2007.
i had graduated from college roughly a year prior. i was playing regularly in my band, and had recently entered a period of deep sexual satisfaction. it seems like both of those might just well be out of reach for the foreseeable future, but i digress...
i had spent the prior few years building up my video / DVD library with the weirdest, most fucked up films i could find. i was particularly taken with the cinemas of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jan Svankmeyer, Kei Fujiwara, Richard Kern, and films such as Sweet Movie, Begotten, Subconscious Cruelty, Tetsuo the Iron Man, Titus, The Mansion of Madness, essentially anything dream-like, trangressivley violent, sexually provocative, and impenetrably experimental... with heavy imagery that came off the screen. i was also digging deep into researching fringe performance artists like Chris Burden, the Vienna Aktionists, as well as Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and industrial / electronic acts that put on elaborate shows, such as IRM, SPK, Skinny Puppy, and so forth.
i had gotten to place with my lyric writing where i finally felt like i had found my niche, and i had just had a short story published in the Dennis Cooper edited anthology Userlands (my own personal "Four Touchdowns in One Game" moment i suppose), so i was feeling a bit of that old hubris, and i decided to go a head and write a screenplay that would encompass all that mentioned in the above paragraph; an experimental art-splatter surrealist epic (with some of that Tarantino-esque "interlaced anthology" structure thrown in for *shrugs in abject creative failure*) about the days immediately following a violent uprising at a mental institution. i first called it House with a Sky Inside, but feeling that the title was like a mouthful of a plastic flowers, i settled on Cut Visions, probably as a nod to Douglas Buck's resplendent short Cutting Moments.
the inmates would each represent different horror film archetypes:
- a young teenage girl who represented the "killer kid" genre, made popular by the Bad Seed. but really an homage to my favorite TV movie ever Child of Rage, as well as the America Undercover episode that inspired the former.
- a malnourished vampire who was meant to invoke the more "artful" strains of that genre (the Hunger, Martin, etc)
- a slasher villain whose exploits inspired a film-within-a-film, scenes from that being intercut with the "real world" events of the film.
- a school shooter with delusions of being a revolutionary.
- the "mad doctor" who ran the asylum, who was meant to be a "gritty, deconstructionist" take on Dr. Giggles (oh lord how i wasted so many creative hours pondering "elevated" takes on what is best left to be glorious trash. if you're ever feeling like you a need a hit of cringing pity, ask me sometime about my idea to synergize Venom and Carnage with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.)
- a witch who is sexually attracted to inanimate objects (no idea what i was going for here, but some of the imagery i liked the most came from this character, even if she served no real narrative purpose [not there was any narrative purpose at all, but y'know])
- the "pen pal" of the aforementioned killer kid, who would evolve into the biggest screen writing no-no imaginable; a nakedly obvious stand-in for *points two thumbs at carotids and makes a slashing motion*... a regrettable lapse into the kind of navel-gazing wish fulfillment that made me loathe such charmless fodder like Garden State and Ruby Sparks... Cause I Hooked Her To A Car Battery During Edgeplay, after i wrote what might be my most embarrassing set-piece ever, where this guy has a full on John Stagliano style punch-fuck session with a Lydia Lunch stand in who he flirts with at a nearby sex club while watching the aforementioned movie within a movie, i tried to negate my "tortured writer who is secretly really good at fucking trust me please baby please WHERE ARE YOU GOING" posturing by having the "killer kid" bite his cock off (having realized i inadvertently made this character a creep whose basically stalking a teenage girl... fuck i'm just like all the rest. i'm trying to be better now i promise).
- members of a cosmic death sex cult who served as a kind of stream-of-conscious greek chorus.
- random one-off characters like a Buffalo Bill lady skin suit wearing person who does an extended dance number to "I'm So Beautiful" by Divine, an environmentally autistic woman who wore a burqa of used diapers, a cop named after the Vio-Lence song "Officer Nice", a private investigator who went nuts trying to capture a slippery arch-criminal, and several other non-sequitur set-pieces that i pulled from dreams and Communion lyrics (i think i flirted with the idea of this being some kind of grindcore version of the Wall or Tommy because i was reaching Rupert Pupkin levels of socially nullifying self-delusion, but i digress).
i worked on Cut Visions for roughly two years. i had read that when David Cronenberg writes a first draft of a screenplay, he makes it as insane as possible, knowing full well that much of it will be changed or shed entirely during the filmmaking process, but giving himself and those who would come to work on a project a general idea of the film's world, pathos, and atmosphere. i applied that theory to my script, but i might've been overzealous, as i ended up with a crowded, meandering tumor of a project that scared away any potential collaborators, who either wanted nothing at all to do with the project, or who would've preferred to isolate the characters and slot them into more conventional genre stories. i felt that the point of the script was that these characters from disparate worlds were crossing over into each other's lives, being situated in a universe with rules that are completely different from the worlds they inhabit. creating something with more dimensions than their isolated mythologies possess. it's still how i feel about my creative universe; by themselves, the characters are little more that stand-ins for other myths and archetypes, but when put together, they form something more varied, and i think more bursting with imaginative potential.
nearly 10 years after i wrote Cut Visions, music had hit the skids for me, and i had once again looped back to the kind of sanity-squeezing isolation that defined much of my school years. i turned my attention back to prose, using Cut Visions has grist for the mills of the shared universe of my writing, re-examining and expanding upon the imagery, characters, atmosphere, and pathos in ways that i find much more rich and satisfying, so much so that the script feels like a skeleton drained of its marrow.
i'm not sure if i will ever attempt to write a screenplay again; movies are the most insurmountable and remote of creative opportunities... but never say never i suppose.
No comments:
Post a Comment