6. INT. NON-DESCRIPT WAREHOUSE - DAY

What do you mean, what does it look like?  Dammit, I said "non-descript."

SHADOWY FIGURE
(suddenly realizes he's chained to a wall)
What?  I wasn't like this at the end of last episode!
FRANCHISE BOY
(suddenly realizes he's chained to a wall, too)
P.G.--we're chained to a wall!  How did that happen?
CAPED VILLAIN TYPE GUY
(laughs an evil caped villain type laugh)
Welcome to my evil base of operations, cinematic crusaders.

SHADOWY FIGURE

Who are you?  And I swear by Ron Howard's bald spot that if you do
no release us immediately you will feel my wrath!

CAPED VILLAIN TYPE GUY
(laughs an...oh, you get the point)

I'm Count Continuity, you bumbling fool.  Everytime you spot a glass
of water in a restaurant scene that changes levels of water every
other frame--I did that.  Everytime someone's cigarette changes length--
I did that too.

FRANCHISE BOY

So you're the fiend who made Marty Feldman's hump change sides in
Young Frankenstein?
SHADOWY FIGURE and COUNT CONTINUITY stare at FRANCHISE BOY, dumbfounded.
FRANCHISE BOY
What?  What is it?  Are you or aren't you?

Last uploaded: December 4, 1998

Some Short Cuts

Hi there, boys and girls.  Once more into the breach with the Widgeman, who is very glad to not have his entire life retooled by John Byrne.  Wouldn't that just suck?  Anyway, we're back from our extended commercial break to report on whatever my medication is making me say this week.  They've upped me to 150mg pills and they're also using a larger car battery, so this should be interesting.  Strap in.

I mean, there's no other way of putting this first thought any other way but this: Babe's bacon.  Wow!  Who would have thought that a little pig would get so many people in so much trouble?  I mean forget James Cromwell falling down a well or whatever, head burrito Casey Silver has left Universal!  Mumblings of budgets up to $120 million or so to make and it'll be lucky to get a fourth of that domestically?  Wow.  Yeah, sure, there's rentals and there's international ticket sales still come but...wow.

And speaking of singing mice, have you seen that King and I trailer yet?  I don't know about you, but I think I'll wait for the Jodie Foster-starring remake of the 1946 film, Anna and the King of Siam.  And how strange is it that Chow Yun Fat will be playing a role originated on the screen by Rex Harrison?  God, isn't life just weird as hell?

And one last thing.  I saw Life is Beautiful for the second time the other night and it was a tremendous experience.  The first time I saw it, there were seven people in the theater total.  The second time it was a sold out house, and it was so much better to see it with a crowd.  And then, when the film ended, an amazing thing happened: nobody moved.  For two whole minutes, no one in the audience moved or even seemed to talk amongst themselves at all.  We were all kind of stunned.  And no, the majority of us weren't reading the credits either, they were in Italian.  See this movie.  It's the best I've seen all year and a big thank you goes out to Miramax for bringing it to us stateside.

And now for this week's sermon.  1998 as you're well aware is crawling to a close even as we speak, and we're about to be flooded with lists.  The best films of the year.  The worst films of the year.  The best explosions of the year.  The best ways to make fun of movies like Godzilla.  You know they're coming.  So I figured that plenty of people will tell you what to look forward to in the coming year.  I want to tell you what the studios have screwed you out of.  Why?  Well, because someone has to point out how we got shafted.  It might as well be me, since I don't have a life and have been known to heroically throw myself on top of copies of the Brando version of The Island of Dr. Moreau before they were rented by unsuspecting civilians.  So here we go, with

The Top Ten Films You Will Not See in 1999
(or probably anytime in the near future)

Here are the movies that we're missing out on, my fellow Coronites.  The Fates and the studios are in cahoots and are conspiring to keep these potential gems from us.  They're presented for you here in alphabetical order, since I couldn't make my hyperactive mind up about what order to rank them in.  So grab yourself a big cup of joe and let's weep together, for I know who the small friends are...

Aliens vs. Predator

This film is so dead it's not even funny.  It had everything.  One of the coolest non-superhero comic book mini-series in recent history.  A kick-ass story with a female protagonist who...you guessed it, chews bubblegum and kicks some ass.  And what dug its grave?  Well, first of all the unremarkable Predator 2, where we tried to do the first movie again, but forgetting that if you care about the characters before you start blowing them away, it makes for a much more effective film.  More recently, there was the very unremarkable Alien Resurrection.  Again, another boring pick-em-off-one-by-one flick with so much goo that it looked like God blew his nose on the film.  Then you have Sigourney's quote from our page on this project, showing that she doesn't know what the story's about and probably equates it with Billy the Kid vs. Dracula or Dollman vs. Demonic Toys or hell maybe even Tricky vs. the Gravediggaz.  Fox decides, yeah, you're right.  What the hell were we thinking?  Meanwhile, New Line will probably rake in the dough with Freddy vs. Jason and laugh all the way to the bank.

Buckaroo Banzai 2

If you have not seen this film, then there's no way we can be seen in public with you anymore.  Fix it and then come back with a box of Twinkies and maybe we'll forgive you.  There is no compelling reason for this film to not be made.  Good script, the involvement of the original cast (who are all stars in the own respective rights now), built-in cult following...but no studio could get interested?  No, of course not.  "We can go make movies out of 60's and 70's television shows.  We can go make...make...The Avengers!"  I mean, come on, people!  The Brady Bunch got a damn theatrical sequel, for crying out loud.  If that's not a sign of the apocalypse, I don't know what is.  But now, it's all in the ninth circle of hell.  I can see it now: "Hey, wait--I know--let's do a REMAKE of the original Buckaroo!"  Make the pain stop.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Al Pacino as the Doctor?  David Mamet screenwriting?  Where the hell do I buy my ticket, right?  Pacino's an acting god, Mamet's a writing god (as long as we excuse Spanish Prisoner, which we will) and for them to double team a classic of literature like this would be awesome.  However, glancing over at Cinescape I see that they've abandoned that approach and are instead turning the character into a superhero in Hong Kong?  It's a joke, right?

See--what's scary is that I even have to ask that question.

Good Omens

Haven't read the book?  Fie upon you.  Fie, dammit.  Sigh.  As you've probably seen, this film will probably be forever in arriving, so SDI took matters into our own hands.  But we're talking the real world here...or at least a necessary equivalent.  The movie's quite do-able, it's just that the studio said, "British humor?  God, who would want that?"  They basically wanted to move the whole story to America, though there was actually a reference in the book as to why that does not happen.  Which means they basically wanted to cripple the entire film.  Poor Neil.  Imagine every artistic creation you ever created being threatened with people who just don't get it (read: idiots) making a feature film version of them.  Imagine...imagine you're Todd McFarlane, Lord of the Spawniverse, and you've just woke up screaming in the middle of the night because you learned Joel Schumacher was going to direct Spawn 2.  That's what Neil must feel like every day.  Sigh again.

I Am Legend

Again, since the people behind this project are in desperate need of a clue transfusion, SDI did their thing to try and tide us over until a decent film version can be made. Blade showed us this year that vampires can get people into theaters.  Then John Carpenter showed us that if you did it wrong, it would keep people at home.  But regardless, somebody needs to take a meat cleaver to the draft of the script they have for this thing currently and remove any reference to frigging "hemocytes."  They're not "hemocytes," you bastards, they're VAMPIRES.  VAMPIRES.  Say it with me, just like they used to on Sesame Street: "Vam...pires...VAMPIRES."  They took a perfectly good novel with science fiction, horror and suspense all in a nice little package and had to turn it into an Arnie-inspired shoot-em-up.  And now they want to give it to Kurt Russell?  Kurt might do well, but with that script...all is lost.  Order a pizza, rent The Omega Man and work on your Matthias imitation.  All is lost, I tell you.

The Sandman

Speaking of heavy sighing, here's yet another example of studio idiocy at work.  The illustrious writing team of Rossio and Elliott created a screenplay of the film, which got everyone pleased, including The Neil, and then...WB dropped the whole shebang and decided to start over from scratch.  We want more action.  We want a franchise (this is WB, remember, they're desperate).  We want...The Corinthian and Dream in a drunken bar brawl.  Some garbage like that.  But recently, we've received word that not even that was good enough and they've started over...again.  The closest we may ever get to this film, my brethren, is an anthology of all the dropped scripts.

Spider-Man

You know, it was either Rene Descartes or Marilyn Manson who once said, "It's a long hard road out of hell."  I always get those two confused.  Well, they were talking about this film.  Not even the King of the World could kick its butt out of legal purgatory.  He even wrote a 57-page scriptment for the project that wasn't half bad.  It had its faults but it was readable and is better than any non-animated Batman film in existence.  Marvel couldn't help at all, seeing as how when they weren't setting off depth charges inside their continuity they were struggling with bankruptcy.  I was hoping (like Peter David) that Warner Brothers would just buy Marvel and get it all over with.  But that's another column completely.  Stanley Kubrick could have made Eyes Wide Shut thrice in the time it's taken this to even get to the point where the players have looked up from their jackhammers and said, "We're almost there!"  Right.  Then again, once Marvel gets done revamping the character, will there even be a market for the movie?  You be the judge.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Again, this film's got on its side a number one novel from one of sci-fi's Big Kahunas, a decent script from 1995, the involvement of Mr. Oscar himself, Tom Hanks, and rumors of Sean Connery's involvement.  And where is it?  Where?  Somewhere in Paramount's fruit cellar, fighting off mutant spiders or the like.  We sent out search parties, but they didn't come back either.  Sigh.

The Vampire Lestat

I know many a Anne Rice reader who swear by this chapter of The Vampire Chronicles as the mack daddy of them all.  We've already established that vampires (done correctly) are a way to achieve audiencedom.  We've already established that Warner Brothers would sell Dot from the Animaniacs to a cartoon sweat shop if it meant they could get a franchise in exchange for it.  We've already established that Anne Rice is involved, and she packs a bit of a literary sales punch, what?  So what's the problem?  Well, at first it seemed that WB was going to sit on the film rights to the Vampire books until they expired and reverted to Rice, who had said she would take them and run on her own.  Now they may skip this book altogether and run with Queen of the Damned.  Skipping around out of order...what is this, the Jack Ryan films?  Harrison Ford as Lestat?  Erg.

Watchmen

One of the best comic book series out there--if you haven't read this, do yourself a favor and do so.  This project is so close to being golden it just makes me sick.  So sick did it make me that we at SDI, you guessed it, snapped and did our own thing.  Terry Gilliam wants to do this project and badly.  (I mean he wants to do it a lot, not that he wants to do it and make it suck eggs--you know what I mean, never mind)  And if there's anyone who can pull off a good adaptation of a book and to hell what everybody else thinks (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), it's Terry G.  And we've got a screenplay by Sam Hamm that's ten years old and 70% dead on.  (My offer still stands to fix it, Terry)  So what's happening?  I think everybody's just scared of the material.  Writer Alan Moore has asked Gilliam not to do the movie because he doesn't think it can be done.  Gilliam thinks he can do it, but it would be Branagh Hamlet-sized.  So what?  You're the man, Terry--you're the one who can break one of these films out of Inner Eye Cinema and back onto the big screen where they belong.  We just want to tell you good luck, we're all counting on you.

Well, that was a depressing look at what stands between studios and good decision making, wasn't it?  Isn't it irritating to see how little it would take to make most of these films a reality?  It doesn't matter how many times we say it folks, the studios know what we really want.

And what we want is more bad Leslie Nielsen flicks and I Still Know 3: Die, Moesha, Die!

Get the women and children to safety, my friends.  And cheer up, the worst is yet to come.


Widgett is a figment of humanity's collective imagination given flesh, operating from a secret underwater fortress in an undisclosed location off the coast of Iowa .  He is the founder of The Sleep Deprivation Institute and an active member of the Secret Society of Guerilla Ontologists.  When he's not championing independent films or complaining, he spends his dwindling free time writing short fiction, poetry, novels, essays, screenplays and children's books under a pseudonym.  He also does weddings and bar mitzvahs.  His rates are quite reasonable, as he can normally be found wandering the halls of Corona HQ with a sign around his neck that says, "Will Write For Food."

Previous issues of Widgett's column are also available.