by Larry Doyle
It is with great sadness that I take out full-page ads today in the New York Times, USA Today, and Variety, though I weep not for myself alone but for the entire film community, for all of show business, and for the billions who depend on it for entertainment free of morality and the pieties of self-appointed spokesmen for God.
I am Demetri Pinot, a name a few of you may recognize from my music-video work, in particular Mandingus’s “(I Need a ‘Ho’ with a) Big Ho,” which won an MTV music award last year for Best Rap/Hip-Hop based on a Negro Spiritual. Some may also know me as the writer-director of this past Valentine’s Day weekend box office champ, Dead Girls Don’t Cry. But to many of you, I am simply the “hellbound pottymouth” behind christblood.
christblood is my attempt to come to terms with the divine mystery of the Resurrection, and most certainly not “a zombie picture with Jesus as an undead killing machine,” as Mr. William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, recently claimed on his program, Donohue & Donahue at the Movies. It is worth noting that Mr. Donohue based his review on an early test screening, before any of the effects were laid in, and yet chose to condemn christblood WITHOUT HAVING SEEN A SINGLE FOOT OF THE COMPLETED FILM. Had he viewed the final cut, with its 234 digital effects and Trent Reznor score, perhaps Mr. Donohue would have seen christblood for the devout piece of entertainment it is.
In christblood, the character Jesus returns from the dead with a vengeance, a mangod on a mission, using his divine superpowers to destroy the Roman soldiers who cast lots for his clothing—and that’s just the beginning. Donahue says this is sacrilegious. But how? This is more or less the legend set forth in the Book of Revelation; I have simply combined it with the Resurrection story line for greater dramatic impact. And let’s not forget, THE GOOD GUY WINS. (But not before facing off against the entire Roman Empire.) Donohue also found “stunningly blasphemous” the scene in which Jesus “squirts blood from his stigmata into Pontius Pilate’s face, apparently melting it.” Again, the final effect is more convincing, but more to the point: What I did was simply physicalize Jesus’s spiritual powers, transubstantiate them, if you will, into the kind of state-of-the-art pyrotechnics that today’s audiences can truly believe in. As for the “obscene” Mary Magdalene scene, Donohue neglected to mention that she has sex with the apostles, not Jesus, and when he comes upon their grief-driven orgy, he expresses his divine displeasure in no uncertain terms. And for what it’s worth, this scene no longer even appears in the domestic release, having only been included as an exigency of the foreign market.
I would like to say, “SEE THE MOVIE FOR YOURSELF AND DECIDE,” but of course that is now impossible. Donohue’s campaign against christblood has gone far beyond his unprofessional review and well into slander, harassment, and restraint of trade. As a result of his one-man anti-christblood crusade, the House of Representatives has attached a formal condemnation of my film to the current appropriations bill, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has banned it from being advertised on city buses, I have been excommunicated, and Bill Maher suddenly isn’t returning my calls. In response, my distributor has pulled christblood from its Christmas release schedule, and will only screen the film in Los Angeles and Manhattan in a one-week Oscar™-qualifying run.
The Inquisitional reign of terror has not ended there. The premiere of my film at last week’s Twin Cities Film Festival was ruined when the projectionist opened the film canisters only to find them filled with blood. I cannot prove this was the WORK OF RIGHT-WING RELIGIOUS ZEALOTS, but somebody must have done it, just as somebody bribed my female escort at that event to begin talking in the voice of my dead grandmother at a most inopportune time, pleading with me to destroy christblood and devote the rest of my life to prayer. Later the same night, this same somebody filled my hotel bedroom with thousands of frogs—frogs, lest there be any mistaking their origin, which had been professionally trained to croak in unison something vaguely approximating the word “repent.”
There can be only one response to this. All artists of conscience, and particularly voting members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, must make a show of solidarity against censorship. And what better way than to nominate christblood for the Academy Award in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director (Demetri Pinot), Best Screenplay Adapted from Another Medium (Demetri Pinot), and Best Supporting Actress (Sasha Grey as Mary Magdalene). These nominations would send a strong signal to DONOHUE AND HIS MINIONS and perhaps keep christblood in theaters through the symbolically important Easter weekend.
As artists, or those who consume the work of artists, you must be concerned about who or what Donohue will choose to unleash his holy wrath on next. Before you sit down to create or enjoy your next work of challenging art, think of me, lying here covered in black, gurgling sores unseen in the medical literature, and say to yourself, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Why We Strike
Many in showbiz don’t have a clear understanding of the writers’ demands or the reasoning behind these demands.
—Variety
OUR BELIEFS
We are artists. We may not dress all cool like artists, or get chicks like artists, and none of us are starving, quite obviously, but Hollywood screenwriters are certainly artists, perhaps even artistes. Okay, maybe we’re not cranking out endless Mona Lisas, but what about this Damien Hirst guy with his preschool spin paintings and cows suspended in barbecue sauce? If that’s art, then Ten Deadly Whispers, debuting exclusively on DVD this week, is art with a capital R (for strong sexuality and some graphic violence).
We suffer for our art. Not in a showy oh-I-live-in-a-tenement-and-turn-tricks-to-buy-paint-and-have-this-special-tuberculosis-only-artists-get kind of way. But we suffer just the same. We slave over our screenplays, alone, staring into blank laptops, often blinded by pool glare. And we smoke real cigarettes.
We struggle. We slave collectively over our teleplays, surrounded by fat people, crowded into ancient bungalows cluttered with free candy and soda. We go through all this only to have to listen with a wan smile as some Jeffrey tells us what’s wrong with it, letting his bathrobe fall open to reveal he has a carrot up his rectum.
We are not in this for the money. Management would have you believe that we all make $200,000 a year. That’s funny. We wouldn’t even eat something that cost $200,000, unless it was actually $200,000, drizzled with truffle oil, the way Silvio makes it. Yum. The exact amount we receive under this new contract is meaningless to us, as long as it’s more. The only reason why we require payment at all is to support those little people we keep telling you about: the assistants, amanuenses, baristas, Rolfers, scarf carriers, sycophants, and erotic muses we need to create our art. Oh, and our babies. And our various charities.
We are not cogs in some machine. While many of today’s blockbusters are written by that machine, we are not cogs in it, despite having originally written all of the dialogue and characters and plot that this machine endlessly recombines and maximizes. When a bitter cop with a shattered family and a monkey on his back flees a narco-terrorist’s fireball while cracking that he’s getting too old for this, some writer wrote some parts of that, some time back.
Nor are we trained chimps. The last decent show written by chimps was Jojo’s Poop Party, which was largely improvised.
OUR DEMANDS
An end to the lying. Just kidding. We recognize that, without lying, Management would be unable to exhale and thus perish. However, we are asking for a manifold increase in White Lies about how we are brilliant geniuses and the like, and a corresponding decrease in Brown Lies, about where our money is or what might happen in the future.
A fair share of newfangled revenue. Management is currently offering us bupkes of the monies they are making off Internet sellthrough, streaming, ringtones, webisodes, cellisodes, iPadiSodes, celebrity-narrated colonoscosodes, or the psychotic episodes they’ve been beaming into your brain, brought to you by Clozaril™. All we are asking is 2.5 percent of
revenue, based on 40 percent of gross receipts, divided by zero, in bullion. We believe this is a fair formula, yet complicated enough for Management to continue to find ways to exercise their screwing rights.
More respect. We are demanding unbounded respect bordering on worship, but that’s just our opening offer. We’ll accept far, far less, or even a good-faith reduction in spittle.
Meaningful consultation. While we acknowledge Management’s right to rape our material, pervert its meaning, and cravenly dilute it for commercial use, we demand to participate in this process. We would like to be on set, or contacted by iPhone if the director doesn’t want us there, and simply be asked, “Is this okay?” We stipulate that our opinion, coming, as it does, from the creator of the material being dramatized, is meaningless, and that Management can walk away or hang up before we even answer the question, but it would be nice, for once, to be asked.
A renunciation of droit du seigneur. As it stands, studio executives, from chairman down to associate producer, have the right to deflower us on our wedding night, or any other night or time of day of their choosing. We believe this can be written into our contract without affecting a similar agreement they have with the Screen Actors Guild.
Adequate parking validation. We know Management is deliberately understickering our tickets, and we want it to stop.
t.V.
An inmate climbs onto the roof of a county jail and refuses to get down until prison officials can name all the members of The Brady Bunch. When the officials are unable to name all the Bradys, the inmate surrenders anyway.
—Mysterious news item I read or heard sometime in January 1991 and then mysteriously forgot where
The Bradys, it is becoming increasingly clear, are a genuine touchstone for a whole generation… I do know a few things about them… I know that one of the Brady children’s name was Cindy…
—Mysteriously popular writer Bob Greene in his syndicated column, also from January 1991
“… basically we study and treat Tubal abuse and other video-related disorders.”
“A dryin’-out place for Tubefreeks? You mean… Hector…” And Zoyd remembered him humming that Flintstone theme to calm himself down, and all those “li’l’buddy”s, which as they both knew was what the Skipper always liked to call Gilligan, raising possibilities Zoyd didn’t want to think about.
Dr. Deeply shrugged eloquently. “One of the most intractable cases any of us has seen. He’s already in the literature. Known in our field as the Brady Buncher, after his deep although not exclusive attachment to that series.”
“Oh, yeah, that was ol’ Marcia, right, and then the middle one’s name was—” till Zoyd noticed the piercing look he was getting.
“Maybe,” said Dr. Deeply, “you should give us a call anyway.”
“I didt’n say I could remember all their names!” Zoyd yelled after him…
—Mysterious author Thomas Pynchon, in Vineland, published that February
chapter one
In which Zenith,
a metaphor,
gets out of
bed.
t.V.
ZENITH REMOTECONTROL, to be soon all things going as planned this pulsatile young morning the newly Dr.’d Zenith Remotecontrol, Doctor of the Tube, though not Tube Doctor, a real vocation, awoke in a state of static frenzy, her lips emitting a Tune—
All of them had hair of gold,
like their mother,
the youngest one in curls.
Rubbing the nightstuff from her eyes, lying aback, Zenith cocked a smile and went for the second verse:
Here’s a story
of a man named Brady,
Bringing up three young men of his own—
—and lost it. Zenith blinked, and in a swallow, sent a franchise-sized Big Gulp of twelve-molar hydrochloric acid gurgitating down, bypassing her stomach and pylorusing straight into her duoden da dum dum. Her panicreatic juices joined the fray, and Zenith, ascending, heaved herself into the bathroom. Pepto Beach!
At the kitchen nook, with the K-Tube all the way up in volume, brightness, contrast, and color, Zenith stirred heaping tablespoons of creamy pink Protective Coating Action into her coffee and tried to compose for herself. Start from the beginning, she thought. And it will come.
It came—
Here’s a story
of a lovely lady
bringing up three very lovely girls.
All of them had hair of gold,
like their mother,
the youngest one in curls.
Here’s a story
of a man named Brady
who was busy with three boys of his own.
They were four men,
living all together,
but they were all alone.
“Yes—” Zenith slamming her Flintstones chugamug down onto Alf, alien taking the form, just now, of a placemat. The rest spilled out like twoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepickles onionsonasesameseedbun: tilltheonedaywhenthisladymetthisfellaandtheyknewitwasmuchmorethanahunchthatthistroupe wouldsomehowformafamilythat’sthewaytheyallbecamethebrady bunch.
Yes! Cut to the chase! Beep! Beep!
chapter two
In which Zenith
getting into her
car, com-
mutes.
t.V.
ZENITH PILED into her Tweety Yellow ’72 Special Edition Volkswagen Love Bug, which she had on good authority had stuntdoubled Herbie Rides Again, but now bearing license plates reading my mother, modified with hood ornament in the form of the rabbit ears from a ’55 Philco, nonfunctional in the physical sense but which Zenith felt spiritually filled the machine with Ghosts of the Golden Age, her dissertation and a few TubeTapes to watch on the way.
Submerging onto the 101, Zenith grabbed a Tape at random and plugged it into the dashboard. A click and a whirr and the right half of her windshield, illegally custom silver-screened using a process currently a matter of trade litigation, glowed dead green then phosphoresced into projected phantasms, and then finally, after a few seconds, into good-old purple black-and-white. Zenith rapped her fingers at ten and two and sang along
Dah—
Da—
Da dada da dada
Da dada
Da dada
Da da dada dada dada da
Vwooop! Boom!
Dr. Zenith Remotecontrol. Oh, Rob! Zenith Remotecontrol, Tv.D. Shut up, Mel! The culmination of 42,600 hours of programming, with limited commercial breaks. Where can I buy a baldheaded voodoo doll? More than 352,000 violent acts depicted. Buddy! Yecch! Nearly 600,000 laffs, guffaws, chuckles, and snickers, all meticulously videologued. Walnuts! Not to mention the hours Little Zenith logged in front of the Tube, knowing even then that this was to be her life’s work.
Moe, Larry, the Cheese!
“What the—?” stabbing at the eject button. The Tape spat out of the console and Zenith zoomed in on it, careful to at all times keep one hand on the wheel. This was not her tape. Could not be. Not with Rob and Laura and Larry and Curly. And she doubted it could have come from the Institute. No self-respecting vacudemic would have mixed these vidoeuvres. Unless it was some kind of a sick Couchpotato joke.
The Tape bore none of the usual TubeTape markings—time, date, channel, the signs, and symbols of the profession. Only, scratched into the black plastic above the save tab, saved, two lowercase letters: tv.
There wasn’t much time to ponder what all this little might mean, because at that moment Zenith zigzagged across three lanes of traffic, wigwagging more responsible and less responsive motorists off the road and onto their Final Destination, and it was only through serendipity rather than perspicacity that Zenith looked up just then, into the jagtoothed face of the angry motorist cruising at seventy-five mph, about fifteen feet ahead and to her right, in an ’82 Black K car, the specific details being oh so clear because of the twelve-gauge he had aimed at her head. He chose for her some choice words preambly, giving Zenith the chance to duck b
efore her windshield enfenestrated into many thousands of rounded nuggets of glass, but what difference did that make? She was already going over the side anyway through the guardrail and tumbling end over end over end again with a half twist her and Herbie twirling off into the Twilight Zone.
chapter three
The Crying of the
Whole Sick
Brady
Crew
t.V.
THE F.J. MUGGS INSTITUTE for Video Studies, a public-private joint venture of the Japanese Ministry of Efficiency and the La-Z-Boy people, jutted from the Southern Californian hillside like a crystal mother lode, 6.2 acres of mirrored-blue polyhedron that evoked, perhaps not coincidentally, Galvantica, the geological nemesis of Godzilla in one of his lesser-known features. The highly reflective Institute shone like a citadel on a hill, particularly brightly between the hours of 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., when it tended to start brushfires. For this reason the Institute employed its own squad of firefighters, who scurried about the complex in hooded blue lamé jumpsuits, fooshing clouds of CO2 at anything that smoked, and who at this moment stood ready to extinguish the heaving, steaming car wreck that poly-rolled into the parking lot with Zenith, at the wheel, still marveling at the airworthiness of these German automobiles.
“Oh, rilly! I shall be too late,” Zenith declared, tumbling out of the Volk and grabbing up her entire academic career, with then a mad dash through the doors of the Institute, blood trickling down her left temple and her big hair festooned with beads of tinted glass.
By the time Zenith arrived, or rather landed, on the stage of the Institute’s 950-seat $24 million Viditorium, there sitting in the front row already and bored, idly flipping through the Soaps on the Big Screen, was a jury of her peers.
• Victor La Mastersvoice, Acting Director of the Institute, who had made his reputation in the late ’70s by delineating the Gilligan Paradox, positing that the reason the castaways did not simply kill the eponymous Gilligan was because even though the hapless sailor constantly bungled their attempts to escape the island, his survival was a sufficient and necessary condition for the continued existence of said isle, and thus their own continued survival.