie in which the hero of the tale fends off a deadly attacker for ten or eleven hours might scupper its box office hopes, I realised that they were onto something, and that the movie needed a proper ending instead of the freeform open ending I had envisioned (with Laurie and The Divider battling against each other in the post-apocalyptic 24th century). Zack and Trip were glad to hear it, and thought there was room for renegotiation.

Heartened by their interest, I told them all about the final act. After a few hours of evisceration and explosions, Laurie finally stops and screams at her nemeses, "Why won't you stop? Please God, why won't you stop?!!?" Finally, putting down his razor-sharp copy of The Great Gatsby, from under the blood-soaked Groucho Marx mustache The Divider speaks, his voice shrill and annoying. "We just want to hang out with you! Stop trying to kill us, and we can just go get some ribs. That's all. It's not just a pretext to kill you later. We really will stop if we can just be BFFs." And then he gives out a terrifying cackle.

Trip's response was a bit more visceral this time. What would happen, he said, if Freddy Krueger just wanted to team up with Nancy Thompson, and they danced gaily through other people's dreams eating ice cream and playing hopskotch? What if Sally Hardesty formed a cheerleading team with Leatherface? Or Laurie Strode turned out to be related to Michael Myers? Did I really think people would forget the previous carnage? No one would buy that the Laurie in my movie could be friends with someone (or something) that had spent so long trying to destroy her. That's not an ending either. How long until The Divider stabs our hero in the back? Or The Immortal Politician? That kind of ending is just as open and unsatisfying as the other one.

Then he called me a limey jerkoff scumbag asshole motherfucker and told me to never call him ever again, and to go fuck myself for trying to ruin the horror genre. Hah! I had the last laugh then. Viewlane Pictures went on to make the costly horror/historical epic Alexander The Great Zombie, the much-derided Cannibal Holiday, the G-rated horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer And I'm Going To Tell Your Mom, and the vampire-laden remake of Manhattan, starring Woody Allen, Lance Henriksen, Norman Mailer, Liv Ullman, Gunnar Hansen, and Mia Farrow as the horrifying vampire Brood Mother, with a guest appearance by Scarlett Johansson as Woody's underage lover (a casting choice included in Woody's contract, apparently). Their company shut down three years ago, and Zack and Trip ended up in jail over unpaid parking tickets and money owed to Kensington Gore manufacturers. Somewhere in the background, inside a shadow taking up half of the screen, a sickening laugh rises up. The Divider shall never die!!!