needless to say, it didn't work out, but i'll let these emails (with the attachments) tell the tale, just in case you see a movie bearing similar themes under the name Michael A. in the next few years.
Be warned; this is LONG. i'll forgo my bitter-ass opinion on the whole ordeal for now, but maybe i'll come back with something later. for the moment, i'll just share all the correspondence;
From: Nick <>
To: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 4:03:30 PM
Subject: RE: Classifieds Response: writer seeking feedback, will pay
hello Micheal. this is Nick. we spoke through Myspace about a possible collaboration. sorry i took so long getting back to you.
The compensation you are offering (under 10 an hour i believe?) is more than acceptable should we decide to peruse a working relationship. i promise you'll get more than your money's worth. i'm not looking to retire or put my kids through college with whatever i make from this...just a little spare dough so i can breathe. plus i'd be doing 2 things i enjoy immensely; reading and writing.
Just so you know what kind of literary degenerate you are getting involved with, i took the liberty of scanning my short story 'Lycanthropy Wife' and attaching it to this email. it's one of the more 'extreme' things i've done, and i understand if you want nothing to do with me after reading it, but you should know that i was in a weird place when i wrote it, and it's meant to be a spiteful, dense piece of claustrophobia and malice. i don't wanna over sell it... just see for yourself.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
- Nick
Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:42:53 -0700
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Classifieds Response: writer seeking feedback, will pay
To:
nick, too you long enough to write back. i'd given you up for dead.
luckily you have a talent for writing! i like your style, it reminds me of the music you like to listen to: fun, dangerous, colorful, etc. i think we could have potential working together. but let me say right up front, i'm not fucking around at all. this is total literary immersion on my part, everything i write and want to read i take very seriously, probably way too seriously for my own good. i'm uptight like that. remember, i'm thinking long term, here. i'm very interested in whether you want to be sid vicious or arthur rimbaud. are you trying to make a commitment to either? i remember the days when i was 20 and in an alternative/pop band, music was the greatest thing ever. still is, but only to listen to now. i wouldn't want your writing to interfere with your music, or vice versa.
here's something i'm working on attached. it's not close to finished, i'm not entirely pleased with it, but it's in the direction i want to go. let me know what you think and we'll go from there.
best,
m
From: Nick To: Michael A
Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 11:44:05 AM
Subject: RE: Classifieds Response: writer seeking feedback, will pay
sorry... it was a busy-ass week.
thanks for the compliments. i'm taking a look at your story right now and will have my overview of said story later in this email.
as for the question of whether or not i want to be Sid Vicious or Arthur Rimbaud.... i'm actually interested in being more like M. Gira (Swans) or Nick Cave or Henry Rollins.... someone whose just constantly busting with creative endeavors... someone who always has something out there in some form, be it an album or a book or even a movie (that's my current project... a screenplay). i'm not too interested in churning out mediocre schlocky "best sellers" just to turn a profit... but a little bit of money for what i love doing would be nice.
The music is more or less a glorified hobby. We take the music seriously, but not to the point where we demand everyone involved devote the entirety of their existence to the band. We all try to have lives outside the band, then we get together twice a week and jam out the ugly parts. I get together a few times a week with some good friends and write some tunes. we play shows here and there... mostly local, and if we're lucky take a weekend to play a string of out-of-state shows. We record a little bit at least once a year. The kind of music we play is never going to make teen idols out of us, so we just push those silly million dollar dreams aside and just blast out the nightmares of bland-ass suburban living. The band revolves around our work schedules... and writing is the work i want the most.
alright...on to "Four Whores" (i like it already)
You absolutely have something here. Your writing style is clear and succinct ... minimal but with a defined voice that saves it from becoming interchangeable with other "confessional" genre of writing. It's darkly funny, but doesn't feel like it's trying so hard to be so. It's very natural...very at home.... never feeling affected. It's identifiable, approachable, and consolable.
Some may look at your female characters and suggest some mild misogynistic tone to the work (the wife is apathetic in the beginning, than somewhat nagging towards the end, Renee is a hateful prude, and Lauren besides being a prostitute is just sort of a stock girl you'd meet in a bar), but since your characters feel like they could and do exist, we understand them and even love them despite their damages. it doesn't come off as being "anti-woman" (at least not to me)... it comes off as someone who loves women immensely, and when you love something that much, your bound to see all the flaws...and sometimes those flaws can be traumatic, yanking out the angelic perception from under your feet, but you love them all the same...perhaps even more because you see that ugly part of you in something else... something that is otherwise beautiful. Your title also rises above it's initial shock value and encapsulates the whole story perfectly. Though it appears the characters have negative qualities that are unique to their genders, it is revealed by the end of the piece that they posses a uni-sexual bleakness... nasty that lay within all of us. That the battle of the sexes is like Alien vs. Predator: Whoever wins... We all lose.
it's also great that your story can be related to without the reader having to go through the specific set of circumstances laid out in your work. The themes, though presented in this semi-unique context, are universal. It's about unrequited love. It's about feeling neglected. Feeling lost. But like i said before; it doesn't come off as angst ridden and whiny like much other "confessional" works.
all in all an excellent read.
favorite parts/segments;
“Do you listen to music?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?” (You coy girl, you were ready to show me your tits for sixty dollars and probably rub them in my face, but you’re going to make me work to find out of if you like Bartok or Janacek, your country’s most famous national musicians, if you even know who they are.)
“Dance music,” she says, “I like dance music. Techno.”
Something inside falls.
Once I was so close to her that I could smell her breath. It was rotten but not overwhelmingly so, it smelled like cigarettes and dead bodies, and I told her I loved her. She paused just a moment, and then looked at me blankly. Before that we were talking about something stupid, something trivial, maybe even something about work involving numbers or deadlines, and it just slipped out, completely out of place. I don’t know why it came out at that moment from me, it just did. She sat there and looked at me blankly. And it was as if the words just evaporated, no echo, no words even. The words didn’t exist when I said them and they surely didn’t exist the moment after. She just looked away and smoked her cigarette and didn’t look back for a minute and then went on talking about whatever it was she was talking about. I imagine it will be the same when she hears of my death, though I may get a longer pause between puffs.
I use the voice of one woman to hear the words of another.
I already knew how they began and how it ended and how it haunts her every day, and when she drinks, she drinks to forget about what happened on that day of her childhood, how that man did enough to her to make her want to die, or drag broken glass over her skin enough to create a shower of blood, or make her drink enough every day just to be able to want to go out in public again enough to be able to look some man in the eye and not think he’s going to claw her to death like a wild animal would do to a helpless baby, a helpless baby.
thanks so much for the story and this potential opportunity. I hope there is something here.
thanks again.
- Nick
From: Nick
To: Michael A
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2008 12:27:01 PM
Subject: RE: henry rolliins....too cool
"nick, let me start off by saying henry rollins is a totally cool guy. i like him enough that i can say that i don't know one of his songs, probably don't dig his music very much, but really admire the fuckin guy for being so multi talented and smart. when i used to watch tv, i'd watch that show of his on ifc, and i was impressed with everything he did. so if he's your model, you by association already impress me. the world always needs another renaissance man."
well i'm still esentially an angry punk rock guy, so Rollins' music has been on my playlist almost as long as i've been listening to music, whether it's his days in Black Flag or the Rollins Band. But his books (Get in the Van being his watermark for me) are what put transcend him beyond being a mere angry guy yelling in a loud band. They help you understand the person and the music better, and give the music a world to bounce of off. People like Rollins seem to have their own world meticulously mapped out, and its a world fueled by creativity.
right off the bat, let's talk screenplays. they're my thing, my shit, my true love. but i have a serious history and am quite unrecoverable at this point, yet i digress, when i was 21, fresh out of nyu, i wanted nothing more than to write what tarantino did in his early days. i was going to write for hollywood, and i was going to be it. then after much research, i found the ultimate horror story, that if you sold your shit to hollywood, they could take it and chop it up however they wanted. i couldn't bear the thought of that. so i did the most logical absurd thing, i decided to write and direct my own thing, which ultimately meant i produced, wrote, directed, edited, and acted in my own thing. i bilked my family out of $50,000 (damn that makes me proud), and now i have a totally non sellable b & w feature film on my own home copy of dvd transferred from vhs, that sits on a shelf collecting dust. i compare it to the short story i sent you, kind of pleased in some parts, but ultimately not successful. my story of course can be revised and reworked, film however, is another mess. needless to say i never want to work in the film business again, it's a fucking nightmare to me, but i learned a LOT of what there is to know. so if you want any help, guidance, insight on the screenplay, i'm there for you. and just to make sure i'm clear, i'm ALL about the writing. yes, scorcese is my hero, and i would love to have my films look like his, but without the story, the quality story, it's shit. lets say that dark knight imax highly amused me, but ultimately i think it fell just a bit short because the story and the writing could have been better. but that's just ME. so again, i'd be more than happy to help you with your screenplay project in any way i can. i love movies sometimes more than literature.
Thanks very much. i'm with you on the "loving movies more than literature" thing. I've only just started on the screenplay (i only have about 13 pages done), so i'm not really ready to start flashing it around cause it would be like a twelve year old girl doing a topless dance before her tits had a chance to grow (my girlfriend did actually sneak a peak at the screenplay when i wasn't around, but she's the only other pair of eyes who has seen it).
and i know much about the growing pains 99% of aspiring film makers go through when it comes to their films, especially if the films have transgressive subject matter. Some of my favorite films (Subconscious Cruelty, Dust Devil, the Manson Family) took more than a decade to put together, and since i'm extremely obsessive when it comes to anything i'm interested in, i followed the stories behind the scenes of these films, which detail how much of an uphill battle film-making can be.
As for my screenplay... i don't know yet. I feel like at this stage i'm just reporting visions and dreams. It's a strange project, combining elements of European/Asian splatterhouse and Surrealist cinema, so i don't know if a market for this even exists. I know nothing about directing, so i can't imagine that i could do it myself. I admire you though for giving it a shot at least, and going as far as having a finished project. Most people don't get that far.
and for the record, i loved the Dark Knight, story included. Maybe it could've been better, but as far i go, i thought it was the perfect Batman film. Comics are how i learned to read, so i have a strong connection and derive much influence from them... they're smarter than most people give them credit for, but i digress.
which brings me to collaboration, again. i believe we may indeed have something, at least i'm hoping very much. i'd like to hear more about the big picture (if you have one) of your writing plan. what you like to have completed in the next five years? what would be your ideal yet realistic dream scenario? how would you accomplish it? novels, short stories, screenplays, what?
as far as the big picture... i'm still trying to figure out how to get my foot in the door. it's been a very aggravating process to say the least. It's hard when you don't have a literary agent, and the few publishing houses that do except unsolicited material are so swamped with work that it takes forever for them to respond (or NOT respond, as my case may be). I had that short story published in the Userlands anthology, which was put together by Dennis Cooper (one of my favorite authors) when he realized the high number of aspiring writers that read his blog. The anthology got very few reviews, and most of them were poor, as many of the stories were written off as "irrelevant suburban white boy angst", as if literary anger is only substantial if a woman or a minority or a city-dweller is the one shaking his fist... but lets not get into that right now.
I was really heavily contacting publishers 2-3 years ago, but i got tired of being either burned or ignored, so i focused on my school work, my music, my relationship, and becoming a stronger writer. I created my own writing workshop blog ( http://bricksaredelicious.blogspot.com) so when i was at the computer if something popped in my head i could go over there and jot it down and maybe get some feedback from anyone who might be looking. Anyway, i finished up school in December of 2006 and began looking for work, taking civil service tests, and trying again to get people out there interested in my stuff. My creativity did land me my first honest-to-god girlfriend (at the ripe age of 24. sad am i), so i can take pride in that, cause she's only about the best, most beautiful person i've ever known, but any sort of recognition from publishers has eluded me. I'm looking to get back into contacting people again, but i'm starting a little bit smaller; by looking for other writers/artists/film makers so i can maybe form some sort of community that helps each other out.
as for finished projects; I have a finished novel entitled Commuters, which is what i call a "scrambled anthology". I basically took all the short stories, story fragments, stream-of-conscious musings, fever dreams, and the more random and weird and desperate journal entries from all my years in college (where i was a commuter, not a resident, hence the title) and shuffled them into a chaotic literary terrain. i also have enough lyrics/poems to create a hefty anthology.
that's it in a nutshell, no bullshit. stories, more stories, essays, more stories, novels, more novels, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, write til i drop. i'll need help all along the way, and i'm more than willing to help you too, whatever you need. i just want someone to fucking work with, it's so fucking impossible to work in a box, and yes i can pay you like the others (especially if you need the money), but what i'm really looking for can't be bought. i really hope it can come to that.
that's great. Thank you so much. I do need the money, but i don't need too much, so you pay me what you can/what you think i'm worth. I can stretch out dollars like old bubble gum. I live at home (for now), and i make little money where i can, plus i'm looking for a day job that will probably be a soul-crushing bore but it will put money in my pocket and feed my anger, which means more writing. Like i said, i'll do my best to give you more than your money's worth.
as far as the big picture... i'm still trying to figure out how to get my foot in the door. it's been a very aggravating process to say the least. It's hard when you don't have a literary agent, and the few publishing houses that do except unsolicited material are so swamped with work that it takes forever for them to respond (or NOT respond, as my case may be). I had that short story published in the Userlands anthology, which was put together by Dennis Cooper (one of my favorite authors) when he realized the high number of aspiring writers that read his blog. The anthology got very few reviews, and most of them were poor, as many of the stories were written off as "irrelevant suburban white boy angst", as if literary anger is only substantial if a woman or a minority or a city-dweller is the one shaking his fist... but lets not get into that right now.
I was really heavily contacting publishers 2-3 years ago, but i got tired of being either burned or ignored, so i focused on my school work, my music, my relationship, and becoming a stronger writer. I created my own writing workshop blog ( http://bricksaredelicious.blogspot.com) so when i was at the computer if something popped in my head i could go over there and jot it down and maybe get some feedback from anyone who might be looking. Anyway, i finished up school in December of 2006 and began looking for work, taking civil service tests, and trying again to get people out there interested in my stuff. My creativity did land me my first honest-to-god girlfriend (at the ripe age of 24. sad am i), so i can take pride in that, cause she's only about the best, most beautiful person i've ever known, but any sort of recognition from publishers has eluded me. I'm looking to get back into contacting people again, but i'm starting a little bit smaller; by looking for other writers/artists/film makers so i can maybe form some sort of community that helps each other out.
as for finished projects; I have a finished novel entitled Commuters, which is what i call a "scrambled anthology". I basically took all the short stories, story fragments, stream-of-conscious musings, fever dreams, and the more random and weird and desperate journal entries from all my years in college (where i was a commuter, not a resident, hence the title) and shuffled them into a chaotic literary terrain. i also have enough lyrics/poems to create a hefty anthology.
that's it in a nutshell, no bullshit. stories, more stories, essays, more stories, novels, more novels, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, write til i drop. i'll need help all along the way, and i'm more than willing to help you too, whatever you need. i just want someone to fucking work with, it's so fucking impossible to work in a box, and yes i can pay you like the others (especially if you need the money), but what i'm really looking for can't be bought. i really hope it can come to that.
that's great. Thank you so much. I do need the money, but i don't need too much, so you pay me what you can/what you think i'm worth. I can stretch out dollars like old bubble gum. I live at home (for now), and i make little money where i can, plus i'm looking for a day job that will probably be a soul-crushing bore but it will put money in my pocket and feed my anger, which means more writing. Like i said, i'll do my best to give you more than your money's worth.
i'd like to hear more about how you live your life, and have lived it up til now. what kind of job are you slaving at to make money? live at home, or with roommates, or alone? other facts of how you grew up, etc, what you wanted to be.
i was born, raised, and still reside in Wantagh, NY, a small suburb of Nassau County, Long Island. the older people are all republicans, the younger people are all drunks, and there's not much to do but hop the train and head into the city. There's more bars in Wantagh than in almost any other town you can think of. Like most writers, i have a love/hate relationship with where i grew up. i like it here, my roots are here, but i'm just disappointed almost constantly by the people and situations they put themselves in. They anesthetize themselves with alcohol and banal work. They've given up on their interests because they bought into the notion of those interests being sub-valuable because you can't "make any money" doing them. I've seen many brilliant minds either leave this place (which may have been the right choice, but i miss them now more then ever, cause i feel like i've finally caught up to their brilliance, which was ahead of its time and always drove me to be something more), or they just give up and choose an unexamined life peppered with bad television and beer pong. Many of my "friends" i wrote off halfway through my junior year of high school, and i spent my senior year with one friend (a pathological liar) and my #1 crush (the girl who served as a "muse" for my more hopeless romantic moments... emphasis on "hopeless"). Even though i'm with a great girl now, a woman who i wouldn't leave for anybody, this #1 Crush still manages to find her way into a story or a song. not nearly as often as before, but she's still on my mind.
I still live with my parents (who are great), and i've been struggling since i graduated to find work. i swept up the parking lot of a strip mall from age 17-24 for 45 dollars a week, but the owners lost the lease on the property and pretty much every store in the mall went under or just weren't willing to spend that 45 dollars a week on some dirt-ass sweeping up the cigarette butts and hamburger wrappers, so i lost that job.
I took a civil service test in hopes of landing a file clerk/typist job at one of the County's local libraries. So far I've been on 3 interviews with said libraries and haven't gotten a job yet.
I managed to land a Data Entry job at a local law firm this past February. Dull-ass work, but it was 12 dollars an hour, full time, so it was nice to not have to worry about money. that all came to end in May, just before Memorial Day weekend, when my Myspace page got around the office, eventually landing at the bosses desks.
See, there's a reason my page is now private; because it got me fired.
They were vague on just what it was that they found so alarming about my page, but i ascertained it had something to do with several blogs i did where i vented about co-workers who annoyed the piss out of me on a nearly daily basis. typical office shit; The guy who brings his loud annoying kid to work every other day, the guy who burns bad smelling food causing the poorly ventilated room to stink to high heaven, the obnoxious twit with the horrible laugh who showcases her horrible laugh by laughing at nothing every ten god damn seconds.... you know same old same old. I would do my work, keep to myself, than i vented in the blog. well someone i work with looked me up (i wasn't myspace-friends with anyone i worked with) and proceeded to send everyone in the office my page (they did this during work hours, hours they SHOULD HAVE BEEN WORKING. I WAS WORKING DURING THOSE WORK HOURS AND THEY WEREN'T. WHO GOT FIRED? not that i'm bitter, or anything). I never named names, never named what company i work for, never trashed the bosses. But they were "dealing with the fallout" (direct quote) and since i was already viewed as an outsider (everyone in that office was already either a friend or family or etc.) they had to let me go. OVER MYSPACE. the best part about this was the bosses were actually laughing at what i wrote, and they said i was a very good writer... one of the guys even said "yeah you're wasting your time here, man". so that made me feel good. it also made me realize what i am... a writer. unfortunately, it also meant being broke for pretty much the whole summer.
did you ever watch the OC? i wanna bang the shit out of mischa barton, but i also grew up a lot like that whole story. i was raised just outside of philadelphia, on what they call "the main line", all the kids were rich and had trust funds . my life and my writing is a direct reaction against that whole establishment i was raised in, i can fit in with the suits and do, every day, but mostly i want to burn them all down.
i'm pretty much on the same page. my writing is more trance-like, constructed like a dream probably cause sometimes i wanna sleep off my existence. There's nothing to do out here besides eat and drink and work... and there isn't much work to be found anymore...and food and drink are now really pricey... so basically living here is turning into that scene from Requiem for a Dream where Jennifer Connely and that other chick are tag-teaming a giant dildo while a bunch of rich white men throw money at them and chant "CUM! CUM! CUM!" throughout the whole ordeal. My writing is confrontation through escapism... or escapism through confrontation... either way. Create something that may be unpleasant and ugly, but at least it's exciting, colorful, and the music is better.
as far as the OC goes... Rachel Billson and Mindy Clarke are more up my alley... especially Mindy Clarke. ever since i saw the standee for Return of the Living Dead 3 at the local video store when i was ten i've had a big thing for her. as you can see i've been a little psycho for a while now.
i was born, raised, and still reside in Wantagh, NY, a small suburb of Nassau County, Long Island. the older people are all republicans, the younger people are all drunks, and there's not much to do but hop the train and head into the city. There's more bars in Wantagh than in almost any other town you can think of. Like most writers, i have a love/hate relationship with where i grew up. i like it here, my roots are here, but i'm just disappointed almost constantly by the people and situations they put themselves in. They anesthetize themselves with alcohol and banal work. They've given up on their interests because they bought into the notion of those interests being sub-valuable because you can't "make any money" doing them. I've seen many brilliant minds either leave this place (which may have been the right choice, but i miss them now more then ever, cause i feel like i've finally caught up to their brilliance, which was ahead of its time and always drove me to be something more), or they just give up and choose an unexamined life peppered with bad television and beer pong. Many of my "friends" i wrote off halfway through my junior year of high school, and i spent my senior year with one friend (a pathological liar) and my #1 crush (the girl who served as a "muse" for my more hopeless romantic moments... emphasis on "hopeless"). Even though i'm with a great girl now, a woman who i wouldn't leave for anybody, this #1 Crush still manages to find her way into a story or a song. not nearly as often as before, but she's still on my mind.
I still live with my parents (who are great), and i've been struggling since i graduated to find work. i swept up the parking lot of a strip mall from age 17-24 for 45 dollars a week, but the owners lost the lease on the property and pretty much every store in the mall went under or just weren't willing to spend that 45 dollars a week on some dirt-ass sweeping up the cigarette butts and hamburger wrappers, so i lost that job.
I took a civil service test in hopes of landing a file clerk/typist job at one of the County's local libraries. So far I've been on 3 interviews with said libraries and haven't gotten a job yet.
I managed to land a Data Entry job at a local law firm this past February. Dull-ass work, but it was 12 dollars an hour, full time, so it was nice to not have to worry about money. that all came to end in May, just before Memorial Day weekend, when my Myspace page got around the office, eventually landing at the bosses desks.
See, there's a reason my page is now private; because it got me fired.
They were vague on just what it was that they found so alarming about my page, but i ascertained it had something to do with several blogs i did where i vented about co-workers who annoyed the piss out of me on a nearly daily basis. typical office shit; The guy who brings his loud annoying kid to work every other day, the guy who burns bad smelling food causing the poorly ventilated room to stink to high heaven, the obnoxious twit with the horrible laugh who showcases her horrible laugh by laughing at nothing every ten god damn seconds.... you know same old same old. I would do my work, keep to myself, than i vented in the blog. well someone i work with looked me up (i wasn't myspace-friends with anyone i worked with) and proceeded to send everyone in the office my page (they did this during work hours, hours they SHOULD HAVE BEEN WORKING. I WAS WORKING DURING THOSE WORK HOURS AND THEY WEREN'T. WHO GOT FIRED? not that i'm bitter, or anything). I never named names, never named what company i work for, never trashed the bosses. But they were "dealing with the fallout" (direct quote) and since i was already viewed as an outsider (everyone in that office was already either a friend or family or etc.) they had to let me go. OVER MYSPACE. the best part about this was the bosses were actually laughing at what i wrote, and they said i was a very good writer... one of the guys even said "yeah you're wasting your time here, man". so that made me feel good. it also made me realize what i am... a writer. unfortunately, it also meant being broke for pretty much the whole summer.
did you ever watch the OC? i wanna bang the shit out of mischa barton, but i also grew up a lot like that whole story. i was raised just outside of philadelphia, on what they call "the main line", all the kids were rich and had trust funds . my life and my writing is a direct reaction against that whole establishment i was raised in, i can fit in with the suits and do, every day, but mostly i want to burn them all down.
i'm pretty much on the same page. my writing is more trance-like, constructed like a dream probably cause sometimes i wanna sleep off my existence. There's nothing to do out here besides eat and drink and work... and there isn't much work to be found anymore...and food and drink are now really pricey... so basically living here is turning into that scene from Requiem for a Dream where Jennifer Connely and that other chick are tag-teaming a giant dildo while a bunch of rich white men throw money at them and chant "CUM! CUM! CUM!" throughout the whole ordeal. My writing is confrontation through escapism... or escapism through confrontation... either way. Create something that may be unpleasant and ugly, but at least it's exciting, colorful, and the music is better.
as far as the OC goes... Rachel Billson and Mindy Clarke are more up my alley... especially Mindy Clarke. ever since i saw the standee for Return of the Living Dead 3 at the local video store when i was ten i've had a big thing for her. as you can see i've been a little psycho for a while now.
ps. i didn't even get to thank you for the review of my story. thanks a lot, really. i'll go into that later, when i haven't started with a mile of other words before it. regardless, thanks very much for taking the time to read it, and i'm really impressed with what you got out of it. we'll have plenty of time to talk about that shit. you'll see that writing and me are a strange pair, it's like the arm i want to use and cut off at the same time.
thanks again;
- N.
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Wed 8/27/08 2:31 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
here's an idea for you, what say we collaborate on a screenplay that we'll try to sell? the Usual Suspects comes to mind, the write of that is a friend of a friend, that was one of his first works, and a collaboration too. don't know if you liked it or not, but i loved it. you can have the lead credit, i don't care about all that, but it would be a novel idea for me to try and write something sellable, that could actually make money. i've always had issues with commercialism and refused to bend in the past, but i realize i've shot myself in the foot with that. and when i say sellable and commercial, i don't mean Princess Diaries 2, i mean like dark knight, something a bit twisted, edgy, yet fun, that people would pay to see. in this day and age of shitty shitty and super shitty movies coming out, i know hollywood is dying for quality screenplays, and famous actors want to work, they just don't want to work on shit. look at ralph fiennes doing The Avengers, a totally shitty horrid screenplay, but a great idea.
well i adore The Usual Suspects (one of the first movies i owned on the new and exciting DVD format). It would pose a fun challenge; craft something edgy yet sellable. We could probably do one of those Silence of the Lambs/Se7en kind of films... something disturbing on a cerebral level as well as a visceral level. I'm also thinking of drawing from some 70s Italian thrillers ("Giallos" as they are known) and some true crime stories involving murderers (always been a fascination of mine).
one of the guys in my band told me about these "Smiley Face Gang Murders". It's an interesting idea that maybe we can do something with. here's a link
comic books are HOT too. my wife is dying over that Watchmen preview, and Hellboy 2 looks really good.
i saw Hellboy 2. I loved much of the visuals and characters, but i still liked the themes of the first one more (the Nazis interest in the Occult). Nazis usually make for better villains. Watchmen i'm not feeling. the book is one of my favorite pieces of fiction ever created, and i just feel like the movie is going to lose a ridiculous amount of the story in the translation. interesting side note; the character of "Rorschach" may act as one of the influences for the antagonist of whatever we decide to work on. He's one of the good guys of Watchmen, but he's also intensely disturbed and poetic in his disgust, which makes him sound like a walking Son of Sam letter to the police.
can't wait to read the rest of what you have to say.
- N.
well i adore The Usual Suspects (one of the first movies i owned on the new and exciting DVD format). It would pose a fun challenge; craft something edgy yet sellable. We could probably do one of those Silence of the Lambs/Se7en kind of films... something disturbing on a cerebral level as well as a visceral level. I'm also thinking of drawing from some 70s Italian thrillers ("Giallos" as they are known) and some true crime stories involving murderers (always been a fascination of mine).
one of the guys in my band told me about these "Smiley Face Gang Murders". It's an interesting idea that maybe we can do something with. here's a link
comic books are HOT too. my wife is dying over that Watchmen preview, and Hellboy 2 looks really good.
i saw Hellboy 2. I loved much of the visuals and characters, but i still liked the themes of the first one more (the Nazis interest in the Occult). Nazis usually make for better villains. Watchmen i'm not feeling. the book is one of my favorite pieces of fiction ever created, and i just feel like the movie is going to lose a ridiculous amount of the story in the translation. interesting side note; the character of "Rorschach" may act as one of the influences for the antagonist of whatever we decide to work on. He's one of the good guys of Watchmen, but he's also intensely disturbed and poetic in his disgust, which makes him sound like a walking Son of Sam letter to the police.
can't wait to read the rest of what you have to say.
- N.
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Thu 8/28/08 12:54 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
i understand your hesitation with not showing the screenplay you're working on, i'm a fucking maniac when it comes to self consciousness. i'm either IN YOUR FACE like david lee roth, or i'd rather just curl up and forget it and say it's shite and burn it all. but there's a place for something like that screenplay you're protecting, and a place for the other screenplay which we will speak of in depth in the near near future.
well i can tell you the title of the script; House with a Sky Inside. It takes place several days after a riot at a mental institution for the criminally insane. It's being constructed in such a way that it resembles the mental landscape of the patients/prisoners of the asylum, so it's full of strange images, non-sequitors, and wild characters. Basically it's my id gone wild.
well i can tell you the title of the script; House with a Sky Inside. It takes place several days after a riot at a mental institution for the criminally insane. It's being constructed in such a way that it resembles the mental landscape of the patients/prisoners of the asylum, so it's full of strange images, non-sequitors, and wild characters. Basically it's my id gone wild.
your choice of films to mention really intrigues me. i've been watching a LOT of movies for oh 25 years now, and i don't know any of the ones you mentioned (Subconscious Cruelty, Dust Devil, the Manson Family), I'm assuming they're recent ones. but i'm always looking for new stuff, cause i've seen SO much of everything. a video store is a very painful exercise in "been there done that" for me, it takes a lot for me to notice, so i'm glad to get new titles in mind, thanks.
no problem. I'm all about obscure, experimental, exotic films. Since American films are mostly trash, i've pretty much reserved my cinematic habits to films out of Asia and Europe. That's where a lot of the great, challenging films are coming from. The films i mentioned have been made available on DVD in the last few years. Subconscious Cruelty is only available as a Region 2 DVD, so i only have torrent of that one. if you check out Dust Devil, make sure it's Dust Devil: the Final Cut, cause there's a lot of different versions of that movie floating around, and Final Cut is the only one that's been approved by writer/director Richard Stanley (one of the few people i can say is a personal hero. you should look him up. one of the great cautionary tales of Hollywood).
no problem. I'm all about obscure, experimental, exotic films. Since American films are mostly trash, i've pretty much reserved my cinematic habits to films out of Asia and Europe. That's where a lot of the great, challenging films are coming from. The films i mentioned have been made available on DVD in the last few years. Subconscious Cruelty is only available as a Region 2 DVD, so i only have torrent of that one. if you check out Dust Devil, make sure it's Dust Devil: the Final Cut, cause there's a lot of different versions of that movie floating around, and Final Cut is the only one that's been approved by writer/director Richard Stanley (one of the few people i can say is a personal hero. you should look him up. one of the great cautionary tales of Hollywood).
i definitely want to talk more at some point about your several years frustration with trying to get published. i'd like to hear what routes you chose, and what material you submitted, that always has a big impact on the attempt. i think i could learn a lot from your trials, and maybe give some helpful hints if you want to try that painful route again. of course i want the easy route, but in a way i like how difficult "they" make it to get published, otherwise, there'd be a ton of serious shit out there.
Yeah... i just don't think i was ready. I look back on some of the stuff i sent out, and i hang my head in shame. I was younger though, and fooled myself into believing i was going to be the next "edgy" author. But i was trying too damn hard to be shocking, and the writing suffered because of that. Once i backed off and just let my pen do the talking, that's when i really felt like i tapped into something... but yeah, another time for that.
i'm all for that community of people who can collaborate, but i think it's about as difficult at forming a successful communist state that doesn't exploit the people. i think small groups of collaboration are much easier and more effective (2 or 3). we all have these monstrous egos we carry around, and to fit them all in one room is so so difficult. even just starting with 1 other person is such a challenge, that's why i'm starting small.
agreed.
so, let's table the "i pay you to read my fiction stuff", for just a bit, until we explore the screenplay thing, but that will be in the next email. i'll definitely be happy to pay you, we'll work out the details later. i'll have some available funds early to mid september.
also agreed.
also agreed.
- N.
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:58:47 -0700
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: the project.
To:
ok, let me control myself first, and try to keep these thoughts organized.
1. when i started thinking about movies to emulate, i shit you not, i said silence & se7en, we are on the same FUCKING page! and 'adore' is easily a word i would use for Usual suspects.
2. your smiley face gang link didn't work, but i'll google it.
3. ok, here's what i propose:
1. 6 months to produce a fully finished screenplay, ready to shop around to agents, etc.
2. we must negotiate and agree completely on all aspects of story and character, it will be a true collaboration (though again, you can have the first mention, thus credits would read: screenplay by Nick Cacioppo and Michael A, not the other way around)
3. our primary goals: write something commercially viable, if it can't sell, it's a FAILURE. the only caveat is to do it without selling out to commercial bullshit (Usual Suspects being the perfect model)
4. The necessary next steps are to collaborate and agree on:
a. genre
b. general story line and plot points
c. main characters
d. general tone (dark like Se7en, edgy and funny like Usual Suspects, serious like Silence)
5. once we agree on that, we then devise a general scene structure (i'll go over other general suggested guidelines in a bit), and then parce it up 50/50, and then swap each other's 50 to chop and revise, etc.
6. once we have a fully fleshed out skeleton, it's just a matter of polishing over and over til it's done.
if we get past step 4b without killing each other, we'll know it's highly possible and probable
let's think of this as a creative business venture, and integral to the survival of our creative souls. this is not about ego or being famous, it is as practical as it is creative. we help each other create something synergistic that could never have been done otherwise alone, we're trying to build each other's careers in writing and make something fucking SUCCESSFUL so we can do more with our lives what we want instead of dying slowly in a legal office/financial institution, if my primary goal is not to create something i think is cool and will make me rich, but to help you create something that will make you successful, and you do vice versa, our motives are pure. there's no room for ego, because the point is to use that ego for the good of the other person. i don't care if i've had more experience than you or not, or vice versa, we're out to help the other get it done and do it right. we can end up creating something that has a life of it's own that ultimately we both don't want to fail and becomes bigger than the both of us. and if we create 1 that flys, there will definitely be demand for 2, and 3, etc. do i sound idealistic and 15 years old right now?
you're already educating me, cause i don't know what the fuck a Giallo is, and i've seen a BILION movies!
and i'm right with you on the importance of themes, like in hellboy. sure, i want cool twisted good guys to blow shit up, but far more interesting to me are the stories behind the plot. for me, i love the interaction of the supporting characters he had along with him, especially the guy in the water tank, too cool. and what is cooler than 'disturbed and poetic'??? NOTHING. HAAA!!!! so we totally click for now.
take a look at my attached guidelines and see if it makes sense to you. remember, everything i suggest is negotiable, i am NOT trying to take over, just push it along. partners, right?
the only other thing that is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY is complete honesty. if you ever think this is going awry, going south, cracking up, you have to be open and communicate that. if communication breaks down, we're FUCKED. make sense?
will wait to hear from you, am very anxious, but don't want to was either of our time, if its not feasible.
m
----- Original Message ----
From: Nick
To: Michael A
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008 8:37:00 AM
Subject: RE: the project.
That all sounds good. I read through your guidelines, and that works well too. I think you'll find me fairly easy going/receptive, and open and excepting of criticism... as long as it's constructive and always respectful. I'll respond in kind.
In some sort of feverish daze, i spent most of yesterday brainstorming an idea. It doesn't have a title, but it has some of the characters and key plot moments. i attached the notes/ideas/influences to this email. Let me know what you think.
I say Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, but i'm not interested in creating another knock off of those films, which at this point are almost innumerable. It would be cool if we did something that could be placed alongside those films, yet was the next evolution of those films. Have it start out as a gritty cat-and-mouse, but by the the end of the second act have it become something hauntingly hallucinogenic (i just watched the Cell last night, which i guess is a decent template to go on, but i'd like to push it even farther).
As for tone... so far what i've got in my notes is fairly intense and dark, but in sort of the context of a fucked-up pulp novel crossed with a late 60s/early 70s grindhouse/midnight movie vibe, so it has some quirky characters, though some of them are put in situations that serve to further their intensity. I'm also influenced by a lot of contemporary Asian and European Horror/Thrillers that have been coming out in the last 8 years, and i can see some of those aesthetics making their way to American shores, so maybe we can be some of the first people to climb aboard, using their story-telling methods in an American film.
I also drew from real life... from articles i've read and studied. It's all in the attachment.
"Giallo" is Italian for "Yellow", which refers to the color of the paper that pulp novels were printed on. in the 60s/70s there was a surge of films that were inspired by these pulp stories, and they were called "Giallos". many American films, such as Saw, Se7en, and others have drawn influence from those films. notable directors; Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava.
alright that's enough of that. Can't wait to hear what you think.
- N.
notes
- Protagonist; No name yet. Strong, mother-bear-fierce female detective. Thinking Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hamilton, Chelsea Field, Stacy Travis, Sheryl Lee. Older, hardened but attractive.
She’s been somewhat deadened after a case a few years ago, where she rescued an environmentally autistic 7 year old girl from a mildly-retarded caretaker. She is cold and clinical, but remains moved and destroyed by that case, welling up when any memory of that day wafts through in memory. The girl was eventually institutionalized at the IRIS THACHER MEMORIAL ASYLUM, an experimental facility for dangerously unstable mental patients, after any and all attempts to make the child remotely functional failed.
The Detective is now trying to solve the motive behind a recent school shooting, where a disgruntled psychology major shot and mutilated an alarming number of teachers and students. The crime is the worst yet in what has been dubbed “the Happy Hour Slayings”, where the killers appear to be wearing black hoods with yellow smiley faces printed on the front. She begins to uncover the connections between these killings, the trail leading to the journals of the infamous “Karigan Stello”.
- Antagonist; “Karigan Stello”. Convicted serial killer. Picturing Crispin Glover or Jeffrey Combs. Found criminally insane by the courts, he is now held prisoner at the IRIS THACHER MEMORIAL ASYLUM, a compound rife with tension and seemingly on the verge of a full-scale riot.
Before Stello’s capture, he sent several packages out to assorted media outlets. The packages contained videos, different masks worn during the murders he committed (one of those masks being a black hood with a yellow smiley face printed on it) and copies of his handwritten journals. The journals were printed and read on-air near verbatim, and hundreds of counterfeit and bootleg copies made their rounds either from greedy clerks who got their hands on the journals or from people obsessively transcribing Stello’s words from television and internet broadcasts. Slowly but surely copycat crimes start happening, and there are reports of individuals wearing crude smiley face masks. Some of these people have merely misplaced their worship, raising Stello to the level of a folk hero, but other more unhinged people have used Stello as a blueprint for their own brand of murder and mayhem. Rumors of a mass cult of Stello worshipers begin to circulate, all of them wearing the smiley face masks and committing brutal acts of rape and mass murder. There will be some ritualistic scenes, where the cult members interpret Stello’s journal entries with their bodies, engaging in acts of mutilation and perverse sex. One scene I have planned is a massive orgy where the men and women are completely naked except for the smiley face masks, while a voice over of Stello reading a specific entry in his journal narrates the ordeal.
Stello appears ambivalent, even a little insulted by these cultists. He intent with sending out the packages was to offer people a window into his world. He is however so self-insulated that the idea that others may take his words to heart and commit similar acts of violence never crossed his mind. He is not opposed to these people worshiping him, he just wonders if they should be doing something more constructive with themselves and their feelings rather than just copying others and using that as a method of expressing their individuality. He is intense, disturbing, and poetic in his disgust for almost everything.
other characters;
- LIZA MONDAY: Survivor of Karigan Stello. Spunky, sardonic. She escaped Stello, was able to identify him, resulting in his capture. Picturing Shannynn Sossaman.
- CASTOR BRANNON: Liza’s on again/off again lover. Shares her humorously bleak view of the world. A twisted version of Jim and Pam from The Office. Picturing Rory Cochrane.
- CYRUS NABISCO: Unhinged Stello cultist. Sort of an evil Hunter S. Thompson parody. Feels the closest to Stello, since his close friend CASTOR BRANNON frequently dates LIZA MONDAY, the sole survivor of Stello’s kill spree.. Picturing Ben Foster.
Castor and Liza don’t take Cyrus too seriously, as they view his dementia as part of his image rather than any sort of genuine devotion to his alleged insanity. They write it off as a morbid curiosity. This time however they let their sardonic reigns go to slack, and become concerned and alarmed when Cyrus gets in a nasty bar fight, resulting in a violent and debilitating disfigurement of a patron. After this fight, Cyrus is completely transformed, his metamorphosis capped off by shaving all the hair off his head, eyebrows included, than giving himself chemical burns starting at the corners of his mouth and going up the sides of his face, the desired effect being the appearance of his own lips being elongated into a permanent sneer. Is caught by authorities when Castor reports of Cyrus’ intentions of taking a bus full of school children hostage and driving the bus off a bridge. He gets as far as petrifying the children, but is caught before any physical damage has been done to the students. He does however fatally stab the bus driver in front of them, unmoved as they scream and recoil in horror. These winds up being the most bizarre of the so-called “Happy Hour Slayings”, as Cyrus isn’t wearing the smiley-face mask, but has taken it a step further by burning a grin into his face, shaving all the hair off his head, wearing black lipstick on his chelsea grin, as well as putting big black ovals around his eyes, turning his face into a grim mock-up of the smiley face seen on the masks. He too is sent to the IRIS THACHER MEMORIAL ASYLUM, along with many other captured cultists.
They are initially unaware that they are being housed in the same facility as their icon, and when they become aware of the fact, the tension builds even further to the danger point. When one of the staff finally caves in out of sheer terror, he agrees to let a small group of the captured cultists have access to the confinement wing where Stello is being held. When Stello is found to be unimpressed, even disgusted by the cultists, they go mad, violently attacking Stello, tearing him to shreds, killing the staff member that let them in, and finally igniting the riot that will turn the IRIS THACHER MEMORIAL ASYLUM into the heart of all nightmare, the grounds now turned over to the prisoners inside, who began reconstructing the building to represent their own fractured view of the world.
(The aftermath of this riot will be shown in greater detail in House with a Sky Inside)
Inspirations/Influences/References;
- Gory Italian Thrillers (“Giallo”). Ex; Dario Argento (Profoundo Rosso, Tenebrae), Lucio Fulci (New York Ripper, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin).
- Late 60s/Early 70s “satanic” mindfucks. Ex; Ken Russel’s The Devils, Jodorwosky’s The Holy Mountain, Alucarda, the Mansion of Madness.
- Charles Manson. School Shootings (particularly the Virginia Tech Killer), Zodiac, the “Smiley Face Killings”.
- Shinya Tsukamoto’s Nightmare Detective (hardened female lead).
- Sion Sono’s Suicide Club (young people acting out in an cultish epidemic)
- Heath Ledger’s take on “the Joker” in Dark Knight
- Tandabou Asano’s “Kakihara” from Ichi the Killer.
- the Chemical Burn scene from Fight Club.
- Johnny: the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez
- songs; “Jester Axis” by the Communion
“Smile” as performed by Nat King Cole.
“Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” by the Buzzcocks
“How Deep is Your Love?” as performed by Take That
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:10:44 -0700
From: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: the project.
To:
i don't know a thing about grindhouse, i'm still stuck in shakespeare. can you elucidate briefly the best points of them, with a few titles?
also want to hear which asian & european story telling methods you're talking about, could i get a few examples of the methods, etc, and the titles of the films? have to do some brushing up.
From: Nick To: Michael A
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008 7:42:11 PM
Subject: RE: the project.
"grindhouse" is basically the film school term for low-budget, drive-in, exploitation, and cult films from the 70s up to the early 80s. It's an umbrella term that refers more to a time period than a specific genre of film. They were marital arts action films, screwball gross-out comedies, blacksploitation, raunchy teen sex romps, spaghetti westerns, women in prison films, grizzly horror films, rape/revenge movies, sexploitation, Mondo Cane (aka shockumentaries) etc.
some titles;
Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS
I Spit on your Grave
Driller Killer
Cannibal Holocaust
Foxy Brown
The Warriors
Maniac
the Last House on the Left
Men Behind the Sun
Faces of Death
Caged Heat
the Guinea Pig series from Japan ( Mermaid in a Manhole, the Flower of Flesh and Blood, Android of Notre Dame, the Devil's Experiment, He Never Dies)
here's a Wikipedia entry
as far as the storytelling methods of the asian films... it's hard for me to put it into words. There's just something more literary about their films... more artistic, vivid, and poetic, even if the subject matter is lurid. They take their films very seriously. here's some personal favorites from Asia;
Takashi Miike (Audition, Visitor Q, Izo, Ichi the Killer, Gozu)
Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: the Iron Man, Tetsuo 2: Body Hammer, Tokyo Fist, Vital, A Snake of June, Gemini, Nightmare Detective 1 & 2)
Sion Sono (Suicide Club, Strange Circus)
Park Chan Wook (Old Boy, Lady Vengeance, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance)
Art of the Devil 2 & 3
A Tale of Two Sisters
The Untold Story
Rubber's Lover
some other from other countries;
Andrey Iskanov (from Russia) - Philosophy of a Knife, Visions of Suffering
Nacho Cerda (from Spain) - Aftermath, Genesis, the Abandoned
Martin Garrido Baron (from Spain) - H6: Diario de un Asesino
films from France - À l'intérieur, Frontier(s), Haute Tension, Martyrs
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:35:07 -0700
From: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: the project.
To:
if you mean The Warriors, the one about the gangs in NYC, i saw that movie about 30 years ago, and i still think about it all the time. as a kid i idolized that movie!!
From: NickTo: Michael A
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 10:45:36 AM
Subject: RE: the project.
yup that's the one. total classic.
now that i think about it, the guy who played Luthor ("come out to play-ee-ayy!") would be a good Karigan Stello. just a thought.
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:27:27 -0700
From: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: the project.
To:
like the vibe, but i may be thinking more epic, like gandalf/magneto type, i'm thinking classic shakepearean tragic downfall figure that we could do a prequel on for when we're really rich and this thing is a household FUCKIN NAME!!
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Fri 8/29/08 6:51 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
maybe like Titus Andronicus?
I like the Shakespearean edge, but i don't want him to be too sympathetic, or his "origin" explored too much. What makes characters like John Doe or Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men) is that they are fully realized villains, allow the audience to concoct their own backstory for the character. Hannibal's evil suffered from needless sequels/prequels/requels that went too far into his character, rendering his evil inert.
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:28:11 -0700
I like the Shakespearean edge, but i don't want him to be too sympathetic, or his "origin" explored too much. What makes characters like John Doe or Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men) is that they are fully realized villains, allow the audience to concoct their own backstory for the character. Hannibal's evil suffered from needless sequels/prequels/requels that went too far into his character, rendering his evil inert.
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: another thought
To:
would like to stay away from stello being a serial killer, sounds too much like hannibal or like john doe from se7en, there should be plenty of ways to make him psycho and evil and violent without falling into that now worn out serial whatever guy. if we take madness as a central theme in this story, how about playing up that no one is safe from madness, no matter how brilliant or rich he/she may be, maybe he was a richard branson/donald trump type billionare/businessman/innovator who lost it and then started to destroy things instead of create things.
what thinks you?
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Fri 8/29/08 2:07 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
Maybe not a serial killer, but someone who has entertained and even attempted to go through with murder. It could've been a one night spree killing attempt, but the individuals who he tried to kill actually lived, though they could be disfigured or crippled. He could be inept when it comes down to it... just a guy who thought this was the only way to get his message out to the world.
He could be some kind of home-based entrepreneur maybe... since his personality indicates that he wouldn't want to be around people. That isolation and spare time could've fed into his madness.
To: m*******3333@yahoo.com
He could be some kind of home-based entrepreneur maybe... since his personality indicates that he wouldn't want to be around people. That isolation and spare time could've fed into his madness.
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 1:47:07 PM
Subject: Article for movie?
12 Decapitated Bodies Found in Mexico, Heads Still Missing Friday, August 29, 2008
Mexican authorities found 12 decapitated bodies on the Yucatan Peninsula Thursday, but have yet to find the heads, AFP reported.
Photos of the crime scene showed 11 headless corpses stacked on top of one another in a field outside the city of Merida, the capital of Yucatan state. Some of the bodies had tattoos and were jumbled amid blankets and tarps. One was completely naked, while the others wore denim clothing, AFP reported.
A twelfth body was found in a town called Buctzotz, 45 miles northeast of Merida.
It appeared to be the largest single group of beheadings in recent years in Mexico. The tactic has become more frequent in gangland-style killings, and the largest previous instance of decapitations occurred in 2006, when gunmen tossed five human heads into a bar in central Mexico.
"We believe that the 12 executions were an isolated incident and not part of a strategy to destabilize the state," Yucatan state prosecutor Jose Guzman told reporters.
The federal attorney general's office confirmed there were 12 dead and it was taking over the investigation — a move that usually indicates a case involves high-caliber weapons or drug trafficking, both federal offenses.
Merida had largely been spared the drug-gang violence afflicting many other Mexican cities.
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:48:28 -0700
From: m*******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Fw: Suicide bomber article
To:
this really fascinates me, i'd like to work some part of this in if possible.
----- Forwarded Message ----
To: m*******333@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008 11:09:28 AM
Subject: Suicide bomber article
Behind the Scenes: A Female Suicide Bomber Is Captured in Iraq Thursday, August 28, 2008
By Anita McNaught
BAQOUBA, Iraq — When the first few women in Iraq's Diyala Province began blowing themselves up late last year, I registered a shift in the insurgents’ tactics.
When the number of female homicide bombers was still in single digits, I began planning a trip to the province to find some answers for myself. I filed a story for FOX News that addressed some of the questions I had. That was back in March.
Since then, the number of women in and from Diyala who have used their bodies as a weapon has reached at least 20. This week, I sat next to a young woman who nearly became No. 21.
It was about four hours since she had been captured. I had been in the office of the governor of Diyala in central Baqouba when the news came through on the security reports. That building – and its occupants - have been the target of more than one female suicide bomber attack in recent months.
We begged a ride on a U.S. military convoy to get to Iraqi police headquarters. When I reached the office of the police chief, the frenzy was only starting.
We were the only Western media present. Over the course of the next two hours, the room filled with Iraqi journalists, photographers and video cameras.
She was sitting on the sofa, holding her disheveled clothes around her body, flanked by Iraqi police commanders I knew, deflecting a barrage of questions with a mixture of stubbornness and incredulity. The officers did not look particularly indulgent. It’s Iraqis more than U.S. forces who have suffered the most from this extraordinary run of violent homicide bombings in Diyala — Sunni and Shia have both been targets: forces like the Sons of Iraq and the police.
Beautiful, scenic, lush Diyala, which used to be famous for its endless groves of oranges and dates, is now notorious for its exploding women.
The present circumstances, as they had been described to us, were intriguing. The young woman had been caught in the vicinity of a large police checkpoint. She had not actually given herself up, but she had been behaving suspiciously long enough to prompt the police to shout at her to stay right where she was.
They eventually handcuffed her to a window grate, and then they proceeded to strip her half-naked to disarm and remove the explosive vest she was wearing.
We knew about this not only from eyewitness accounts, but because the acting Diyala police chief, Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, produced a video shot by an Iraqi police cameraman that showed all of this happening in almost painful detail. Khalaf played it on his enormous office TV, emphasizing details with a long metal pointer.
Her name was given to us as Rania, and there were many things about her that were startling. She gave a date of birth that suggested she was 15, but she certainly didn’t look that young and she said she'd had a husband for nearly a year. But it's true that many girls in the Middle East mature early and marry early.
She was not remorseful for what she had nearly done, but neither was she defiant. In the course of long, rambling, almost incoherent exchanges with Iraqi police interrogators, with me and my interpreters, and then finally with a scrum of local media, she told a contradictory tale.
She said she really didn’t know what it was she was being asked to wear. Well, she knew it was a suicide vest, but the fact that it was packed with explosives didn’t really register with her until long after she had walked out of the place where she was living with her husband’s sisters.
She said these two women had tied her into the vest and adjusted the final wiring, including a detonator. The wires alarmed her, she said, and she asked her in-laws more than once if she was being coaxed into something dangerous. The women just told her to take the suicide vest “to her mother’s.”
And that, she said, was what she was doing when she wandered into the checkpoint, wearing clothes that didn’t fit and behaving in a fashion almost certain to draw attention.
“So,” needled a female police officer, “you were taking it to your mother's so she could blow herself up, where you?” Rania took little notice of her.
Rania was clearly uneducated — she told us her schooling had finished at around the age of 10 — but she was not stupid. She had a streetwise wiliness, and a self-possession beyond her years. She was nervous, but not especially so. She chewed her bottom lip. But she met your gaze strongly and managed a wry smile or two.
She handled a pack of Iraqi media in the police chief’s office with some dignity, and when pressed by her various interlocutors, she pushed back crossly. Still, she gave little away — and even less that would implicate her in the planned murder in which she was intended to play a central role.
Others — principally her sisters-in-law, she explained — were the instigators. She was merely the unquestioning passive compliant agent of their mysterious plans. She was just ‘”transporting” the vest. She had hoped, she told us, that her mother would sort out the problem for her — perhaps by taking the vest to that very same police checkpoint and turning it in.
She hadn’t intended to blow herself up, she told us. But when I asked her what had made her change her mind, she said it was because she hadn’t wanted “to hurt innocent people."
Most female homicide bombers don’t live long enough to explain themselves to journalists. I know now from much reading and discussion with people researching the issue that there can be many reasons behind the act: Hopelessness, despair, coercion, fear, revenge, brainwashing.
We know that the recruiters go looking for vulnerable women, recently widowed or orphaned, or who have lost brothers who were insurgents. These women have little economic or social capital left in this post-conflict society. Some are married off repeatedly to militants, so that by the end they have become "disposable" in the eyes of the people around them.
In Iraq, these women are — so far — almost exclusively from Sunni communities, and the insurgency networks affiliated with Al Qaeda are training them and sending them to their deaths.
But Rania seemed to me to belong to another category. She was, after all, only just married. While her husband had “gone to Kirkuk to have a hernia operation” (she later told me he’d fled the district that morning, and as of today he is still on the run), there did seem to be a functioning family of sorts. She certainly wasn’t religious; I asked her about that. She said she’d “tried praying, but quit.”She said she wanted her and her husband to “rent a house and live together.” It was only after she married him that she was told by a local "Sahwa" group that her husband worked for Al Qaeda and had a track record of planting IEDs.
It sounded to me that she had grown up in an environment where the dividing line between what you lived for and what you died for had become very blurred. She was living in a house with more than one suicide vest lying around (police who went there told us they arested the “very defiant" sisters-in-law and found another vest). Death had been "normalized."
She told us that both her father and older brother had been kidnapped and murdered by militiamen in the past year. “That was when it all began to fall apart”, she said.
It was clear that at some point that morning, she had decided she could not go through with the detonation. She waited to be “found out.” But she could not go the whole distance of admitting her guilt.
At this moment, Rania is precious. The size and gruesome effectiveness of the Al Qaeda female homicide bomber program in Iraq has surprised and appalled everyone here. There is a report that there are another four "on the loose" somewhere in Diyala province. For both Iraqi and American forces desperately working to crack the homicide network and find the ringleaders, any first-hand "lead" — and future witness — like Rania is extremely useful.
Nevertheless, there will be no going back for her. Her failure to carry out what she had been ordered to do, followed by a very public unmasking, has undoubtedly made her a target for her own family. And she is unlikely to be treated well in jail; few Iraqi women survive incarceration unmolested.
To: m*******333@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008 11:09:28 AM
Subject: Suicide bomber article
Behind the Scenes: A Female Suicide Bomber Is Captured in Iraq Thursday, August 28, 2008
By Anita McNaught
BAQOUBA, Iraq — When the first few women in Iraq's Diyala Province began blowing themselves up late last year, I registered a shift in the insurgents’ tactics.
When the number of female homicide bombers was still in single digits, I began planning a trip to the province to find some answers for myself. I filed a story for FOX News that addressed some of the questions I had. That was back in March.
Since then, the number of women in and from Diyala who have used their bodies as a weapon has reached at least 20. This week, I sat next to a young woman who nearly became No. 21.
It was about four hours since she had been captured. I had been in the office of the governor of Diyala in central Baqouba when the news came through on the security reports. That building – and its occupants - have been the target of more than one female suicide bomber attack in recent months.
We begged a ride on a U.S. military convoy to get to Iraqi police headquarters. When I reached the office of the police chief, the frenzy was only starting.
We were the only Western media present. Over the course of the next two hours, the room filled with Iraqi journalists, photographers and video cameras.
She was sitting on the sofa, holding her disheveled clothes around her body, flanked by Iraqi police commanders I knew, deflecting a barrage of questions with a mixture of stubbornness and incredulity. The officers did not look particularly indulgent. It’s Iraqis more than U.S. forces who have suffered the most from this extraordinary run of violent homicide bombings in Diyala — Sunni and Shia have both been targets: forces like the Sons of Iraq and the police.
Beautiful, scenic, lush Diyala, which used to be famous for its endless groves of oranges and dates, is now notorious for its exploding women.
The present circumstances, as they had been described to us, were intriguing. The young woman had been caught in the vicinity of a large police checkpoint. She had not actually given herself up, but she had been behaving suspiciously long enough to prompt the police to shout at her to stay right where she was.
They eventually handcuffed her to a window grate, and then they proceeded to strip her half-naked to disarm and remove the explosive vest she was wearing.
We knew about this not only from eyewitness accounts, but because the acting Diyala police chief, Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, produced a video shot by an Iraqi police cameraman that showed all of this happening in almost painful detail. Khalaf played it on his enormous office TV, emphasizing details with a long metal pointer.
Her name was given to us as Rania, and there were many things about her that were startling. She gave a date of birth that suggested she was 15, but she certainly didn’t look that young and she said she'd had a husband for nearly a year. But it's true that many girls in the Middle East mature early and marry early.
She was not remorseful for what she had nearly done, but neither was she defiant. In the course of long, rambling, almost incoherent exchanges with Iraqi police interrogators, with me and my interpreters, and then finally with a scrum of local media, she told a contradictory tale.
She said she really didn’t know what it was she was being asked to wear. Well, she knew it was a suicide vest, but the fact that it was packed with explosives didn’t really register with her until long after she had walked out of the place where she was living with her husband’s sisters.
She said these two women had tied her into the vest and adjusted the final wiring, including a detonator. The wires alarmed her, she said, and she asked her in-laws more than once if she was being coaxed into something dangerous. The women just told her to take the suicide vest “to her mother’s.”
And that, she said, was what she was doing when she wandered into the checkpoint, wearing clothes that didn’t fit and behaving in a fashion almost certain to draw attention.
“So,” needled a female police officer, “you were taking it to your mother's so she could blow herself up, where you?” Rania took little notice of her.
Rania was clearly uneducated — she told us her schooling had finished at around the age of 10 — but she was not stupid. She had a streetwise wiliness, and a self-possession beyond her years. She was nervous, but not especially so. She chewed her bottom lip. But she met your gaze strongly and managed a wry smile or two.
She handled a pack of Iraqi media in the police chief’s office with some dignity, and when pressed by her various interlocutors, she pushed back crossly. Still, she gave little away — and even less that would implicate her in the planned murder in which she was intended to play a central role.
Others — principally her sisters-in-law, she explained — were the instigators. She was merely the unquestioning passive compliant agent of their mysterious plans. She was just ‘”transporting” the vest. She had hoped, she told us, that her mother would sort out the problem for her — perhaps by taking the vest to that very same police checkpoint and turning it in.
She hadn’t intended to blow herself up, she told us. But when I asked her what had made her change her mind, she said it was because she hadn’t wanted “to hurt innocent people."
Most female homicide bombers don’t live long enough to explain themselves to journalists. I know now from much reading and discussion with people researching the issue that there can be many reasons behind the act: Hopelessness, despair, coercion, fear, revenge, brainwashing.
We know that the recruiters go looking for vulnerable women, recently widowed or orphaned, or who have lost brothers who were insurgents. These women have little economic or social capital left in this post-conflict society. Some are married off repeatedly to militants, so that by the end they have become "disposable" in the eyes of the people around them.
In Iraq, these women are — so far — almost exclusively from Sunni communities, and the insurgency networks affiliated with Al Qaeda are training them and sending them to their deaths.
But Rania seemed to me to belong to another category. She was, after all, only just married. While her husband had “gone to Kirkuk to have a hernia operation” (she later told me he’d fled the district that morning, and as of today he is still on the run), there did seem to be a functioning family of sorts. She certainly wasn’t religious; I asked her about that. She said she’d “tried praying, but quit.”She said she wanted her and her husband to “rent a house and live together.” It was only after she married him that she was told by a local "Sahwa" group that her husband worked for Al Qaeda and had a track record of planting IEDs.
It sounded to me that she had grown up in an environment where the dividing line between what you lived for and what you died for had become very blurred. She was living in a house with more than one suicide vest lying around (police who went there told us they arested the “very defiant" sisters-in-law and found another vest). Death had been "normalized."
She told us that both her father and older brother had been kidnapped and murdered by militiamen in the past year. “That was when it all began to fall apart”, she said.
It was clear that at some point that morning, she had decided she could not go through with the detonation. She waited to be “found out.” But she could not go the whole distance of admitting her guilt.
At this moment, Rania is precious. The size and gruesome effectiveness of the Al Qaeda female homicide bomber program in Iraq has surprised and appalled everyone here. There is a report that there are another four "on the loose" somewhere in Diyala province. For both Iraqi and American forces desperately working to crack the homicide network and find the ringleaders, any first-hand "lead" — and future witness — like Rania is extremely useful.
Nevertheless, there will be no going back for her. Her failure to carry out what she had been ordered to do, followed by a very public unmasking, has undoubtedly made her a target for her own family. And she is unlikely to be treated well in jail; few Iraqi women survive incarceration unmolested.
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Thu 8/28/08 7:06 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
this could work definitely. I like the idea of a mad lady bomber.... love my crazy girls.
From: Nick
To: Michael A
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 1:56:50 PM
Subject: quick thing about the title...
i like it, but i think Thacher Memorial sounds a little punchier.. harder. but i dunno that's just me.
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:31:45 -0700
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: quick thing about the title...
To:
i'm not sold on my title suggestion at all, i just want to give it a bloody working name so we have something to work with. sometimes i love making movie titles and novel titles more than making the damn movie, i'm real flexible on this... immediately i also worry of ripping off that pretty cool stephen king thing on tv about the hospital....
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Fri 8/29/08 6:54 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
that's cool. It's still way early in the creative process, so we may find something more appropriate.
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:32:46 -0700
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: first go around
To:
ok, here's my first attempt at some kind of coherence, see attached. everything is negotiable, just trying to create some kind of form. below are more notes (i'm getting tired, so i may get incoherent)
- must keep it sellable, thus i'm trying for some uplifting elements, social things like sexism that women can associate with, cool dark shit that guys can love, and a sympathetic character that all insecure and crazy people (basically, every new yorker) can root for and feel good about
- really grooving on the theme of going into the belly of the beast, facing your worst nightmare (incarceration and being labeled mad) and coming out at least partially intact
- your music ideas are great, but remember, this is a screenplay and there is no place for music just yet, keep focused on the words, the story, the characters, and the things we have the power to develop. i''ve been listening to nine inch nails the whole time i wrote this. you like trent?
- worried about derivative elements of dark knight (smiling = joker)
ok, it's late and i'm burned out, next time i'll check email is tomorrow before i leave for work at 9:45 or so, and then after work at 7. if we can, why don't we keep one master document going, just to centralize everything.
i'm really feeling this thing and the collaborative element we got goin.
----- Original Message ----
From: Nick
To: Michael A
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 11:06:53 AM
Subject: RE: first go around
Alright...i'll do my best to keep my notes in the master document.
I will say i love what you've done with Cathrine Madden (great name. Wish i thought of it). the rest of my thoughts are in the master document.
Well the Dark Knight elements are what i thought might make it appealing to potential buyers. it could be a little to derivative, but only on a surface level. we'll see i guess.
- N.
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:35:14 -0700
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: first go around
To:
have to go back to work now, so i will read your updates tonight. also, a purely administrative tip, if you update the master document, change the title to reflect the latest date, or if done on the same day, add date and time, eg: todays at 1:00pm would be: md 0829100
From: Nick Cacioppo To: Michael A
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 2:54:49 PM
Subject: RE: first go around
no problem.
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:07:08 -0700
From: m****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: first go around
To:
i'm looking over all the stuff now, may take a few hours, hope to have something to you by around 9 or 10. my goal is to now get us really organized so we can efficiently funnel everything into one stomping ground, and go back and forth to finally meet at a forged piece of steel.
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Sat 8/30/08 12:06 AM |
| To: |
|
sounds good to me.
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Sat 8/30/08 3:52 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
this is the story i was telling you about;
GIRL FOUND IN HORROR CLOSET
COULDN'T SPEAK, EAT - HAD NEVER SEEN THE SUN
By LANE DeGREGORY
Posted: 4:19 am
August 10, 2008
PLANT CITY, Florida - The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.
A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.
The girl looked young. And too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.
The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.
Months went by. The face never reappeared.
Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside. Two officers went into the house - and one stumbled back out.
Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.
Someone had finally called the police.
Plant City Detective Mark Holste and his young partner found a car parked outside. A woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.
"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."
"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "Urine and feces - dog, cat and human excrement - smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."
Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.
The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.
"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"
A stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .
The detective turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.
At his feet, something stirred.
First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.
She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice.
Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked - except for a swollen diaper.
"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "That child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."
When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."
Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?
"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can.' "
THE detective carried the girl past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car.
"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner.
Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.
She weighed 46 pounds. In the pediatric intensive-care unit, they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.
Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.
Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. A doctor would write, "The child will be disabled for the rest of her life."
Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists.
She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold - or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while, she grunted.
She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.
The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But they believed she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. They doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.
Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.
"There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition," Armstrong said. "We saw a little girl who didn't even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."
THE authorities had discov ered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.
The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts - some fictional, some true - of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing.
It is said that during the 13th century, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II gave a group of infants to some nuns. He told them to take care of the children but never speak to them. He believed the babies would eventually reveal the true language of God. Instead, they died from the lack of interaction.
"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," Armstrong said. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."
Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.
Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General. Eventually, she was placed in a group home. In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school in a special-ed class at Sanders Elementary.
"If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position.
"She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone. She didn't know how to climb a slide or swing on a swing. She didn't want to be touched."
It took her a year just to become consolable, he said.
By Thanksgiving 2006, her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.
Luanne Panacek, executive director of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County, decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery - a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption displayed in malls and on the Internet.
BERNIE LIEROW, 48, and Diane Lierow, 45, have four grown sons from previous marriages and one together. Diane couldn't have any more children, and Bernie had always wanted a daughter. So last year, when their son William was 9, they decided to adopt.
When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.
When they met Danielle at her school, Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus. He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet.
Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.
They brought Danielle home on Easter weekend 2007.
"It was a disaster," Bernie said.
They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.
She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed.
She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours. All night, she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.
Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.
She took the plea.
After a year with her new family, "Dani" (as they call her) has grown a foot, and her weight has doubled.
Since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond.
She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. They take her to occupational and physical therapy, to church and the mall and the grocery store. They have her in speech classes and horseback-riding lessons.
SHE'S out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost.
Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens.
Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, Michelle says she was a student at the University of Tampa when she met a man named Bernie at a bar. It was 1976. They had two sons.
Bernard died in August 1997. Six months later, she met a man in a casino. "His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."
Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.
When Danielle was 18 months old, Michelle headed to Florida. She got hired as a cashier at a Publix supermarket. But it was OK: "The boys were with [Danielle]," she says.
She goes to the boys' bathroom, returns with a box full of documents.
The earliest are from Feb. 11, 2002. A caller reported that a child, about 3, was "left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper."
Nine months later, another call to authorities. A person who knew Michelle from the Moose Lodge said she was always there playing bingo with her new boyfriend, leaving her children alone overnight.
Michelle insists Danielle was fine.
A judge ordered Michelle to have a psychological evaluation.
Danielle's IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating "severe mental retardation." Michelle's is 77, "borderline range of intellectual ability."
Michelle is on probation until 2012.
© Copyright St. Petersburg Times. Reprinted with permission.
GIRL FOUND IN HORROR CLOSET
COULDN'T SPEAK, EAT - HAD NEVER SEEN THE SUN
By LANE DeGREGORY
Posted: 4:19 am
August 10, 2008
PLANT CITY, Florida - The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.
A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.
The girl looked young. And too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.
The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.
Months went by. The face never reappeared.
Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside. Two officers went into the house - and one stumbled back out.
Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.
Someone had finally called the police.
Plant City Detective Mark Holste and his young partner found a car parked outside. A woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.
"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."
"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "Urine and feces - dog, cat and human excrement - smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."
Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.
The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.
"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"
A stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .
The detective turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.
At his feet, something stirred.
First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.
She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice.
Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked - except for a swollen diaper.
"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "That child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."
When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."
Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?
"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can.' "
THE detective carried the girl past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car.
"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner.
Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.
She weighed 46 pounds. In the pediatric intensive-care unit, they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.
Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.
Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. A doctor would write, "The child will be disabled for the rest of her life."
Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists.
She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold - or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while, she grunted.
She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.
The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But they believed she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. They doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.
Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.
"There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition," Armstrong said. "We saw a little girl who didn't even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."
THE authorities had discov ered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.
The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts - some fictional, some true - of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing.
It is said that during the 13th century, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II gave a group of infants to some nuns. He told them to take care of the children but never speak to them. He believed the babies would eventually reveal the true language of God. Instead, they died from the lack of interaction.
"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," Armstrong said. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."
Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.
Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General. Eventually, she was placed in a group home. In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school in a special-ed class at Sanders Elementary.
"If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position.
"She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone. She didn't know how to climb a slide or swing on a swing. She didn't want to be touched."
It took her a year just to become consolable, he said.
By Thanksgiving 2006, her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.
Luanne Panacek, executive director of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County, decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery - a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption displayed in malls and on the Internet.
BERNIE LIEROW, 48, and Diane Lierow, 45, have four grown sons from previous marriages and one together. Diane couldn't have any more children, and Bernie had always wanted a daughter. So last year, when their son William was 9, they decided to adopt.
When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.
When they met Danielle at her school, Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus. He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet.
Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.
They brought Danielle home on Easter weekend 2007.
"It was a disaster," Bernie said.
They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.
She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed.
She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours. All night, she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.
Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.
She took the plea.
After a year with her new family, "Dani" (as they call her) has grown a foot, and her weight has doubled.
Since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond.
She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. They take her to occupational and physical therapy, to church and the mall and the grocery store. They have her in speech classes and horseback-riding lessons.
SHE'S out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost.
Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens.
Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, Michelle says she was a student at the University of Tampa when she met a man named Bernie at a bar. It was 1976. They had two sons.
Bernard died in August 1997. Six months later, she met a man in a casino. "His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."
Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.
When Danielle was 18 months old, Michelle headed to Florida. She got hired as a cashier at a Publix supermarket. But it was OK: "The boys were with [Danielle]," she says.
She goes to the boys' bathroom, returns with a box full of documents.
The earliest are from Feb. 11, 2002. A caller reported that a child, about 3, was "left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper."
Nine months later, another call to authorities. A person who knew Michelle from the Moose Lodge said she was always there playing bingo with her new boyfriend, leaving her children alone overnight.
Michelle insists Danielle was fine.
A judge ordered Michelle to have a psychological evaluation.
Danielle's IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating "severe mental retardation." Michelle's is 77, "borderline range of intellectual ability."
Michelle is on probation until 2012.
© Copyright St. Petersburg Times. Reprinted with permission.
| From: | Michael A |
| Sent: | Sun 8/31/08 3:50 AM |
| To: | Nick
|
yes yes yes yes yes. brilliant.
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:03:05 -0700
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: latest
To:
Ok, so i'm in organization mode. let me know if i sound too overbearing, i can ALWAYS lighten up, just need prodding.
here's what i want:
#1 top priority, we must now flesh out the full story and get EXACTLY to the same page. any misunderstanding we have will sabotage the focus of the work. we cannot have 'oops, i thought she was a blonde' 'oh nooo, she's a redhead'. communication. communication. therefore, we will now have central documents. if it ain't on them, it ain't part of it. of course we can go back and forth in email, but to have it officially on the canvas, we must keep it centralized. i see 4 key documents:
1. Treatment - this is a classical screenwriting term, meaning a story-ized version of the screenplay
2. Scene by scene breakdown - if its in the treatment, it must be reflected in the plot structure. think of scene by scene as the bones
and the treatment as the flesh
3. Key notes - this will be our log of all our ideas and feedback, etc. i suggest each writing comments in their own color (pick one), and
then if and when it gets too cluttered with color, edit, select all, and black out everything, but keep your latest comments in your color
4. the screenplay itself - this will come last after we've fully fleshed out 1 & 2.
again, my anal date stamping in the title will keep it organized.
i suggest we work to complete the treatment first, and then if/when that alters something on the scene by scene, update that too. ultimately the scene by scene will just be a pared down treatment to give a broad overview of plot structure. the treatment drives the scene by scene. the key notes can be the commentary for the treatment changes and development.
for the treatment, it's not about creative writing, its pure cold journalism of a sort, just telling the essential story and plot points. key notes can have backstory, if necessary. the treatment is what we'll use as reference to write the scenes in the actual screenplay. that means down the line, i can work on scene 2 while you're working on scene 1, and we won't have you ending her up in queens, when i've got her starting in montauk.
do you have microsoft word? i get your files in RTF format. is .doc a problem for you? let me know whatever's good. just one more little thing we can streamline.
i'd really like you to have the first go at expanding the treatment, i think i'm a better reactor than i am innovator, and you're so full of names and ideas and specifics i can't come up with yet. i'm a seriously thematic, fuck the details kind of guy. i did come up with some interesting backstory and possible story i've put in the notes, take a look. i'm also going to do a bit of research on the titus thing for stello.
we can go act by act, starting with fully fleshing out act 1 and see if the process works well, and then perfect the process for acts 2 and 3.
let me know what you think of this.
lastly, if we can communicate a schedule of work, that would be helpful too. i know i'm going to be peeing my pants (i sound like a fuckin girl there) to see what you've written, and would rather expect things later than earlier. so in NO WAY am i rushing you, but if you can ever give me a guideline/timeline (eg. give me 2 days to do act 1 of the treatment), it will allow me to sleep better and not get up at 3 a.m. JUST to check my email on the hope that you've pumped something out by chance... again, i could be way too anal and controlling about this, so just let me know. i really just like to communicate and keep everyone on the same page, but it can be annoying.
my schedule for the next 3 days:
1. out all day tomorrow, saturday, leaving around 9am, back around midnight, no access to email
2. sunday probably in and out all day
3. monday probably home a lot
ok, i'll stop now.
thoughts?
i'll now wait on you for:
a. feedback
b. concurring with or adjusting any/all of plans and processes
c. however much you want to do on act 1 of treatment, and/or backstory
d. anything else i've forgotten
later,
m
From: Nick To: Michael A
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 9:38:17 PM
Subject: RE: latest
well you've given me a lot to mull over, and i'll get started on it first thing tomorrow. I'll do my best to get the treatment and scene breakdown to you by Sunday.
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:21:30 -0700
From: m*******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: latest
To:
no rush, please. we don't need pressure to fuck this thing up. and i don't want to be a looming nag. have a great weekend if i don't hear from you. feel free to run any and all thoughts by me, will check email midnight tomorrow. take care.
----- Original Message ----
From: Nick
To: Michael A
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 10:38:31 PM
Subject: RE: latest
well here's some notes for now.
have a good weekend.
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:49:09 -0700
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: latest
To:
eatin it UP! did some short responses. really i'm going to bed now....
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Sat 8/30/08 4:25 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
 | 1 attachment(s) |  |
|
| key notes...rtf (25.3 KB) | |
thanks so much for the ideas and kind words. i did some short responses also.
i'll get to work on my treatment/scene breakdown later today/early tonight.
enjoy your weekend.
- N.
i'll get to work on my treatment/scene breakdown later today/early tonight.
enjoy your weekend.
- N.
Working title: Thacher Memorial
Overview: Detective Catherine Madden must struggle to keep her sanity, while fighting an insane world bent on destruction and a society bent on manipulation
N: I'd actually like to steer clear of the "sexism" thing... i feel like it's sort of a tired plot device. I like the idea of Catherine being just too intense for anyone to handle... i think we can do that without focusing on her gender. I wanna make more of an Ellen Ripley (Alien) style heroine, someone tough, fearsomely motherly, and a little crazy. The fact that she is incorruptable makes her threat, which is why she is incarcerated.
M: Maybe I came off too preachy on that, I have no urge to be the ms. Magazine poster movie of the year, yet I think it can be a valuable undercurrent and pretty much unsaid, yet understood.
LOVE the “incorruptible” aspect!
Hmmm, ripley vs sarah connor… I’m really torn here. I have much more the hots for Linda Hamilton in T2, but will not let my libido dictate. Yet, if we talk about crazy, sarah was crazier than ripley, so I’m still pulling for sarah.
N: She can be somewhere between the two, but my worry is that she'll come off as too violent/crazy. I think she should have it in her to get savage, but she should know when to stop herself. I feel like with Cyrus, Karigan, and the seemingly inumerable misguided "cultists", the insanity quotient is going to be pretty high. We need someone who can stand up to the chaos while still maintaining most of her composure. I'm not interested in making her too sexual, cause i feel like it's not enough of a challenge writing wise.
M: I concur with moderating the violence/craziness, don’t want a caricature or dirty harry. DEFINITELY not too sexual. I’ll talk about the sexual addiction thing later. By the way, when I’m thinking of Linda Hamilton in T2 at her “sexiest”, I’m thinking of her doing pull-ups on the bed frame, just so fucking empowered I want to soil myself, now that’s a turn on for me, better than jenna jameson doggy style any day (sorry jenna, I do love you though).
N: I'd like the "cult" to be more unyielding... without a central leader. Playing up the themes of Delusion, perhaps Cyrus could be so captivated by the notion of a cult of Stello worshippers that he thinks he can become the leader of the cult. One idea for a twist could be that "the cult" and much of Stello himself is a myth created by the media and authorities to frighten and incite, flushing out the the less-than-desirables of society and capturing them so this new experimental facility can have plenty of guinea pigs.
M: LOVE THIS, definitely want to make the hospital I dyanamic entity and personality of its own, perhaps abu-graihb elements too, trying to make people “better” what ever means necessary, even if they have to ruin a few hundred in the process
N:Pretty much. That's why Stello's journals were read on the air, sold over the internet, bootlegged, etc. The "copycats" think they're striking a blow against society, perhaps even believe that they are creating a new society by taking over the old one. but really they're playing into society's hands. The fatal mistake being that the media and authorities and society think they can control even the most desperate and insane brand of criminal. They are ill-equipped when dealing with the monsters they created, and this results in the crazies taking the asylum, dismantling it. I think this would tie in well to Catherine's incarceration, as she is seen as "not a team player". Catherine however, is not crazy. I'm not feeling the idea of Catherine leading the revolt at the asylum.
M: I don’t need her to lead the revolt, I was just thinking of giving her a way to use her smarts to escape her situation, learning to work with the insanity instead of fight/resist it. I also agree she is NOT crazy, yet she could hover over a very dangerous edge, and ultimately is the model of how the everyman can deal with their own madenss
N: She shouldn't do anything to stop the revolt, as she views this new facility as a failure, but i don't feel comfortable with her enginering anything behind the asylum walls. She shouldn't be one of the crazies or one of the staff, but her own entiy, beyond reproach.her only concern is the safety of the young girl (possible name for young girl; Lucy Cortian) and herself. Her instincts tell her to go for Lucy, and she cuts through the inmates swath of destruction to rescue her. The asylum will be lost by films end, but Catherine and Lucy will make it.
N: the smiley face basically goes through an evolution, starting as crude, cartoonish, and homemade, becoming more demonic and detailed, ending at Cyrus' disfigurment.
M: I’ll go with you on the smiley face, but you’re going to have to convince me it’s a) not derivative or copycat of the joker or of the recent smiley face murders and b) not just symbolizing just smiling, but has a deeper symbolism and meaning than just smiling (perhaps if it references a historical human trend of using the smile to signify the duplicity of madness and humor at the same time. If you’re REALLY sold on the smile, let me know and I’ll do some research in literature and history for interesting references.
N: The smiley face represents a way of quietly mocking the victim, who is being forced to gaze at the vaccously happy visage... a cheerful yet alarmingly joyless grin that makes it seem as if their misery is fodder for another's merryment. there is also the idea of a "chelsea grin", which is what happened to the victim of the Black Dahlia. cuts are made starting at the corners of the mouth and going up the cheeks. the victim would then be kicked, causing them to open their mouths as they scream in pain, which opens the cuts, causing the lower jaw to go unhinged. Another idea was having a flashback scene where Karigan (who wore many masks, a smiley face one being only one of those masks, yet unexplicably that's the mask that the copycats use, ignoring the others) is wearing a plastic Charlie Chaplin mask. At the end of Chaplin's Modern Times, he tells a distraught women to "Smile", while the song of the same name plays in the background as they walk off into the sun. Nat King Cole sang this song in the 50s. I love the song, but find it's message a bit infuriating... that a shithouse life can be made a heaven if you force your the corners of your mouth upward.... and it plays into the notion of mocking the human spirit, repressing genuine emotion in favor of cheap, phony content. Karigan wore the masks to play up different aspects of his psyche. The smiley represents his vile contempt by showing his savagery at its most complacent, it's most detached. Even while you're lying in pool of your own urine, crying and begging for life, all he can do is smile.
M: LOVE it. Just keep comforting that me people will not immediately say: JOKER!
N:I still wanna keep the subplot of Catherine rescuing the enviornmentally autistic girl, that being the catalyst for how she is when she is introduced in the film. love the idea of a young girl being rescued by Catherine at the hospital. It will play into the idea of redemption and tie into the EA girl without actually being that same girl.
M: Of COURSE!!! Did I somehow negate that in my previous summary? Didn’t mean to. Maybe I introduced it too late? No problem, have at it
N: I think that this Asylum should be something we haven't seen before. Clean... lots of machines. a pharmaceutical abyss. Maybe a "Steampunk" sort of look (look up the term "steampunk" and let me know what you think. i think it presents some incredible visual possibilities). After the riot, it will be a skinless nightmare.
M: I LIKE the steampunk aesthetic, maybe even a neo version of that, where we play up the fantasy element more than the Victorian, leaning towards techie (was that totally incomprehensible?)
N: no no i get it. I wanna have some of the victorian element, but absolutley more of a modern, extreme version... as if the Victorian is only there in traces, completely swallowed by modern thought.
N: as for Karigan Stello himself; Maybe not a serial killer, but someone who has entertained and even attempted to go through with murder. It could've been a one night spree killing attempt, but the individuals who he tried to kill actually lived, though they could be disfigured or crippled. He could be inept when it comes down to it... just a guy who thought this was the only way to get his message out to the world. He could be some kind of home-based entrepreneur maybe... since his personality indicates that he wouldn't want to be around people. That isolation and spare time could've fed into his madness. The media blows him up into a monstronsity; a testament to the pervisity our society has reached when it attempts to forge a new, independent path. They want order, and they feel as if they are losing their grip... that too many people are starting to think for themselves, so they use Karigan as an example of what happens when you choose to go your own way (ie; working from home and being your own boss rather than bowing to your corporate masters), when you speak out against the way things are going (his journals).
M: I believe he is YOUR baby for now, so I’d like to step back on this and let you develop him. My strong opinions have been voiced, and I just want to make sure he is very very complex and human, while at the same time being evil. Chigurl of course is my hero, but I still believe his type is too one dimensional,. I will be very skeptical and resistant to anything too charicaturish or derivative. Sound ok?
N: sounds very okay. He won't be a Chigurh clone i can assure you... i was just using him as an example of a villian who is fully formed to the point that you can't even imagine how he got to this level of brutality. He'll be a villian, but totally human, which i think will make him more unnerving. He'll be a little bit like Charles Manson; an abomination of a human being, but nowhere near the supreme evil mastermind that the media has made him out to be. They build him up into a supervillian so they could sell books and movies and most horrifingly, use fear to control the masses as well as inspiring those who may be desperate or crazy enough to carry out acts of criminality, so they can flush those subversives out and "cleanse" society. a little tin-foil-hat perhaps, but i have fun calling society on their hypocricies.
M: Didn’t think you’d try for chigurh 2, just emphasizing the multi sided thing I love, like the charles manson comparison too, just as long as its not too close to him either
N: No he won't be quite the raving lunatic that Charlie can often be. Karigan may say some Manson-esque things, but he'll be more cool... more of a twisted intellectual than a boxcar hobo gone horribly wrong.
N: i'd like to really push the subversive, Orwellian aspects. They won't be there at first, but it will be revealed as the "twist". Karigan, Cyrus, and the other people in the asylum are crazy, but they are really just caged animals. The real monsters are out there...the real asylum is outdoors.
M: Once again, I bow DOWN to you!! Orwell is my HERO, 1984 (with Richard burton and john hurt) is one of my favorite films of ALL TIME. I was just watching it two days ago for the Nth time. Please elaborate on this and how it will be incorporated. Actually I could see burton’s character in 1984 as a possible model for stello, but I’ll STOP interfering and shut my mouth and let you go. (as he yells beneath the duct tape
N: Well in 1984 they created the idea of an enemy to use fear and anger to control the populus. That will be the case here, where the media constructs this idea of a violent youth cult, encouraging parents suspiscious of their children's behavior (or friends suspicious of other friends or bosses or teachers or whatever) to report them to authorities, or to even send them to the IRIS THACHER MEMORIAL ASYLUM, the experimental facility that's now almost excluively dealing with Stello and those he has "inspired".
M: Abused institutionalism and conformity as oppression, love it of course. Rationality taken to the extreme so it crushes humanity. I’m really thinking of playing up the “experimental thing” all those crazy evil ideas that scientists can rationalize trying, totally destroying people and their dignity, but for the “good” of society. How about like the creator of the place was actually really inspired by the nazi death camps, and saw some really useful efficiency models and thought he could put them to use, or he saw a way of using old torture instruments to somehow heal his patients. They’re trying so hard to be brilliant, they totally miss the point…
N: Absolutley. I'm having flashes of all kinds of weird, ornate machinery... and it will probably almost take the form of a neo-stalaag. I am envisoning a Heinrich Himmler/Mengle type as Dr. Thacher... picturing Kurtwood Smith as he was in Robocop (he played the villain "Clarence Bodicker"). I almays mourned the fact that he never played another smug villain, so maybe this will give him an excuse to put the wire frame glasses back on and stir up some ruckus.
M: I’d like to let you develop the liza/castor sub plot, I don’t know you want to incorporate this or how essential it is to you.
N: Liza is a survivor of Stello's campaign of suffering. Castor is her boyfriend. Cyrus is friends with both of them, thus he feels the strongest connection to Karigan due to Liza's abduction and essentially besting of him. Cyrus has always been quirky, but mostly harmless. He has a vivid imagination, and is a bit a bullshit artist, who is now seeking to make his delusions a reality. Liza and Castor are realitvley minor characters, who will probably dissapear when Cyrus fully immerses himself as the next evolution of Stello. their dissapearence signifies Cyrus' detachment from anything connecting him to the real world, as he sees them as albatrosses that will keep him from his alleged destiny.
M: New backstory/ scene 1/act 1 ideas:
NYPD detective Catherine Madden has suffered through a difficult life and career.† After clawing her way into the police department (being schooled in the Bronx as a rookie), she soon became the pariah of the department.†† Since she virtually sacrificed her whole life and her sanity for her career, she has given up all chances of a normal relationship with a man, a family, and having children.†† Because of the stress combined with her total dedication/immersion in the job, and her isolated social situation, she suffered a sexual addiction for a while and became the "whore" of the department.
N: like everything except the sex addiction. I'm not a prude or anything, i just don't know if will serve her well if she is to be sympathetic. Everything else is golden, cause it makes her almost the second side of the coin (the other side being Karigan). 2 lonely people who are bascially combating that lonliness, but the ways they are combating the lonliness are in direct oposition. They understand each other. They're on the same page... it's just a different book.
M: I’m not wedded to the sex addiction, and DEFINITELY must maintain her sympathetic integrity, I’m just looking for a cool flaw that she could have that would really scar her, but not destroy her. Human suffering is so often manifested as addiction, which one would you choose?
N: I would make her obsessive over her job, perhaps by surroundong herself with humanity's absolute bottom psychological/social rung, she can trick herself into believing that evil has only one true face, that stopping the maddest people to the point of damaging her own psychosis will make the world safe for decent people. Of course she uncovers the conspiracy of an SS like campaign on the mentally ill, where the media and authorities and institutions meant to to do good have been driven made themselves at their own inability to deal with the ever-growing epidemic of mental illness, so they use Karigan to galvanize the population, shaking it down until those who are uncontrollable (or in some cases just different) are locked away in one location, so the "sane" people can go about their buisness and not have to worry about caring for these people.
M: This simultaneously helped and hurt her career, causing her to climb the ranks a bit quicker, but at the same time gaining the disdain and the disrespect of all her colleagues.†
She finally went over the edge when she saved the autistic girl named Lucy, this summed up all of her despair over children and even her own damaged childhood.†† Perhaps she was diagnosed falsely as autistic when she was a child, and her parents treated her as a freak/outcast.
N: well Lucy isn't going to be the autistic girl... Lucy is going to be the girl in the asylum who ultimatley acts as a symbol initially for Catherine's greatest failure (the environmentally autistic girl never fully recovered, and the mildly retarded mother of said child was never formally charged with anything. I'll send you an article that i'm drawing from to understand the tragedy i'm going for with this situation), but she becomes Catherine's hope for redemption. I had the idea that Lucy and her older sister Illana were put in the asylum by their parents when they got caught up in the media hype of the young people going crazy. Being naieve and ultimatley inept at being parents, they went the easy route and had both their children commited. While Illana is genuinley disturbed (her sickness made even more horrible by being incarcerated in the ultimatley ineffective asylum), Lucy is merely a quiet young girl whose interests aren't congruent with that of a "normal" pre-teen girl. the fact that a good hearted, intelligent young girl like Lucy was put in this den of iniquity by her own parents makes Catherine sick to her stomach, but she puts her rage aside and acts as the child's mother.
M: Sorry, I misunderstood, but LOVE it all! Send me article, I’m trying to lock into your vibe and the tragegy, if she can’t kill the captor of the girl, maybe just rough her up enough for a lawyer to charge her with assault and going over the line, just enough to get IA on her ass and make her a threat to the system, though everyone would have wanted to do the same. Love the sister thing too. I’ve got a huge grudge against bad parents in general, so you’re just stroking me off with any anti parental like sentiment or condemnation of bad authority figures. Easy sell for me…
here's a quote for the end credits;
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Sun 8/31/08 2:06 AM |
| To: | Michael A |
“We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little: More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”
- Charlie Chaplin, the Great Dictator, 1940.
- Charlie Chaplin, the Great Dictator, 1940.
| From: | Michael A |
| Sent: | Sun 8/31/08 3:53 AM |
| To: | Nick
|
can't argue with it..... well done.
----- Original Message ----
From: Nick
To: Michael A
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2008 9:38:19 PM
Subject: RE: latest
here's my treatment. Let me know what you think.
TREATMENT;
PROLOGUE:
A young girl bursts through the screen door of a large house on suburban Long Island. She runs down the street. A man in an ill fitting black suit and a plastic Charlie Chaplin mask attempts to go after her, but winded, he collapses, falling down the steps. Police arrive and cart him off.
ACT 1:
Detective Catherine Madden has just gone through the most emotionally taxing case of her career, involving an environmentally autistic girl. In a rare slip of her usual demeanor, Catherine attacked the child’s mildly retarded mother, which costs Catherine a promotion, and almost a suspension. She undergoes sensitivity training, and regularly meets with a staff psychologist (under direct orders).Catherine is also now given the cases no one believes can be solved. One case sets the course for a chain of events that will challenge everything Catherine believes about the nature of humanity; a school shooting that ranks among the most violent and bizarre spree killings in the history of crime.
Partnered with a fellow detective (whom Catherine has a difficult time figuring out), They begin to uncover connections that exist between Catherine’s once-thought “unsolvable” case load. Digging deeper, they find symbols, quotes, etc. that seem to have something to do with the journals of the now infamous Karigan Stello; attempted murderer diagnosed as criminally insane and sent to the Iris Thacher Memorial Asylum, an experimental new facility designed to specifically deal with the more “uncontrollable” types of mentally ill. Before Stello’s capture, he sent out packages to various media outlets, each containing videos, masks, and copies of his own handwritten journals, which have since been read on air, or obtained through other assorted means.
ACT 2:
Rumors of a secret society or “cult” of Stello worshipers begin to circulate, suggesting that these acts of violence are being carried out in collusion with one another. One such believer in this notion is Cyrus Nudesco, an unhinged societal outcast who finds a twisted sense of empowerment when he immerses himself in Stello’s words.
He begins to frighten his two closest friends; couple Castor Brannon and Liza Monday, the latter of whom is a survivor of Stello’s campaign of carnage and anguish. Cyrus feels that he has a stronger connection to Stello than any of the so-called “cultists”, because of his relationship with Liza, who was instrumental in Stello’s capture. He is constant gratitude of her, because if not for her turning in Stello, the “message” would have never gotten out, and Cyrus would still view himself as a “Lost Cause”.
As Cyrus gets further and further into Stello’s “doctirnes”, he gets more animated and violent. This culminates in Cyrus disfiguring himself, and attempting to hijack a bus full of school children. He is caught by Catherine before and real damage can be done, but once again due to the nature of Cyrus’ crime, Catherine nearly beats him to death. Because of this, Catherine, along with Cyrus, are both sent to the Iris Thacher Memorial Asylum. Initally, Catherine is sent there just for “intense psychological evaluation” , not incarceration (as is the case with Cyrus). This turns out to be a ruse, And Catherine is now imprisoned in the experimental facility; with Cyrus and Stello.
ACT 3:
Two young girls are admitted to the asylum by their parents; Ilana and Lucy Cortian. Ilana is legitimately disturbed, but her younger sister Lucy is merely quiet and disinterested in typical teenage girl things. Catherine becomes quite moved by the precocious Lucy, and becomes her surrogate mother/big sister, making up for Lucy’s absentee mother and psychologically deranged older sibling.
Cyrus is at first ignorant of the fact that Stello himself is incarcerated on the grounds, but he (along with several other Stello “cultists”) eventually uncover the truth, cornering the owner/operator of the asylum Dr. Clarence Thacher and forcing him to take them to Stello’s cell. When the meeting with Stello doesn’t go as planned, the cultists (with Cyrus thinking himself their “leader”), they revolt, violently killing both Stello and Thacher. This ignites a log-gestating riot. Cyrus and the other cultists release a bulk of the more violent inmates, and they begin to destroy everything and everyone in site, including each other. Cyrus himself is gruesomely murdered by the very people he released.
Amidst all the carnage, Catherine holds Lucy tight, rescuing her (and herself) from the blood sodden grounds. As Catherine and Lucy take one last look at the asylum, they notice that no police or authorities have reported to the scene of the crime. It’s just her and Lucy and the emptiness of the outdoors. Catherine has come out of hell almost unscathed, and looking at Lucy, she feels triumph for the first time in a long time.
Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:57:11 -0700
From: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: latest
To:
okay, i have lots to say about this, and am happy to hear all responses and/or rebuttals. let me know if i ever sound overbearing, undermining, demoralizing, etc, that is never my intent.
1. i like everything here, but i feel crucial elements are missing. there just need to be some adjustments and amendments/additions
2. perhaps one of the most important questions in every story is: who's story is it? if you lose this focus, you lose the story. i think we agree it's catherine's story, yet i worry that you lose focus of that by coming right out of the gate with stello's story. if i compare that interesting and intriguing set up of "who the hell is the guy in the mask?", with "oh my god i've just seen 1 million cockroaches and one of the worst treatment of children in HISTORY!!!", number 2 clearly WINS in my opinion. i think this could set up the whole tone of the movie: life is so fucking ugly and we have to muster a lot of courage and character to get through it. or we instantly pose the question "how is this poor girl catherine going to deal with this for the rest of her career/life? will she ever survive or be psychologically healed again?" by knocking her DOWN so low right out of the box, we then begin the story of building her back up (after we fuck with her for 3 acts), and showing just what one human can endure. and as i talk about endurance, remember, it our goal to test her endurance in an OLYMPIC manner, i'm talking the fuckin michael phelps psycho olympics times TEN, which brings me to all important point #3.
3. dramatic tension/obstacles. i'm not feeling the tension or seeing the huge psychological indiana jones type boulders she must DODGE or be CRUSHED by. tension is caused by two things: conflict and questions that need to be answered:
questions:
holy shit, how is she going to deal with THAT one?
oh my god, how is she going to solve all these cases?
Can she hold it together after THAT challenge?
etc, etc
potential conflicts:
catherine vs herself (kind of see it)
catherine vs the department (kind of )
catherine vs society (sort of)
catherine vs her partner (sort of)
catherine vs cyrus (ok, once)
catherine vs stello (don't see any)
all of these obstacles need to be thrown at her in a methodical and escalating way. think of one of my favorite movies ever: die hard. god i love that tale of survival, & hope you will do. just from memory:
1. holy shit, can he do this without shoes?
2. holy shit, can he stop hans, who is SO smart?
3. holy shit, can he beat a whole team of bad guys?
4. holy shit, how can he fight when the feds are fucking it all up?
etc, etc, etc. one lovely arc of escalation and building tension until face to face with hans having the upper hand by having his woman hostage.
no, we're not doing an action thriller, but the drama MUST be there. even with romeo and juliet, if you take it apart as i have, you'll see the escalation of risk is systematic, every step they make, the tension and stakes are turned up, and finally it comes to a choice of life or death and how much they're willing to sacrifice for their love of each other. the questions beg: what is catherine willing to do to maintain her stability, integrity, and sanity?
we need this at key points, most significantly:
a. at the end of act 1 (scene 10), we must be PROPELLED into act 2
b. in the middle of act 2 (scene 15) the table must be completely turned
c. at the end of act 2 (scene 19) or beginning of act 3, the heroine must be at THE furthest point from success and happiness in the whole story
i don't see these points clearly defined.
i don't feel a lot of dramatic tension
i feel focus is lost by:
a. prologue is NOT about heroine
b. act one doesn't set up the big picture tension enough
c. act two is too much about cyrus
d. act three doesn't seem to focus as much on catherine as need be
again, i don't think anything needs to be removed, just the catherine plot line needs to be better defined and structured in a dramatic tension sense.
does all this make sense? arguments?
lastly, i've edited the treatment to leave out what i think is extraneous language, that i believe doesn't directly contribute to action/story.
comments, questions, complaints?
my suggested course of action is for you to keep running with this, and once you fill out the necessary plot points, then i'll perhaps try to add or adjust, etc. or if you want me to give it a try, let me know, and i'll throw some stuff out there.
lastly, i was reading about Milton tonight, and they said about his creation of satan: "one of the greatest portraits of villainy ever created". i'd like to apply that here, but if i use your treatment as evidence, i'm not sure: who is the villain? stello? cyrus? the hospital? the hospitals director? society? catherine's tortured self/ how is that villainy doled out and directed? at this point i can't tell.
let me know.
From: Nick To: Michael A
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2008 12:59:32 PM
Subject: RE: latest
well Catherine will be throughout the entire film. I figured the script itself would flesh that out, and i just used the treatment to sort of generally show what Catherine would be focusing on. I didn't get too detailed on what exactly would be happening, because again, i figured the treatment is just broad strokes... little punches of the story. The script itself will tie it all together much more succinctly.
The reason for the prolouge is to show how the moment instrumental to Karigan incarceration is congruent with the moment instrumental to where Catherine is.
There isn't much of a conflict between Stello and Catherine. Catherine sees Stello as sort of a strawman target for society's fear of things going out of control, and Stello just views her as someone doing their job. He can sense that Catherine has the same impatience for society that he has... she just went a different route.
the idea of "who is the villain?"... what i'm going for is "who isn't the villain?" If you're going to explore the theme of a world going mad, then fuck...the world must be going MAD. Catherine is the one who sees it, but unlike the rest of the characters, who are either exploiting the dementia, misdiagnosing it, or just letting it engulf them, Catherine is seemingly the last person left who wants to rise above the trappings of her own mind, who refuses to let society break her down.
Sorry if i wasn't clear... always had problems with treatments. i understand its necessary, but i never know what to keep, what hold back... it's hard when you've got a lot of ideas for something and you have to condense what may be a 100 page screenplay into a page and half of 4-5 paragraphs. It's hard getting the full picture... but that's just me.
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:38:08 -0700
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: latest
To:
it sounds like you're stressing, don't stress. if it's not fun, don't do it.
ok, we just have to be clear. since we're collaborating on this and we both have to share the vision equally, we both must be able to know EXACTLY what's happening and where it's going. think of the treatment as an architecture plan that we both have to be able to read the same way. it's mostly about communication and detailed directions. you're jumping ahead of yourself and the process. start with the treatment, flesh it ALL out there, and then the screenplay will be a natural progression. don't even THINK about the screenplay yet, it's irrelevant. if the treatment is not succinct, the story is not succinct, and then the screenplay will be a muddled mess. that's why we impose so much structure up front. the scene by scene breaks it down into 30 little pieces, the treatment is the first attempt to fully elaborate on what each of the 30 pieces looks like. for the treatment, just think exact, precise, plot points. a,b,c. mcclain must first go to holly's office, then up to the 14th floor, then up to the roof, then into the ceiling with hans, etc. not so much descriptive or historical, but very connect the dots. we have a story to tell, and we must know the essential points.
why not make conflict between stello and catherine? #1, the story can always use more conflict, #2 if they're not in conflict, they're either neutrally mulling about around each other or are in harmony, and that's not the case, is it? i remember you calling her the protagonist and him the antagonist. that MUST be delivered through conflict, even if its that she's struggling to make the world orderly and he's struggling to make it chaos. i don't think Ike and Hitler ever slugged it out in a room together, but they were in serious conflict with their pawns.
of course i like the multitude of villains, but each villain must then have their own agenda and genesis of progressive action, otherwise they're an impotent villain. remember, this is a play, come back to conflict, conflict, conflict. if a person exists in this world they're in motion, and they're fighting something. no one just sits around in the dramatic world.
the treatment is the footprint of all the actions. the screenplay is for the words and dialogue. remember, you can't really have too much of a say in imagery or visuals of the final film, that's for the director and the cinematographer. the best you can do as a screenwriter is give him a well defined frame to work with. he won't mess with your words. and he could edit the shit out of your story, but if the themes are so well put together, he can stick with it more. the best thing i ever read was that a great screenplay is actually not too specific, in one aspect, because it gives the director the greatest room for creativity and interpretation.
perhaps i wasn't clear about the treatment, it can be 5 - 15 pages long! don't worry about having "too much" at this point, don't hold back!! this is the most wonderful part of the project where we can throw it ALL out on the canvas. 50 pages of treatment, 300 pages of screenplay, if we want. but ultimately it will all be distilled down to its beautiful essence. 15 pages of treatment. 90 pages of screenplay. we MUST stick to 90 pages, 30 scenes, we cannot deviate from that, otherwise we look like amateurs.
if you need to talk through some of this, let me know, we can talk. maybe i'm being vague about all this and it's throwing everything off. since i've done this so many times before, it's just familiar steps to me.
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Sun 8/31/08 6:38 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
i am still formulating the structure. I haven't really thought too much about the screenplay itself, aside from little random details that pop in my head that i'm keeping in a notebook. My mind is always wandering, and this has almost consumed most of my thoughts. But i can assure you, i have not jumped the gun in any way. I want very much for this to be ironed out.
Karigan was initially referred to by me as the "antagonist", but the more i started fleshing it out, the more i realized that he would be more of a red herring... someone whom we are made to believe is the architect of this whole thing. The main main villain will ultimately be Society itself... the face of that evil best represented in Dr. Clarence Thacher, who i'm still fleshing out as we speak.
as for the conflict... sure it'll be there i guess. But as i said above... it's not going to go where the audience thinks it's going to go. I'd like to stress that this will be something more unique than you're typical "wily detective vs. serial mastermind" thing.
I have no objection to adhering to time-tested rules of screen writing, because so far i think they are tremendously helpful, and i don't want us to look like amateurs (well i guess i am, but you're not, and i don't wanna make you look bad), but i also don't want us look like meat puppets; as if we just copied stuff from a mass-produced script book, forcing ourselves into some box... but if we must, i'd like to maybe add some interesting decor to said box...maybe expand the corners, put up some strange curtains, some posters of naked ladies, etc. I want to be able to sell it, but i want it to stand out among the thousands of bland screenplays that the studios have to read through everyday. Give them some bang for their buck... really work for that paycheck.
and regardless of whether or not we have any say in the imagery/visuals, they're going to be in the script... they have to be. i know we'll have little to no control, but i want to show people we have a vision here. I don't want to just hand them 120 pages of "this happens than this happens than this guy says that and she responds". It's still a piece of writing. I can try to hold back, cause i know we're not writing a novel, but whomever is reading it must be able to visualize it. Whoever the director winds up being, i know he'll put his own mark on the material... but just for my own selfish need for assurance... i want whoever is reading this script to go "wow these suburban jack-off know their shit". I want imaginations ignited when they read it. Some say the best scripts have little details.... i dunno... maybe... but to me the best scripts are the ones that allow the movie to be pictured in your head, that allow for you to envision the environment these characters are inhabiting. Especially with this particular film, where the environment will be a character in and of itself.
you are right about me stressing, though. Maybe i'll take a the next couple of days to chill and formulate myself. I'll hit you back with a revised treatment.
take it easy.
- N.
Karigan was initially referred to by me as the "antagonist", but the more i started fleshing it out, the more i realized that he would be more of a red herring... someone whom we are made to believe is the architect of this whole thing. The main main villain will ultimately be Society itself... the face of that evil best represented in Dr. Clarence Thacher, who i'm still fleshing out as we speak.
as for the conflict... sure it'll be there i guess. But as i said above... it's not going to go where the audience thinks it's going to go. I'd like to stress that this will be something more unique than you're typical "wily detective vs. serial mastermind" thing.
I have no objection to adhering to time-tested rules of screen writing, because so far i think they are tremendously helpful, and i don't want us to look like amateurs (well i guess i am, but you're not, and i don't wanna make you look bad), but i also don't want us look like meat puppets; as if we just copied stuff from a mass-produced script book, forcing ourselves into some box... but if we must, i'd like to maybe add some interesting decor to said box...maybe expand the corners, put up some strange curtains, some posters of naked ladies, etc. I want to be able to sell it, but i want it to stand out among the thousands of bland screenplays that the studios have to read through everyday. Give them some bang for their buck... really work for that paycheck.
and regardless of whether or not we have any say in the imagery/visuals, they're going to be in the script... they have to be. i know we'll have little to no control, but i want to show people we have a vision here. I don't want to just hand them 120 pages of "this happens than this happens than this guy says that and she responds". It's still a piece of writing. I can try to hold back, cause i know we're not writing a novel, but whomever is reading it must be able to visualize it. Whoever the director winds up being, i know he'll put his own mark on the material... but just for my own selfish need for assurance... i want whoever is reading this script to go "wow these suburban jack-off know their shit". I want imaginations ignited when they read it. Some say the best scripts have little details.... i dunno... maybe... but to me the best scripts are the ones that allow the movie to be pictured in your head, that allow for you to envision the environment these characters are inhabiting. Especially with this particular film, where the environment will be a character in and of itself.
you are right about me stressing, though. Maybe i'll take a the next couple of days to chill and formulate myself. I'll hit you back with a revised treatment.
take it easy.
- N.
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 04:32:07 -0700
From: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: hey
To:
how you doin? i rewatched titus this weekend, damn is that a lot of a fun. also rewatched Kramer vs Kramer, have you ever seen it? it won best screenplay in 1979, the whole thing is great, but there are parts of it that are simply gripping, they have the audience in the palm of their hand and they crush at will. now that's great art.
i think you're recording tonight, hope that goes well,
best,
m
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Tue 9/02/08 2:45 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
hey.
i'm alright. fighting a bit of a cold (flu, fever, etc.).
i think i saw Kramer vs. Kramer years ago. don't remember much of it. loved Titus a lot.
no we're recording in like 2 weeks. tonight's just practice.
i'll try to have some stuff to you by tonight. i've just been burned out and beat up the last couple of cays. need to recharge.
hope everything is ok by you and also hope you haven't lost faith in me.
- N.
i'm alright. fighting a bit of a cold (flu, fever, etc.).
i think i saw Kramer vs. Kramer years ago. don't remember much of it. loved Titus a lot.
no we're recording in like 2 weeks. tonight's just practice.
i'll try to have some stuff to you by tonight. i've just been burned out and beat up the last couple of cays. need to recharge.
hope everything is ok by you and also hope you haven't lost faith in me.
- N.
From: Nick
To: Michael Andal
Sent: Thursday, September 4, 2008 4:00:25 PM
Subject: Treatment Revision 1
hey how's it going?
Here's my new treatment. let me know how i can make it a little more succinct, cause i feel like maybe there are too many details... but i tried to make it a little bit more clear than the last time.
Thanks again,
- N.
THACHER MEMORIAL REVISED TREATMENT;
ACT 1;
A young girl bursts through the screen door of a large house on suburban Long Island. She runs down the street. A man wearing an ill fitting black suit and a Chaplin mask attempts to go after her, but winded, he collapses, falling down the steps. Police arrive and cart him off. At the scene of the crime 5 girls are discovered in the basement; bound, gagged, malnourished, flesh pocked with assorted mutilation. They’ll live, but they are forever damaged from what the media dubs “the nightmare campaign of Karigan Stello”.
Stello’s house is now flooded with media and authorities, but one is almost conspicuous by her absence Detective Catherine Madden. Rather than add more strain to the already crowded Stello affair, Madden choose to investigate a seemingly innocuous case involving an environmentally autistic girl. When she reaches the house, Catherine is so taken back the severity of the situation that she attacks the child’s mildly retarded mother, which costs Catherine a promotion and almost a suspension. Under direct orders, Catherine now must go through sensitivity training, regular visits with the police psychiatrist. Catherine is now given the cases that no one else believes can be solved. The most significant case is that of a school shooting, which ranks among the most violent and bizarre spree killings in the history of crime.
Partnered with relative new-comer Detective Rennie DeLuca (whom Catherine has a difficult time figuring out), The two begin to uncover connections that exist between the school shooting and Catherine’s once thought “unsolvable” case load. As the prod further, they find symbols, quotes, markings, etc that seem to have something to do with the journals of the now infamous Karigan Stello. Before his capture, Stello sent out several packages to assorted media across the country. The packages contained artwork, masks, video diaries, and copies of Stello’s own handwritten journals, which were read on air, or obtained through various other means. Stello was found criminally insane by the courts, and now resides in the Iris Thacher Memorial Asylum, an experimental new facility designed to specifically deal with “uncontrollable” types of mentally ill.
Catherine visits the grounds of the Asylum to perhaps gain some first hand insight on what might be an epidemic of insanity being spread through Stello’s writing. With the permission of the head Doctor/Warden/Founder Dr. Clarence Thacher, Catherine meets with Stello. After their meeting, Catherine begins to suspect that Stello is merely just a pawn in something much larger, but those suspicions are temporality put on the back burner when Catherine and DeLuca get more reports of gruesome, ritualistic killings, capped off with a cryptic, Son of Sam like note from someone calling themselves “The Right Worm”.
The cases begin to get to Catherine, who begins to suspect everyone around her, even suggesting that her superiors have given her these cases to see if she will break again under the pressure and increasing severity of these crimes. On top of this... the enigmatic “Right Worm” seems to be trying to take on a life of its own, though it still remains dependant on Karigan Stello for inspiration, liberally borrowing phrases and quotations from Stello for his notes. The several copycats who Catherine has apprehended; one being a Unibomber-type named Victoria Galas, none of them own up to being this “Right Worm” character. Catherine soon realizes that she has been thrown off the trail, focusing on someone who is merely toying with her. She even suspects Stello himself of writing these notes, revisiting the Asylum to show him the notes. Stello reads the notes and writes it off as the literary equivalent of a prank phone caller.
ACT 2:
DeLuca and Catherine are commended for their speedy capture of so many of the perpetrators behind these crimes, but they are unable to control the escalating rumors of a mass cult of Stello worshipers, who the media declares is now in mass and planning something huge. Catherine finds the media’s claim to be highly dubious, as she doesn’t believe any of the individuals they have caught have the mental capacity to be that organized. Catherine sees them as individuals who are connected by their admiration of Stello, but they don’t seem on the surface to desire to shove his message down people’s throats, or form a cult or army. Catherine doesn’t believe they are that ambitious. DeLuca on the other hand, seems to find validity in the media’s claims, but Catherine writes that off as him being naive.
Catherine further examines what exactly happened in Stello’s house that night, even visiting the crime scene. Here there are flashbacks of what when on during Stello’s “nightmare campaign”. Stello wore assorted masks through the 2 weeks he tortured the 6 girls, his apparent favorite being a rubber Charlie Chaplin mask. Catherine begins looking into what happened to Stello’s belongings, and finds that much of it was given away or sold. One “item” that stands out is Stello’s 3-legged puppy named “Punchline”, who was purchased at the crime scene by a young man named Cyrus Nubesco. Catherine makes a note of the name and continues with investigating what happened. Catherine looks up the 6 girls who were tortured by Karigan, but only one of the girls made it out of their with their psyche intact; Liza Monday, the girl who escaped Karigan and reported him to the authorities.
Catherine meets Liza (and her aloof boyfriend Castor Brannon) and asks her about what she saw that may have been omitted from the police reports... any detail at all. She doesn’t have much new information, only the weird fact that Castor’s ex-room mate had “adopted” Karigan’s puppy. Catherine is bewildered by the coincidence (and mildly disgusted that someone so close to one of Karigan’s victims would be so insensitive), and asks questions about Cyrus.
Cyrus turns out to be the mysterious “Right Worm”. The deeper Cyrus went into the Karigan Stello story, the more unhinged he became. Liza and Castor broke off contact with him after he nearly killed someone in a bar fight. There was no turning back for Cyrus at that point, and he began to fashion himself as the leader of this “cult”, believing in the media’s proclamation of such a cult existing. Cyrus disfigures himself, and attempts to hijack a bus full of school children. He sends another “Right Worm” note to Catherine notifying her of this crime. Her and DeLuca are able to catch Cyrus before any of the children can be harmed, but the damage to Catherine’s psyche has been done, and she beats Cyrus near to death. Because of this, Catherine is sent along with Cyrus to the Iris Thacher Memorial Asylum. Catherine is there for a psychiatric evaluation, not incarceration (as is the case with Cyrus). This turns out to be a ruse, and Catherine is now being kept “under observation” by Dr. Thacher himself in the facility, with Cyrus, Stello, and several of the alleged “cultists”.
ACT 3:
Now completely cut off from the outside, Catherine now walks the grounds of the Asylum, though Thacher is careful not to label her a “prisoner”, creating the illusion that she will be released at some point. Catherine winds up interacting with many of the denizens of the Asylum, including many people she aided in capturing. Catherine witnesses many of the so-called “treatments” administered by Thacher and his staff, and is alarmed by their perversity. Thacher spends much of the time trying to get Catherine to see the treatments as necessary, consoling her by saying that the facility is still very much a “work in progress”.
Along the way, Catherine comes across a young girl named Lucy Cortian. Her and her older sister Ilana were sent to the Asylum by their parents when they got caught up in the media firestorm that went so far as to say that any young person in the commuintiy whose child exhibits “strange” behavior should be admitted to the Asylum. Ilana is legitimately disturbed, but Lucy is merely quiet and disinterested in typical teenage girl things. Catherine takes an immediate liking to the precocious Lucy, acting as a big sister/adoptive mother to the girl.
Cyrus eventually learns that his idol Stello is incarcerated on the same grounds as he. Along with several of the alleged “cultists”, Cyrus confronts Dr. Thacher and forces the doctor to take him to Stello. When the meeting between the two doesn’t go as hoped, Cyrus and the other “cultists” brutally murder Stello, igniting the long-gestating riot that reduces the asylum to a red death nightmare smolder.
Catherine protects Lucy, but does nothing to stop the riot, even when Dr. Thacher pleads with her to help him try to regain order. Feeling that they made their bed and now must lie in it, Catherine refuses to stop any of the rioters as they tear apart everything, feeding the staff to the machines the patients had to endure. Thacher loses consciousness from blood loss after Catherine whispers “No.” Catherine, holding Lucy’s hand and dragging Thacher by his shirt collar, attempt to make it out of the Asylum, when they are cornered by Cyrus, who lunges at them. Instinctivley, Catherine covers Lucy, but Cyrus goes straight for the near-dead Dr. Thacher, biting and clawing at his body until his is a bloody mess.
Catherine holds Lucy tight and finally makes it out of the asylum, alive and in one piece. No police or firetrucks or anything have arrived on the scene. It’s just Catherine and Lucy holding each other while the world burns down.
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2008 18:19:34 -0700
From: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Treatment Revision 1
To: armaggedonmccheese@hotmail.com
i like everything i've read, nice work. but i still have key questions i don't believe you've answered, so i'd like you to answer them for me here first, and then translate them into the treatment. if you're worried about sounding cookie cutter and commercial selloutesque, i refer back to the god of gods and one of his master works: hamlet.
1. what is the basis for the dramatic tension of the whole story?
will catherine go mad?
will catherine solve the initial crime she's trying to solve?
will catherine redeem herself from her initial fall?
H: will hamlet avenge his father's death and right the kingdom?
2. based on the answer for #1, lay me out step by step the progression of drama/tension
for catherine's story
1. catherine loses it at the first crime scene
2. catherine can't hold it together
3. catherine loses it more with cyrus
4. catherine really falls apart at the asylum...
5. etc
H: 1. hamlet learns of his fathers death
2. hamlet has polonius trying to ruin his relationship with ophelia
3. hamlet has rosencratz and guildenstern spying on him
4. hamlet has the whole royal court against him
5. hamlet alienates his true love
6. hamlet ernages the king
7. hamlet kills polonius
8. hamlet's true love goes mad cause of his doing
9. hamlet is sent away because of his murder
10. hamlet now has laertes gunning for him
11. hamlets true love kills herself because of his deed
12. hamlet is supposed to be killed by the kings orders
13. hamlet returns to have the king and laertes trying to kill him
14. hamlet must fight to the death
3. the end of act 1 must PROPEL the audience through the rest of the play and definitely set
up act 2. what is that catapult?
H: hamlet learns of his fathers murder and thus knows what he has to spend the rest of his life doing (avenging it) until he can continue living...
4. what is the total twist at the halfway point?
H: hamlet kills polonius by mistake in a mad rage and sends everything into escalated chaos
answer me that, batmannnnn..........
From: Nick To: Michael A
Sent: Friday, September 5, 2008 11:53:33 AM
Subject: RE: Treatment Revision 1
Thanks for the speedy reply as always. what you said is pretty much what i felt i had trouble incorporating into the treatment, so i'll try to answer your questions and then work them in;
1. those three questions to me all tie together in some way. The broad conflict is Catherine fighting to stay "decent in an indecent world" (to quote Two-Face from The Dark Knight). Her trying to solve the crime plays into into it, in that by solving the crime, she will make things safe, thus make herself safe. It's about proving to herself that she can rise above humankind's inherent madness, unlike Karigian, Cyrus, Thacher etc, who either let the madness engulf them (Karigan and Cyrus), or fight madness with more madness (Thacher and the Asylum). Catherine is determined to not go mad while trying to capture these crazies, cause she's trying to prove to herself and others that her way is what works.
2. i'll get on laying this out this weekend.
3. that i'm having some trouble with. you have any ideas?
4. The twist at the halfway point will be the revealing of the Asylum, Authorities, and Media playing up the "cult". I'll try to work that into the next revision.
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 18:13:10 -0700
From: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Treatment Revision 1
To:
#3, well, if you work with the theme of her trying to stay sane in a mad world, what you could do is build her up for the first part of act 1, having her investigating the impossible cases (maybe she's thought of as a charity case, so they just keep her doing the busy work, so she's a cop, but not a legitimate one, because the department has dismissed her). maybe she's the first to capture stello, and becomes like the darling of the department, and then towards the end of act one after pumping her up a bit, she then happens up on the autistic girl and loses it, big time, thus jeopardizing her whole stature and footing, and forcing her to recover all the dignity she has lost until this point. actually, my idea of the autism thing would fit nicely, because she could be some poster girl for autism and accomplishments, etc, and that puts her in the spotlight, but then the mishap with the girl really creates a scandal she must try to recover from.
either that, or if you're set on fucking her up at the beginning with the traumatic case, then you've got to find a way to really strip her/break her down at the end of act one so she can regain herself. like you said, she is trying to stay decent, so what would be the most indecent thing you could throw at her that could really serve as a test for the whole story? perhaps cyrus comes up with another thing before the bus which really sets her on edge, so her pursuit of him becomes the focus, or could you weave in an extra plot point of lucy's and her troubled sister, perhaps the thing that threw ilana over the edge and made lucy so quiet, so we see ilana falling one way into total ruin, and in turn it puts catherine on the edge to relapse, thus you have continuity with lucy/ilana instead of just bringing them up cold in act 3? maybe you tie the cult into lucy/illan's parents or stello somehow influenced their parents to light themselves on fire and throw themselves off the 59th street bridge, leaving them in serious jeopardy, or even better, the cult or stello twisted the minds of these hardcore catholic parents with 7 kids, and they decide to kill all their children, but they didn't get to the last 2.
any of that work for you?
#4 off the top is not very clear to me at all, i want to see what you're doing with that.
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Mon 9/08/08 3:12 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
there's some really cool, helpful ideas here. thanks very much.
not sure about the autism angle... but i like the idea of Catherine having some kind of mild form of mental illness... that could absolutely work. Maybe something that runs in her family and so forth.
Well the idea i had with Ilana and Lucy's parents were that they were these sort of ineffectual tarts who never had a real problem in their life, so they just can't even begin to confront the reality of their daughter Ilana being mentally ill. I was thinking of making Ilana one of the girls that Stello menaced, or maybe a friend or close relative to one of the girls Stello menaced, and that's what pushed her over the edge.
not sure about the autism angle... but i like the idea of Catherine having some kind of mild form of mental illness... that could absolutely work. Maybe something that runs in her family and so forth.
Well the idea i had with Ilana and Lucy's parents were that they were these sort of ineffectual tarts who never had a real problem in their life, so they just can't even begin to confront the reality of their daughter Ilana being mentally ill. I was thinking of making Ilana one of the girls that Stello menaced, or maybe a friend or close relative to one of the girls Stello menaced, and that's what pushed her over the edge.
----- Original Message ----
From: Nick
To: Michael A
Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 11:19:03 AM
Subject: yoooo
haven't heard from you in over a week. everything OK on your end?
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:10:24 -0700
From: m*******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: yoooo
To:
hey, everythings good here, i was waiting on you for your latest revision. things are actually a bit hectic, i'm looking for another job which is taking a lot of time and energy, but nothing serious. how's everything going
From: Nick
To: M
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 9:51:22 AM
Subject: RE: yoooo
been a bit hectic here also. helped my girlfriend move into a new place... band's recording... looking for work.
i'll try to get the latest revision to you by the end of this week at the very latest.
good luck with the job search.
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:46:08 -0700
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: yoooo
To:
don't rush on the revision, remember to ENJOY IT! was watching x-men last stand last night, so so good, yet so amazingly hollywood and commercial, this is a good thing.
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Wed 9/17/08 2:50 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
i prefer X-2: X-Men United. I thought there was good stuff in the Last Stand, but they sort of overloaded it. It's hard juggling that many characters in 90 minutes, and it just felt like a rush job.
From: Nick
To: Michael Andal
Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2008 12:40:20 PM
Subject: Treatment Revision number 4565338678549
hey there.
here's yet another treatment revision. Incorporated a new character, may have finally got that pesky 'twist' thing figured out, and in general feel pretty good about it. hope you do as well.
let me know what you think.
- N.
THACHER MEMORIAL REVISED TREATMENT;
ACT 1;
A young girl bursts through the screen door of a large house on suburban Long Island. She runs down the street. A man wearing an ill fitting black suit and a Chaplin mask attempts to go after her, but winded, he collapses, falling down the steps. Police arrive and cart him off. At the scene of the crime 5 girls are discovered in the basement; bound, gagged, malnourished, flesh pocked with assorted mutilation. They’ll live, but they are forever damaged from what the media dubs “the nightmare campaign of Karigan Stello”.
Stello’s house is now flooded with media and authorities, but one is almost conspicuous by her absence, the seemingly steel-willed Detective Catherine Madden. Rather than add more strain to the already crowded Stello affair, Madden choose to investigate a seemingly innocuous case involving an environmentally autistic girl. When she reaches the house, Catherine is so taken back the severity of the situation that she has a lapse in her usually icy exterior, attacking the child’s mildly retarded mother, which costs Catherine a promotion and almost a suspension. Under direct orders, Catherine now must go through sensitivity training and regular visits with the police psychiatrist, the young and alarmingly bubbly Tammy Christmas. In addition to enduring the near pop-psychology of “Dr.” Christmas, Catherine is now given the cases that no one else believes can be solved. The most significant case is that of a school shooting, which ranks among the most violent and bizarre spree killings in the history of crime.
Partnered with relative new-comer, the quirky Detective Rennie DeLuca (whom Catherine has a difficult time figuring out), The two begin to uncover connections that exist between the school shooting and Catherine’s once thought “unsolvable” case load. As they prod further, they find symbols, quotes, markings, etc that seem to have something to do with the journals of the now infamous Karigan Stello. Before his capture, Stello sent out several packages to assorted media across the country. The packages contained artwork, masks, video diaries, and copies of Stello’s own handwritten journals, which were read on air, or obtained through various other means. Stello was found criminally insane by the courts, and now resides in the Iris Thacher Memorial Asylum, an experimental new facility designed to specifically deal with “uncontrollable” types of mentally ill.
Catherine visits the grounds of the Asylum to perhaps gain some first hand insight on what might be an epidemic of insanity being spread through Stello’s writing. Upon reaching the Asylum, she is equal parts marveled and quietly confused by the structure of the building, which is a blend of “Steam Punk” aesthetics and a Cyber-Chapel, a daycare center for mutants. She meets the head Doctor/Warden/Founder, Dr. Clarence Thacher, who gives Catherine a brief history of the Asylum, named after Thacher’s departed mother Iris, who died a bizarre and painful death due to insanity brought on by a spinal dysfunction. With the permission of Dr. Clarence Thacher, Catherine meets with Stello in a heavily monitored interrogation room. The two talk at great lengths, as Stello is revealed to be every bit the poet of disgust the media has painted him. After their meeting, Catherine begins to suspect that Stello is merely just a pawn in something much larger, that while obviously insane, Stello is so self absorbed that how other people might take his actions and words doesn’t cross his ming. those suspicions are temporality put on the back burner when Catherine and DeLuca get more reports of gruesome, ritualistic killings, capped off with a cryptic, Son of Sam like note from someone calling themself “The Right Worm”.
ACT 2:
The cases begin to get to Catherine, who begins to suspect everyone around her, even suggesting that her superiors have given her these cases to see if she will break again under the pressure and increasing severity of these crimes. On top of this... the enigmatic “Right Worm” seems to be trying to take on a life of its own, though it still remains dependant on Karigan Stello for inspiration, liberally borrowing phrases and quotations from Stello for his notes. The several copycats who Catherine has apprehended; one being a female “Unibomber”, sardonic self-proclaimed “anti-vamp” Victoria Galas, none of them own up to being this “Right Worm” character. Catherine soon realizes that she has been thrown off the trail, focusing on someone who is merely toying with her. She even suspects Stello himself of writing these notes, revisiting the Asylum to show him the notes. Stello reads the notes and writes it off as the literary equivalent of a prank phone caller.
DeLuca and Catherine are commended for their speedy capture of so many of the perpetrators behind these crimes, but they are unable to control the escalating rumors of a mass cult of Stello worshipers, who the media declares is now in mass and planning something huge. Catherine finds the media’s claim to be highly dubious, as she doesn’t believe any of the individuals they have caught have the mental capacity to be that organized. Catherine sees them as individuals who are connected by their admiration of Stello, but they don’t seem on the surface to desire to shove his message down people’s throats, or form a cult or army. Catherine doesn’t believe they are that ambitious. DeLuca on the other hand, seems to find validity in the media’s claims, but Catherine writes that off as him being naive.
Catherine further examines what exactly happened in Stello’s house that night, even visiting the crime scene. Here there are flashbacks of what when on during Stello’s “nightmare campaign”. Stello wore assorted masks through the 2 weeks he tortured the 6 girls, his apparent favorite being a rubber Charlie Chaplin mask. Catherine begins looking into what happened to Stello’s belongings, and finds that much of it was given away or sold. One “item” that stands out is Stello’s 3-legged puppy named “Punchline”, who was purchased at the crime scene by a young man named Cyrus Nudesco. Catherine makes a note of the name and continues with investigating what happened. Catherine looks up the 6 girls who were tortured by Karigan, but only one of the girls made it out of their with their psyche intact; Liza Monday, the girl who escaped Karigan and reported him to the authorities.
Catherine meets Liza (and her aloof boyfriend Castor Brannon) and asks her about what she saw that may have been omitted from the police reports... any detail at all. She doesn’t have much new information, only the weird fact that Castor’s ex-room mate had “adopted” Karigan’s puppy. Catherine is bewildered by the coincidence (and mildly disgusted that someone so close to one of Karigan’s victims would be so insensitive), and asks questions about Cyrus.
Cyrus turns out to be the mysterious “Right Worm”. The deeper Cyrus went into the Karigan Stello story, the more unhinged he became, becoming violent and having frequent hallucinations that are made more intense by his liberal intake of tetrodotoxin. Liza and Castor broke off contact with him after he nearly killed someone in a bar fight. There was no turning back for Cyrus at that point, and he began to fashion himself as the leader of this “cult”, believing in the media’s proclamation of such a cult existing. Cyrus disfigures himself, giving himself a long chemical burn that trails the circumference of his face, creating the illusion of a giant worm wrapping itself around his head, and attempts to hijack a bus full of school children. He sends another “Right Worm” note to Catherine notifying her of this crime. Her and DeLuca are able to catch Cyrus before any of the children can be harmed, but Cyrus has already viscously attacked the bus driver in front of the children, who are petrified. Cyrus also manages to bludgeon DeLuca, giving him irreversible brain damage. the damage to Catherine’s psyche has been done, and she beats Cyrus near to death. Because of this, Catherine is sent along with Cyrus to the Iris Thacher Memorial Asylum. Catherine is there for a psychiatric evaluation, not incarceration (as is the case with Cyrus). Catherine now walks the grounds of the Asylum, with Cyrus, Stello, and several of the alleged “cultists”.
ACT 3:
Catherine winds up interacting with many of the denizens of the Asylum, including many people she aided in capturing. Catherine witnesses many of the so-called “treatments” administered by Thacher and his staff, and is alarmed by their perversity. Thacher spends much of the time trying to get Catherine to see the treatments as necessary, consoling her by saying that the facility is still very much a “work in progress”, that the longer she stays, the more she'll see how helpful the facility can be in "curing" so-called undesirables. Thacher at this point reveals to his new assitant, former police psychiatrist Tammy Christmas, that he intends to keep Catherine confined to the grounds for the time being, that she has dug too deep and if she digs any deeper she'll figure out the truth behind the facilty and it's connection with the media. Christmas supplies Thacher with Catherine's psyhiactric history, which he can now use to keep Catherine under observation for an indefinant amount of time.
Along the way, Catherine comes across a young girl named Lucy Cortian. Her and her older sister Ilana were sent to the Asylum by their parents when they got caught up in the media firestorm that went so far as to say that any young person in the commuintiy whose child exhibits “strange” behavior should be admitted to the Asylum. Ilana is legitimately disturbed, but Lucy is merely quiet and disinterested in typical teenage girl things. Catherine takes an immediate liking to the precocious Lucy, acting as a big sister/adoptive mother to the girl.
Lucy confides in Catherine, and in turn Catherine talks about her childhood. We learn that Catherine had a twin brother, Raymond Madden, who died in a hospital when they were 9 years old. Raymond had dementia, people believed that he was just “acting out”. Only Catherine believed him, and she tried to explain to others that he was genuinely sick, not a problem child. No one... not the teachers or their parents were willing to entertain the notion that their boy was insane. After trying to cut off his own face, Raymond was sent to an ER, than transferred to a regular children’s hospital. They were not equipped to deal with a child like Raymond, and during an activity, Raymond threw himself out of a window.
Fearing that she may have the same illness as her brother, Catherine shut herself off emotionally, focusing on her studies, becoming a detective. But the farther she became wrapped up in these cases, the more her brother’s insanity began to pronounce itself in her actions and views.
Meanwhile, Cyrus Nudesco is relishing his stay in the Asylum, networking with the others who share Stello as an influence. He particularly takes a liking to the droll Victoria Galas, the female letter bomber, though she finds Cyrus more cute and amusing than frightening.
Initially, the “cultists” are unaware that Stello is on the grounds. At some point, one of the guards slips and reveals the secret, and with this Cyrus learns that his idol Stello is incarcerated on the same grounds as he. Along with several of the alleged “cultists” and Lucy sister Ilana, Cyrus confronts Dr. Thacher and forces the doctor to take him to Stello. A group consisting of Cyrus, Victoria, and several others, meet with Stello, looking to him for leadership and advice. At this point, Stello has wirtten the word "NO" all over his face and arms in black ink. Stello is disinterested in these individuals, going as far to run them down. When the meeting between the two doesn’t go as hoped, Cyrus and the other “cultists” brutally murder Stello, igniting the long-gestating riot that reduces the asylum to a red death nightmare smolder.
The riot is now in full swing. Orderlys and guards are drugged and tortured, Tammy gets mummified in scotch tape and is dragged off to apparently never be seen again, and Thacher himself is cut multiple times by Lucy’s older sister Ilana, whose stunning looks made her a “favorite” among many of the guards, who pawed at her and forced her to commit sexual acts, taking advantage of her illness. She castrates one guard who is protecting Thacher, than proceedes to give him tiny little cuts along his arms and back. Ilana leaves the Dr. to bleed and joins in on the chaos.
Catherine protects Lucy, but does nothing to stop the riot, even when Dr. Thacher pleads with her to help him try to regain order. Feeling that they made their bed and now must lie in it, Catherine refuses to stop any of the rioters as they tear apart everything, feeding the staff to the machines the patients had to endure. Thacher loses consciousness from blood loss after Catherine whispers “No”. Still, wanting to prove that she has her wits about her, she tries saves the Doctor from certain death.
Catherine, holding Lucy’s hand and dragging Thacher by his shirt collar, attempt to make it out of the Asylum, when they are cornered by Cyrus, who lunges at them. Instinctively, Catherine covers Lucy, but Cyrus goes straight for the near-dead Dr. Thacher, biting and clawing at his body until he is a bloody mess.
Catherine holds Lucy tight and finally makes it out of the asylum, alive and in one piece. No police or firetrucks or anything have arrived on the scene. It’s just Catherine and Lucy holding each other while the world burns down.
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:27:02 -0700
From: m*******l3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Treatment Revision number 4565338678549
To:
ok, like i said before, i like (actually i really like) everything you've got here, but there are some important elements that i think need clarification. here's what i'd like you to do: take a look at my 30 scene sample i sent you and i want you to pack the story, based on the treatment, into that 30 scene structure, cut down or adjust as needed, but stick to the structure. remember, it's a 90 minutes movie, with 30 3 minutes scenes. start with that. this time, think like an architect, think of dramatic structure.
1intro
10 end of act 1, the impetus for the whole of act 2
15 the twist
20 the cliffhanger that leads to act 3
28 or 29 climax
30 resolution
and keep in mind the escalating tension that must ramp up up up with each act and scene.
also, i want you to answer the following questions:
1. what is the arc of catherine's story? (beginning, middle, end)
2. what is she transforming into (point a scene 1 , point b scene 30)
3. if this is about catherine's struggle, what is the main showdown/obstacle that she has to overcome?
thats enough for now, let me know if you have questions.
oh yeah, i saw this tv show on cbs last night called "the mentalist", very amusing. however, the main nemesis is this serial killer guy called Red John who paints smiley faces in his victim's blood on the walls of his victim's rooms after he kills them.... i like the worm image better.
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Fri 9/26/08 3:40 PM |
| To: | Michael A |
thanks so much. I'll get to work on the scene breakdown this week.
From: Nick
To: Michael A
Sent: Saturday, October 4, 2008 1:37:02 PM
Subject: scene by scene
alright here's my scene breakdown. let me know what you think.
gotta say... this was harder to do than the treatment! i think i'm getting a better idea of the dramatic slant, though... but i'll let you be the judge of whether or not i'm improving.
looking forward to your reply,
- N.
ACT 1:
1. Karigan's capture
2. Catherine's introduction
3. Catherine's psychological evaluation/Tammy Christmas introduction
4. School Shooting
5. Karigan's backstory
6. Rennie's introduction/Copycat Theory
7. Iris Thacher Memorial Asylum/Dr. Thacher backstory
8. Catherine meets with Karigan
9. More "copycats" emerge
10. the first "Right Worm" letter arrives.
ACT 2:
1. Letter bombs are being delivered to assorted media outlets/Victoria Galas introduction
2. Catherine aprehends Victoria, believing her to be "the Right Worm"
3. More "Right Worm" letters arive, each more loathsome than the last
4. The Media Cult Theory
5. Catherine questions Karigan about the letters
6. Catherine retraces the events leading to Stello's capture/meets with survivor Liza Monday
7. Cyrus Nudesco backstory/Introduction
8. Cyrus gets scarred/final Right Worm letter
9. School Bus taken hostage
10. Catherine aprhends Cyrus/Cyrus bludgeons Rennie/Catherine attacks Cyrus/Both sent to Thacher Asylum
ACT 3:
1. Dr. Thacher examines Catherine/Catherine examines the "treatments"
2. Tammy Christmas returns as Thacher's assistant/Media connection with the Asylum revealed
3. Catherine meets Lucy Cortian/Lucy's backstory
4. Catherine's past revealed
5. Cyrus meets Victoria and the other alleged "cultists"
6. Cyrus learns that Karigan is on the grounds
7. A group consisting of the cultists and Lucy's mentally deranged sister Ilana meet Karigan
8. Karigan is butchered by the inmates/the riot begins
9. the Asylum is thrown into chaos/Dr. Thacher stabbed by Ilana/Tammy taken by several inmates/Catherine and Lucy make their escape/Cyrus murders a wounded Dr. Thacher
10. Catherine and Lucy alone outside the wreckage.
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2008 19:39:47 -0700
From: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: scene by scene
To:
before i comment more, i still want you to answer my 3 questions, plus what's the twist at 15? letter bombs sound interesting, want to hear more about that too.
From: Nick To: Michael A
Sent: Sunday, October 5, 2008 12:14:05 PM
Subject: RE: scene by scene
1. what is the arc of catherine's story? (beginning, middle, end)
- the environmental autism breakdown ----> pulling herself together to solve the cases -----> cases getting the better of her, but know she's learned how to control herself more, so she makes it out alright.
2. what is she transforming into (point a scene 1 , point b scene 30)
- at first it seems like she goes from a well mannered, collected individual into a rage of unexpurgated emotions, but by film's end she's a rugged survivalist who has always been in control of herself, which is why she never actually killed anyone.
3. if this is about catherine's struggle, what is the main showdown/obstacle that she has to overcome?
- at first it seems like she goes from a well mannered, collected individual into a rage of unexpurgated emotions, but by film's end she's a rugged survivalist who has always been in control of herself, which is why she never actually killed anyone.
- the evergrowing insanity she encounters on a daily basis that mirrors the the desperation growing inside of herself. by controlling herself, she can control the psychological brushfire that is apparently making its away across the word (of this film)
i don't know about the twist at 15. i seem to be spacing out when it comes to some of the "rules" (there's just so damn many" and i'm just concentrating on putting together the story. the twist may not happen at that precise moment you speak of... but the film is packed to the brim with "twists" so i didn't think it would matter.
whatever. it's the first go-round. i'll try to get it right next time.
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 10:43:41 -0700
From: m******3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: scene by scene
To:
so, this is a story about self control and self preservation in an insane environment. i love that. beautiful. now make sure the story doesn't get caught up in killers and mysteries and cults, and that this is all just a way to enhance the pure and beautiful struggle of a single person coping with that terrible, indifferent, yet brutal universe.
i recommend you make the temptation for catherine to unleash her fury, her urge and empowerment to kill, VERY STRONG. in fact, to the point of #3, which i think you've misunderstood, i think this answers it. #3 is about the final showdown, the last duel, the head to head with the shark in jaws, luke vs darth, prof x vs the phoenix. if roy scheider never faces the shark in person, you don't have a movie. if batman doesn't face down the joker, what's the point? there needs to be a showdown with the shark. in the case of your story, i recommend that you make the showdown feature the doctor and catherine at the end, where she has to resist killing him, hold back on her fury, to the point of tears, because she so badly wants to kill him for all he stands for, for all he's done, and yet the good part of her has to resist, has to let him live, or she becomes like stello, so every though she's failed with the retarded mother and cyrus and many others, she'll ultimately change her pattern by letting him live and NOT killing him. perhaps even more interesting is that she actually does the superhuman thing of holding herself back from killing him when she has the opportunity, and then actually fights to protect him from the crazies in the asylum, and risks herself and her own well being to save him, but ultimately, the beauty of the universe is that it swallows up her and the doctor in the jaws of the insane, but spits out her and lucy at the end and swallows the doctor. kind of like if she got thrown into the middle of a throng of zombies in the day of the dead, and somehow the logic of the universe still prevailed and left the good ones untouched and did away with the evil, beyond her control. make any sense?
don't think of "the twist" like some horrible rule you have to follow or else, you're missing the point. it's to make the story more interesting. any story can become quickly predictable, and the twist is actually a super effective way of shedding new perspective on the beauty of the story. think of it like this: the Jets are kicking the shit out of their opponent for the first half with their new gun bree favre, thus showing the beautiful way they overcome the adversity of an opponent. but then at the half, brett favre pulls a hamstring and can't come out for the 2nd half, thus forcing a mad comeback by the other team, and forcing the jets to have to dig deep and improvise how to stick together and get a big win. they thought they knew how to win, with the big cannon, but now they REALLY have to dig deep and find out how to win. now that's drama! in the eternal effort to make things interesting, you're breaking your whole story in two completely different parts to give to completely unique items of focus so that you have a richer story. go look at the twist in 10 of your favorite movies and see how great of an effect it had on the whole story, and stop thinking of it as some annoying rule.
any of this make sense?
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Mon 10/06/08 3:23 PM |
| To: | Michael A
|
yeah i'm of the opinion that sometimes less is more... in that the "cult" and the more wild characters will have more of an impact if they just have one or two really powerful moments that the protagonist carries with them for the rest of the film. Karigan, Cyrus, Dr. Thacher etc. will be like that. going back to Silence of the Lambs, Buffalo Bill and Hannibal don't dominate the picture technically, but they dominate in the mind of the viewer, because those few moments with those characters have such intensity that they linger for the remainder.
Catherine trying to get out of the Asylum would be that conflict. During the escape i'd envision her coming across the people she captured, fighting her way through them while still remaining focused on getting herself and Lucy to safety. i'll try to expand on that i suppose.
I guess since i have Catherine meeting with Karigan in scene 15, something there could be revealed.. maybe some hints about Catherine's past or something. i'll try to expand on that also.
Catherine trying to get out of the Asylum would be that conflict. During the escape i'd envision her coming across the people she captured, fighting her way through them while still remaining focused on getting herself and Lucy to safety. i'll try to expand on that i suppose.
I guess since i have Catherine meeting with Karigan in scene 15, something there could be revealed.. maybe some hints about Catherine's past or something. i'll try to expand on that also.
From: Nick
To: Michael A
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 11:11:48 AM
Subject: yo
how's it going?
just touching base.
so... where are we going from here with this thing? are we ready to start working on the actual script yet or what? i feel like i'm ready to go... like we've got enough stuff to get going on the script. we've had enough breadsticks, now bring on the meat lover's pizza... and so on.
have you written anything yet? i feel like i've taken over and maybe i'm not letting you flex your creative muscles. let me know what's up.
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:08:47 -0700
From: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: yo
To:
hey, it's a little crazy here, my company just posted at 5 billion dollar loss, so the job situation is a bit stressful. i have lots of thoughts on all this, but need time to collect them, i'll get back to you soon.
From: Nick
To: Michael A.
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 11:12:17 AM
Subject: RE: yo
nuts indeed.
take all the time you need. if anything pops in my head i'll let you know.
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:51:04 -0700
From: m*****3333@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: yo
To:
ok, i have plenty of thoughts, but i'll try to start slowly:
1. i think we really need to assess our goals with this project and make sure we knew exactly where we want to go with this. at this point in my life, i'm really about success, which means, knowing exactly what you want to do, setting out to do it in the most direct way possible, and achieving that envisioned goal. i'm really approaching this script like a business proposal, but i think you have a different perspective. if you remember at the beginning, i talked about a script that could be sold to hollywood for money. obviously integrity was essential, but once you bring in business and money, it sets some clearly defined factors and priorities. ultimately, the last question will be: how many tickets will this sell? if the answer isn't: millions, no one will want to buy it.
what i like most about you is that you want a very pure story based on your creative vision. the one thing i would hate to do is get you to feel you were selling out because you had to alter or change things because it would sell better. so what i need for you to do is ask and answer for yourself in the most brutally honest fashion: a. what do i want to achieve most with this story? b. what do i want to achieve most with this script? when i think of the music you like and make, and the movies you love to watch most, its about a small cbgb type room with a loud sound and lots of smoke and very few concessions, or small grindhouse pictures which are clearly independent type films made on low budgets. i'm happier with arena rock like Rage Against the Machine, a much different sound, a much different dynamic, and movie wise, i'm all over the place. in hollywood right now, the things that are selling are:
do you really want to emulate these? the story comes closest to max payne, but without all the garbage, which is essential for hollywood. do you really believe you can write something which has a primary goal of selling? now you can always write something else, something pure, and try to sell it the independent way, but that would be a different set of priorities for something you're trying to pitch to a studio.
okay, let's start with that, and let me know what you think.
RE: yo
| From: | Nick |
| Sent: | Thu 10/23/08 3:41 PM |
| To: | Michael A
|
i understand you want something you can sell. I'm doing my best to make something i can see selling... forgoing the more wild stuff i usually do.... but it seems like it's still too much for you.
I absolutely do not want to create some soulless, artless video game ala Max Payne. That type of cinema is anathema to me. I don't care if it sells, i couldn't in all good conscience rest well at night knowing i crammed more intellectually crippled anti-creative junk food in America's already bloated movie market. I feel like the time for my kind of movies is coming... i can sense people are sick to death of the sequels and the remakes and the video game adaptations and the true stories minus truth and minus story. The fact that this crap is still making money is because most people have little or no other options (sort of like voting, but that's a whole other rant), but eventually sales will go down enough that studios will have to rethink their game, especially with the economy being the way it is. But that's just my theory.
If i only get one viewer, I want to craft something that will nail that one viewer to the back of the room. Not to get too pretentious, but with this story i'm aiming to create is sort of a surrealist allegory on everything i've been seeing in the culture, underground and aboveground. It's about people who don't fit in, who've been getting the raw end of the deal their whole life, who have lost their most precious things, and who now have no choice but to fight it out while a world that never gave them a chance can only sit back and bear witness to the carnage they unknowingly had a hand in creating. It's about what happens when time bombs get sweeped under the rug instead of being diffused.
I was under the impression that you were looking for something unique. I've done my best to give that to you, but if i go by what you've just written to me, it seems as if you'd rather go with something else. I don't know if i can subjugate myself to that kind of writing. It's not a question of integrity really, it's more the reality of what a struggle it is for me to cater to a mainstream sensibility when most of my life i've gone against such a sensibility. I've never been able to relate to it, and at this point i don't think there is any going back. Also it would be an inordinate amount of work on something that i don't believe in and something i wouldn't watch, and it would just wind up being a debilitating process. I wouldn't care if it made a ton of money from hyperactive ridalin kids, if i was known for the rest of my days as "the guy who wrote Max Payne 2", I wouldn't be able to call myself a writer.
so i guess what i'm saying is i'm not the guy you are looking for. Since i've been doing all the work on this for a solid 2 months, and since they were mine to begin with, I'll take my characters and my ideas and do with them what i want. it may never buy me a car or put my kids through college, it may get buried in dollar theaters, and it may never even get picked up by anyone, but at least i'll be proud of it. This is for me now. This is for my people. Our day is coming.
take care and good luck.
- Nick
-------------------
just needed to share.
I absolutely do not want to create some soulless, artless video game ala Max Payne. That type of cinema is anathema to me. I don't care if it sells, i couldn't in all good conscience rest well at night knowing i crammed more intellectually crippled anti-creative junk food in America's already bloated movie market. I feel like the time for my kind of movies is coming... i can sense people are sick to death of the sequels and the remakes and the video game adaptations and the true stories minus truth and minus story. The fact that this crap is still making money is because most people have little or no other options (sort of like voting, but that's a whole other rant), but eventually sales will go down enough that studios will have to rethink their game, especially with the economy being the way it is. But that's just my theory.
If i only get one viewer, I want to craft something that will nail that one viewer to the back of the room. Not to get too pretentious, but with this story i'm aiming to create is sort of a surrealist allegory on everything i've been seeing in the culture, underground and aboveground. It's about people who don't fit in, who've been getting the raw end of the deal their whole life, who have lost their most precious things, and who now have no choice but to fight it out while a world that never gave them a chance can only sit back and bear witness to the carnage they unknowingly had a hand in creating. It's about what happens when time bombs get sweeped under the rug instead of being diffused.
I was under the impression that you were looking for something unique. I've done my best to give that to you, but if i go by what you've just written to me, it seems as if you'd rather go with something else. I don't know if i can subjugate myself to that kind of writing. It's not a question of integrity really, it's more the reality of what a struggle it is for me to cater to a mainstream sensibility when most of my life i've gone against such a sensibility. I've never been able to relate to it, and at this point i don't think there is any going back. Also it would be an inordinate amount of work on something that i don't believe in and something i wouldn't watch, and it would just wind up being a debilitating process. I wouldn't care if it made a ton of money from hyperactive ridalin kids, if i was known for the rest of my days as "the guy who wrote Max Payne 2", I wouldn't be able to call myself a writer.
so i guess what i'm saying is i'm not the guy you are looking for. Since i've been doing all the work on this for a solid 2 months, and since they were mine to begin with, I'll take my characters and my ideas and do with them what i want. it may never buy me a car or put my kids through college, it may get buried in dollar theaters, and it may never even get picked up by anyone, but at least i'll be proud of it. This is for me now. This is for my people. Our day is coming.
take care and good luck.
- Nick
-------------------
just needed to share.
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