Romancing the Ruins, a Film Treatment

by Jon Foyt

jetramp at Reagan National, Worthington is confronted by Barbara Waters and her cameraman from The All-Gossip TV Network. Worthington sees Sara waiting, but the reporter and cameraman stand in his way of getting to her. Waters batters him with question after question about Charlene’s sexual harassment lawsuit. Annoyed, Worthington tries to elbow his way through Waters and the cameraman. The cameraman loses his grip on the camera, and it crashes to the floor, exploding bomb-like, petrifying everyone including Sara, who rebuffs him with, “Don’t come near me! I never want to see you again.”

  Scene Twenty-Nine:

  The next morning, in Zoe’s pre-arranged meeting, a joyless Worthington joins C. C. Trinket and Charlene for coffee at their fitness club in the Watergate Complex. Both women are wearing exercise leotards.

  C. C. relates a tale of how Charlene was duped into filing the bogus sexual harassment lawsuit by a woman named Angela, who persuaded her that not only would she be getting a lot of money, but more importantly she would be doing the right thing for all of sisterhood by focusing attention on the sexual abuses of Washington’s powerful men.

  A crying Charlene jumps up and throws her arms around Worthington, telling him how sorry she is for causing him all this trouble and saying she will withdraw the charges.

  With the shapely Charlene clinging to Worthington, a flash camera goes off. Blinded by the light, Worthington tips over his ice cream chair and, as he grabs one of the legs and lifts the chair up, both women scream out for him not to attack the cameraman.

  Gently he sets the chair down, dumbfounded they would think he was going ballistic.

  Scene Thirty:

  Returning to his cross-country tour, a dejected Worthington slouches in his first-class seat on board a 747.

  Flashback to Sara looking at the photograph on the front page of The Washington Post of Charlene in leotards embracing him. She immediately threw him out of the house.

  Flashback to Worthington re-living his Marian-Anderson-like performance at his summer solstice singing engagement in front of the Lincoln Memorial, as arranged by Edward. He sees Silver-Bell-in-the-Night lead her disruptive demonstration protesting The Windjammer. The hecklers were the only part the media covered. End flashbacks.

  On the in-flight telephone, Worthington calls Henry DeCamp, hoping for words of encouragement, and asks the media mogul whatever became of the truth. A sarcastic Henry tells him to look under “T” in Obsolete Words in the back of Webster’s new dictionary.

  It is a downcast Worthington who exists the jetramp in St. Louis.

  Scene Thirty-One:

  On summer solstice eve, in search of solitude, Anna climbs the nearby mesa where she unrolls her sleeping bag. In the clear night sky illuminated by the now-rising full orange moon, we see the dark red spires of Monument Valley off to the west and the snow-capped Colorado Rockies to the northeast. A shooting star darts across the night sky, and distant coyotes howl.

  In the middle of the night Anna awakens to a surreal scene of half-dream, half-reality. A circle of Anasazi elders surround her, pointing—not to the ruins she is excavating—but to, now, a vibrating, pulsating 12th-century pueblo populated with prehistoric people, prehistoric sounds and, in the plaza, prehistoric dancers enacting a fertility ritual.

  The elders lead her into the torchlighted plaza where she is engulfed by virile Anasazi male dancers, their bodies colored with ochre, their legs rattling animal bones as they dance to the hypnotic chants of the singers and the throbbing beats of their drums. One dancer, the tall blue-eyed one, comes forward to copulate with her as the others whip up the frenzy of the dance.

  Scene Thirty-Two:

  In the morning Anna awakens to see, in fast-forward photography, frame after frame of the eons of time passing in view. Beginning with the formation of the earth and flashing through the period of dinosaurs, the ice age, to early prehistory man arriving from across the Siberian land bridge, the centuries pass. She watches the Anasazi build their magnificent stone cities, sees them abandon their pueblos en masse in 1285 A.D., and is brought up short to the morning at hand.

  A doe appears. The deer and Anna exchange knowing female glances, and Anna knows—for certain—that she is pregnant with the spirit of the Anasazi. As ethereal mother, her role is to give life to their tenets of truth, love and family. Preservation of the Anasazi heritage now becomes of paramount importance.

  Descending the trail, she encounters a gnarled and sun-bleached centuries-old juniper tree. It whispers to her to create an Anasazi wheel. Anna realizes she must forsake the truth in order for truth to prevail.

  She returns to her seminarists, enlisting them in the conspiracy and swearing each of them to secrecy. She rationalizes to them that since less than one percent of Anasazi settlements have been excavated, it is reasonable that some archaeologist, someday, will find a wheel. After all, her ancient people constructed miles of wide roads leading to and from Chaco Canyon, so surely they must have had the wheel.

  Consequently, she tells them, the government will not permit bulldozers to destroy these sites because they will have proved that valuable artifacts remain buried, yet to be unearthed, providing enlightenment on the mysteries of these ancient Native Americans. World wide, environmentalists, archaeologists and the public will champion her cause, and Congress will back off construction of The Windjammer.

  She shows George how, using stone tools, he can smooth the edges and grind a hole through the middle of the round, flat rock they found in the bottom of the kiva that served as a base for one of the poles supporting the roof. She instructs Dusty to retrieve a juniper viga from one of the house blocks and to shape it into an axle. She tells them she’s going to bash in the skull that Alex found.

  Anna looks around for Alex, and George explains that Alex and Daisy have run off and eloped.

  Anna says she will telephone Brenda Turner, authorizing her to break the news to the world of their startling discovery.

  Scene Thirty-Three:

  Sitting on the edge of the excavated kiva in Noah’s Ark, an excited Brenda Turner composes her news story about Anna’s archaeological find of the century. After a lot of kibitzing over word usage by the seminarists, Brenda finishes her story and transmits it over Dusty’s cell phone to Henry DeCamp’s media headquarters in Washington for worldwide dissemination.

  Series of shots: We see various television anchors broadcasting the breaking news in several different languages. Newspaper headlines flash across the screen. And we observe the individual reactions of our players: Quentin Ford IV praises Anna to Stuart Wales, saying she is quite a woman and that her find will do a lot more for their cause of preservation than Stuart’s assassins.

  Silver-Bell-in-the-Night plunks the front page of The Washington Post down on top of Congressman Roybal’s desk, covering his crayons, and tells him he must change his mind and oppose The Windjammer.

  On the beach at Waikiki, honeymooning Alex and Daisy comment disappointingly that they left too soon.

  A furious Henry DeCamp telephones Brenda and informs her she is fired for having run the story. Brenda replies that, under the terms of Henry’s purchase agreement, if he fires her she can re-purchase her newspaper at one-fourth the price.

  Scene Thirty-Four:

  Undaunted, Worthington continues westward on his cross-country promotional tour. In the 1890’s depot in Antonito, Colorado, he talks to a handful of train buffs, comparing the Cumbres and Toltec Narrow Gauge Railroad they have just ridden at five miles an hour to the three hundred mile an hour-plus maglev speed of The Windjammer.

  Again his presentation is interrupted by Johnny Redgrave of The All-Gossip TV Network. Surveyor Clarence Short comes to Worthington’s rescue by verbally bashing Redgrave, then grabs Worthington and, accompanied by his dog Willie, they dash out the “Baggage Room” door to Clarence’s Range Rover. They speed off down a dirt road in a cloud of dust, followed in hot pursuit by Redgrave and his camera crew.

  Clarence passes his flask to Worthington and tell
s him all work and no play makes Worthington a dull boy. Assuring him they’ve lost the media meddlers, he churns gravel into the parking lot of Klub Kokopelli in Chama. It is a strip joint, and the by-now intoxicated Worthington climbs on stage and, arm in arm with two dancers in high heels and engineer caps, conducts a sing-along.

  Clarence introduces Worthington as the head man of The Windjammer—the new train that’ll provide jobs for everyone. Emiliano and his combo strike up Happy Days Are Here Again. Cowboy hats fly in the air along with cheers. Someone shouts, “We don’t give a damn about some stupid wheel.”

  Redgrave comes rushing in and, seeing Worthington cavorting with the two showgirls, has his cameraman shoot frame after frame.

  Clarence pulls Worthington off the stage and out the back door. Together they speed off to Clarence’s converted Denver & Rio Grande RR boxcar home.

  Inside the unkempt boxcar, Clarence fixes two boilermakers, and the two men become even more intoxicated as Willie hides under an old cot. “Where’s this freight of yours headed?” Worthington asks as the old boxcar seems to be swaying from side to side.

  Clarence proclaims that Worthington needs a good piece of ass, not one of those dance hall girls, but one “who’ll treat ya right.” Without identifying Anna, Clarence tells him about this broad he’s seen out