by Leyner, Mark
“Oh, by the way, I searched the patch files,” says the superintendent, “and we have a bronchitis wheeze sample.”
“Bronchitis … that sounds cool,” I say. “Just make sure the tempo is right—very, very slow, larghissimo, funereal. Like ‘I feel shitty / wheeze … wheeze / oh so shitty / wheeze … wheeze …’ ”
“Gotcha,” he says, extending his hand. “Mark, take it easy and good luck on the screenplay.”
“Thank you very much.”
We shake and he exits.
Ditto the operations officer.
“All the luck in the world on that screenplay.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
The doctor.
“I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you on that Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America thing.”
“Thanks so much.”
And the executioner: “How much was that—$200,000 a year? Madonna! Whack that script out of the ballpark, chief.”
“I’m gonna try. Thanks a lot. And thanks for everything today.”
And then the rabbi.
He gestures elaborately at the mythical multiplex marquee in the sky. “Eventually, Even Mighty Mouse Is Vivisected by the Dour Bitch in a White Lab Coat,” he says, flashing a pair of avid thumbs-up.
“Thank you. Vaya con Dios, Rabbi.”
Now only the warden, the warden’s male secretary, the stenographer, and I remain in the office.
“Absolutely no calls and shut the door on your way out, please,” says the warden.
For a second I assume she’s talking to me.
“Absolutely no calls,” parrots the secretary, winking at me as he closes the door behind him.
When I turn and look back at the warden, she’s perched atop her desk, smirking cryptically, one eyebrow arched high, little diamond chips like crushed ice gleaming across the straps of her stilettos. And she’s got my two little notes in her hand: “You wanna get high?” and “Be my sweaty bosomy lover?” And she’s waving them in the air like a pair of theater tickets. Like front-row orchestra, opening night, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound at the Greater Dionysia in Athens in friggin’ 468 A.D. I mean, like a pair of real hot ducats.
Gulp.
Boing.
Three quick procedural items before we move on to substantive issues—namely, my impending drug- and alcohol-addled liaison with the warden. (What symmetry, right—the exile of my father and my initiation into manhood!)
First, to paraphrase Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, during the minute that it takes you to read this sentence, “thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites … It must be so. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.” Now if you take another minute and reread that sentence, even more animals will be eaten alive and devoured by parasites. In fact, it’s almost as if reading that particular sentence actually causes the animals to be eaten alive and devoured by parasites. Is this possible? Well, yes, according to CERN physicist John Stewart Bell’s theorem of nonlocal interaction. Anyway, my point is—doesn’t it all make what we’re doing right now seem pretty ludicrous? I mean, there’s all that predation and whimpering and devouring going on out there, and you and I are just sitting here, writing and reading. It’s not the writing per se that bothers me, it’s the venue, the sedentarinous, the insularity. If only there were a more public, a more athletic, more agonistic way of doing it. What do you think I’d rather be doing right now: sitting in this book-lined atelier, stroking my chin, lost in this solitary reverie or striding into a domed stadium with a bag full of laptops, wearing a shirt emblazoned with logos—Apple, Microsoft Word, Xerox, Roget’s Thesaurus, Chivas Regal, Marlboro, Zoloft—and going head-to-head against the world’s top-ranked professional prose stylists, as 75,000 raucous, beer-swilling fans cheer our sentences as they instantly appear on the huge Diamond Vision screens?
So why do I do it then? Why do I sit here like this?
Because if writing this book—which, according to several people who are knowledgeable about literature, is the first tetherball novel ever—can help just one other kid who’s gone through a similar experience, i.e., having a dad who survived an attempted execution by lethal injection and is resentenced to NJSDE, and losing your virginity to a 36-year-old warden, then it will all have been worth it.
Second, some of you may find the following depiction of my sexual encounter with the warden to be too explicit or even pornographic. Before reading this section, click the Scramble icon if any of the following activities or anatomical areas are objectionable to you: (1) human genitals in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal; (2) actual or simulated acts of human masturbation, sexual intercourse, or sodomy; (3) fondling or other erotic touching of human genitals, pubic region, buttock, anus, or female breast; (4) less than completely and opaquely concealed (a) human genitals, pubic region, (b) human buttock, anus, or (c) female breast below a point immediately above the top of the areola; or (5) human male genitals in a discernibly turgid state, even if completely and opaquely concealed. By clicking the Scramble icon, your mind will supplant any of the above depictions with images of Buddhist monks paginating toilet tissue. This exclusive bowdlerizing feature is available only in The Tetherballs of Bougainville. And remember, at any point you can reread the Dawkins sentence and kill more animals. Whatever you want. It’s way interactive.
And finally, as you’ll soon see, in the midst of the tryst, I peek at my Tag Heuer and realize there’s no way I’m going to get to the Maplewood Public Library before it closes and that I’ll probably not be able to come up with a screenplay in order to win the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award. Did I ever really expect to ensconce myself in a library carrel and produce an original screenplay in one afternoon? Actually, no. I’d always anticipated making a cursory attempt at researching “story ideas,” looking for books to “adapt,” like, y’know, Spin’s Alternative Record Guide: The Movie, and then, quickly tiring of that endeavor, simply plagiarizing an existing screenplay—something prestigious like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert or Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise. Sure, in a halfhearted attempt at “originality,” I’d have tried to make some cosmetic alteration, like changing the young Parisian Maoists in La Chinoise to followers of Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or to fanatical devotees of leveraged-buyout titan Henry Kravis or maybe fanatical devotees of Amy Tan or Rabbi Schneerson or Ukrainian figure skater Oksana Baiul or whatever, and then finding even this an intellectual conundrum beyond my patience and attention span, just copying Godard’s screenplay word for word, and then, after two pages, annoyed by the prospect of having to retype the whole script, finally just photocopying it and then doing a fast cut-and-paste job on the title page so it read La Chinoise by Mark Leyner, because I figured with the clout of an ICM agent, I’d still be able to win the award.
But I realize, given the time, that it’s going to be impossible to do even that—you’ll be reading all this in a couple of pages—and the warden, grabbing a handful of hair and lifting my head from her crotch, says, “I’ve got an idea, why don’t you make a screenplay out of this?”
And I look at her, or try to look at her, try to focus, squinting through this gooey scrim of secretions that covers my eyes. And I’m like: “This?”
And she says, “Yeah, this,” indicating, with a panoramic gesture, the whole drug- and alcohol-addled liaison we’re presently engaged in. And she says, “Do a screenplay that appears to be a faux autobiographical documentary, but that’s actually—here’s the irony—completely factual. Faux irony.”
My head is spinning. I’d gone from never having even seen a real live vagina one minute to being literally imme
rsed in one the next, which is like having gone from wiggling your toes in a little backyard kiddie pool to scuba diving in the Marianas Trench without any intervening training, and on top of it all, now I’m trying to figure out “faux irony,” which apparently is like multiplying negative numbers, which—I think—we did in Mr. Hawes’s math class. But then a little lightbulb goes on.
“It’s like plagiarizing life, sort of. Right?” I ask. “It’s, like, no work.”
“Basically,” she concurs. “As soon as you get home from here, just write down everything that happened and just put it in screenplay form. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt if you started thinking in terms of camera angles from here on,” she says, pushing my head back down.
Not only do I find transposing my experiences into camera angles simultaneous to actually having those experiences to be an extraordinarily soothing exercise in self-consciousness, but I realize that it’s a correlative to that near-death state during which your spirit hovers over your body and observes the frenzied efforts at resuscitation with this sort of dégagé bemusement, all of which further corroborates my theory of the afterlife that I first proposed in Ms. Kazanjian’s Comparative Thanotology and Eschatology class. As a final project, I built this papier-mâché diorama—well, my friend Felipe actually constructed it; it was my idea, but I seem to have this problem with deadlines—we built this papier-mâché diorama basically illustrating that in our mortal, corporeal existence we’re all sort of like actors and actresses—marionettes endowed with rudimentary attributes like sycophancy and sanctimony, but lacking the capacity for generative thought. But then at the moment we die—unless, of course, we’ve been grossly iniquitous, in which case we plummet on this gondola flume-ride, as Billy Idol sings Venetian boat songs, to some infernal grotto where we become infomercial studio audience members, rapturously applauding nose-hair clippers and sonic plaque removers for eternity—but otherwise we become screenwriters, which is why your life flashes before your eyes in the form of a storyboard. At some point thereafter, you begin your ascension of the empyreal hierarchy—you direct, you produce, you head a studio, you achieve moguldom, and ultimately you implode and, depending on how dense you are, you become either a white dwarf or a black hole. And Ms. Kazanjian said—and she said it in front of the whole class—that of all the seventh-grade final projects linking postmortem ontogeny, Entertainment Weekly, and stellar evolution, mine was one of the best she’d ever seen.
So on the way home from the prison, I stop at Nobody Beats The Wiz and buy this screenplay-formatting software program called SkriptMentor. All in all, I’d recommend SkriptMentor to aspiring screenwriters. In addition to formatting features like slug lines, scene numbers, dialogue breaks, etc., SkriptMentor also offers “idea generator and story guidance” options that include over 50,000 plot and subplot possibilities, 20,000 character combinations, and some 5,000 conflict situations. But I do have some serious reservations. I find several of the tutorial features rather intrusive and cumbersome.
For instance, whenever there’s a sex scene in your script, a dialog box is displayed on-screen reading: Penis size? You’re given several standard options: Harvey Keitel, Jeff Stryker, and Porfirio Rubirosa. There’s a 5-inch default setting. You’re also able to customize the penis size of your characters in much the same way as you adjust tabs and margins in word-processing programs, by manually dragging a size box. Some users may appreciate features that enable you to cut and paste penises from one character to another, or the Find and Replace command that allows you to change penis sizes throughout your script with a single keystroke, but I find it annoying that every time I have a male character engage in or even discuss sex, this penis-size dialogue box plops into the middle of my screen and I have to scroll through the entire Tool Palette just to choose the default setting and continue with my scene.
I find the Ass Menu equally aggravating. With the introduction of every new male character, however subsidiary, a dialogue box is displayed reading Ass? and offering a menu with several options: Hirsute, Hairless, Dimpled, Smooth, Blemished, etc. Clicking any of these options opens a submenu. For instance, there are six levels of Hirsute, from Blonde Down to Coarse Simian. Within Blemished, you can choose Birthmarks, Moles, Keloid Scars, Needle Tracks, Pimples, Folliculitis, Boils, and then you can customize buttock-boil placement with a click, drag-and-drop feature, etc. Again, although some of you may find these features creatively stimulating, I think it would behoove the makers of SkriptMentor to allow users to more easily circumvent these options. Having to scroll through an Ass Menu whenever a FedEx deliveryman appears at the door can really bog you down, and that’s the last thing you need, especially when you have this looming deadline.
And perhaps most distracting of all is that every two pages or five minutes, a dialog box appears on-screen reading: Requisite Springsteen Dirge?
You click No.
Five minutes later: Requisite Springsteen Dirge? Again you click No.
Five minutes later: Requisite Springsteen Dirge?
No!
It’s really irritating. Perhaps this is a valuable feature for those aspiring screenwriters who may have written a script and inadvertently omitted the requisite Springsteen dirge, but at least they could provide some sort of bypass option. Wouldn’t it be better, when you initially set the format parameters of your screenplay, if you could just choose No Springsteen Dirge, double-click, and move on?
PART TWO
THE VIVISECTION
OF MIGHTY MOUSE JR.
A SCREENPLAY
by Mark Leyner
(7th Grade, Maplewood Junior High School)
Submitted in competition for
the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers
America Award
FADE IN:
EXT. SPACE, 520 MILES ABOVE EARTH’S SURFACE
We HEAR faint CH-CH-CH.
KH-12 PHOTORECONNAISSANCE SPACECRAFT’S POV
SLOWLY ZOOM in from KH-12 satellite (at 98-degree sunsynchronous inclination) to prison
Earth. Western Hemisphere. North America. United States. East Coast. New Jersey. Princeton. New Jersey State Penitentiary.
As CAMERA ZOOMS in from space, CH-CH-CH becomes LOUDER and LOUDER.
EXT. NEW JERSEY STATE PENITENTIARY IN PRINCETON
A SERIES OF ANGLES
Concertina Wire. Guard towers. Exercise yards. Etc.
GAZEBO (originally used in The Sound of Music) that Michael Jackson presented to then-governor Christine Todd Whitman for use in state’s maximum-security institutions for conjugal visits and punitive solitary confinement.
CH-CH-CH is now literally deafening.
(The loudest sounds that can be tolerated by the human ear are about 120 dB. For CH-CH-CH at GAZEBO SHOT, use Dolby Spectral Recording at 150–175 dB.)
TITLE FILLS SCREEN:
The Vivisection of Mighty Mouse, Jr.
We hear PERSIAN SANTOUR (72-STRING HAMMERED DULCIMER) AND TAR (SIX-STRING LUTE WITH SKIN BELLY) WITH TECHNO RHYTHM TRACK AND SAMPLED CHORUS FROM JESUS AND MARY CHAIN’S “JUST LIKE HONEY”
Hold, then:
DISSOLVE TO:
INT WARDEN’S OFFICE
WARDEN gets down from her desk, crumples two notes into little balls, shuffles them behind her back, and then extends two fists.
WARDEN
Pick one.
MARK’S POV
His eyes dart anxiously from fist to fist—from right fist to left fist, to right, to left, back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth. This oscillating pan continues for seven minutes, becoming steadily faster until camera movement is a pendular blur.
Display boilerplate MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA WARNING at bottom of screen:
Prolonged exposure to this cinematic effect may induce petit-mal seizures in some viewers.
Finally, MARK taps the Warden’s left fist.
WARDEN opens fist and smooths crumpled note.
CLOSE SHOT of note:
You wann
a get high?
MARK
(coyly)
You … wanna?
WARDEN
Do you have any drugs?
MARK
(patting pockets of leather trousers)
I have one linty phenobarbital, which we could split. Or if you have any, uh, air freshener or Pam, we could, like, huff the butane …
WARDEN
(De haut en bas, but generous. Keep in mind that this is a woman from a dreary rust-belt town in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania, who, as the child of emotionally withholding working-class parents, grew up with no sense of entitlement, but, motivated by a passion for discipline and punishment and impelled by sheer Polish-Catholic chutzpah, clawed her way up the New Jersey Department of Corrections hierarchy to become the first female warden of a men’s maximum-security facility in the state’s history. At this precise moment in the movie, she transcends the stereotype of the “compulsively glamorous yet tormented warden” and achieves a hard-won noblesse. It’s worth doing hundreds of takes to achieve the finely nuanced delivery that this line requires.)
Hmmm … I think we can do a little better than that.
SLOW-MOTION TRACKING SHOT
as warden puts arm around Mark’s shoulder and walks him to a locked room adjacent to her office.
We hear DONNA SUMMER’S “MACARTHUR PARK” (dance mix).
(The distance between the warden’s office and the adjacent locked room is less than five feet, but the Giorgio Moroder dance mix of Summer’s “MacArthur Park” is some eight and a half minutes long, so this TRACKING SHOT of the WARDEN and MARK should be slowed down as much as possible to accommodate the FULL LENGTH of the SONG.
In addition to super slow motion, intercut long shots, detail shots, retracking dolly shots, high angles, wide angles, reverse angles, freeze frames, canted frames—whatever is necessary to stretch this five-second walk into an eight-and-a-half-minute shot coextensive with the sound track.)