(bad idea) by Simulacron3 (4.9 hr) ) 0 (+171 0/-171) March 1948 at 01:07:57

INT. MOVIE THEATER PROJECTION BOOTH-NIGHT

The CAMERA opens to an extreme close-up on man's face as a tear follows the wet track of its predecessor from left eye to corner of mouth.

Cut to POV of movie projectionist looking past projection equipment and through a window to the screen, where We see Max and Robert in wheelchairs facing each other, stage center on a dark, empty, curtained stage.

ROBERT
(shocked and angry)

"Damn, Max!"

MAX

"I'm sorry, I just don't care anymore, Robert."

Max about-faces his motorized wheelchair and exits stage left with slow dignity.

Fade to black, white text scrolls up and out:

"The wind was warm for winter,
but enough to excuse a shaking body.
The empty school playground not whitely frozen,
but brown and barren and
displeased at the self-absorbed soul standing on it.
One, only one, of the two swings swings sadly."

Cut to Robert, alone, still center stage.

ROBERT
(to the camera)

"How can he mean that? In what way, in what way damn it!, could there be any sense behind it? What a prick! (Sobs.)"
Robert's tone changes to wistful remembrance.

"Oh, yes, what a fine, stiff prick. Oh, I'm broken. I shall join the Army!"

(curtains)

(The CAMERA gets bored and begins to swing and sway to the music in its head and nods to the beat. Audio fades to the clamorous, chaotic sounds of intense combat and frantic shouting of battlefield commands and screen fades to black.)

ANONYMOUS VOICES

"You're hit! Find cover!"
"Enemy down!"
"Get that mortar over here now!"

Fade in over sound to a soldier in desert fatigues lying in the dust, back propped up against a wrecked vehicle. We hear THINK!-THINK!-THINK! ... THINK! ... THINK!-THINK!, as bullets strike the mine-mangled jeep that SGT. ROBERT FRANK is slumping against. He doesn't react because he's tired and dead. Battle sounds fade out.

A sudden wind blows the flies from the soldier's massively insulted face and the wind cries, "Mary!" Sound fades. Fade to white. Cut to stock close-up photo of the planet Jupiter.

NEWSCASTER

"On Jupiter, a bolus of gases the size of the Earth was thrust violently upwards this morning with enough force to run your iPod through the next three incarnations of the universe as President Hunteress spoke on all the channels of all the televisions of the whole world, all at the same time. He spoke of the sickness and of naked food.

"But no one cared. Everyone went to the Internet, instead, to see shocking and dramatic accounts of trivial events written by white male six-figure-earners and read by Asian Women six-figure earners and say, "Ohh!" or "Ahh!" or "Oh, no!" or "Yay!" or "That Fucking Bush!" or more likely just think the same because they are all alone and life is dead and the TV is a more entertaining metronome than the jerking second hand of the large office clock that hangs on the wall."

(continued from page 3)

"Please excuse the mess." Mary said apologetically of her obsessively-compulsively clean and neat apartment. "I've never brought a man here before."

Max knew what he said in response would determine the evening's outcome and fingered the inspection tag in the left pocket of the new Dockers he was wearing as he let his sentence form on its own. He looked around for a conversation piece, but found none. His attention was drawn to the incongruously loud and slow ticking of wall clock. "Nice clock." He said. "Large."

Then he moved to a bookshelf, empty but for a single small and thin hardback lying on its side. He picked it up to see the title, which was "On Being Writerly" It was bookmarked with cancelled ticket to "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat"

The book opened to Chapter 1, which began with
"In your first paragraph, chase away the plebian pedestrians, those mundane minds that will never get it and would say so quite loudly and become embarrassing detractors. The best defensiveness is a good offensiveness. Avoid alliteration.

"The hangers-on, play them with quirks and oddities, idiosyncrasies that are precisely nonsensical and rebelliously contrary. Show them the deceptively novel view and entice them with the dark, wavering mirage-mirror of smart, special, right-brain intensity. Use words that are big and obscure, especially the ones you learn in college. Flow and tone are more important than coherence or even sense"

The words inspired him to fill the silence by asking, "Life is poetry, wouldn't you say?" The silence swallowed his words without a burp. Then he gratefully noticed a framed collection of cloth pieces on the wall. He moved to gaze at it with what he hoped would appear to be convincingly concentrated, expert appreciation.

She stared at the back of his nodding head as he stared at her ego art on the wall. She wondered what she could say in less than three words to get him to leave immediately, without a fuss.But then he said it; he spoke the words that created a rose-petal path to her bed. "Oh, my! What a fine collection of fart prints! Where did you acquire these? Don't tell me they are your own work!"

The CAMERA draws back and out through the apartment window, which shrinks to become one in a large matrix of little yellow windows on the facade of a skyscraper. The wind sighs Mary. A large, lit billboard has the words "walking softly on the shattered shards of" quoted in huge black Courier on a white background.

Cut to a large amphitheater-like university classroom.The podium is pointedly pushed aside. Professor Max Flight slouches with measured casualness on a high stool. His feet are drawn up and his knees jut out like angle braces, spread apart by his hands to display his hidden package to the girls.

MAX
(Cants his lecture to first-year creative writing students with the exaggerated enthusiasm and animation that seems to impress these kids. His eyes never stop scanning the front-row girls' faces for the hint.)

"Choose your titles as carefully as you choose your sex partners.", he exhorts strongly. "For some of you, I should probably say much more carefully." Some of the students who were listening laugh and look around to see who's looking at them.

"Always remember that the title is not the content. It is advertisement. A tout. A pithy abstraction, a one phrase poem. Make it short, but luring. Make it a flesh hook.

"Long titles suck. If you can't write a good title in 5 words or less, you can't write at all. Suggest, don't state. Is your title a sentence? That's totally fucked. Leave now and take up teaching or something.

"Remember, that writing FOR an audience means writing ABOUT them. Readers are narcissists with flexible yet hungry self-images. That's right. Just like writers. Let them think, 'Yes! That's me! I'm like that! This is for and/or about me! Oh, joy! I'm so excited that I really have to go and pee!'

"Or perhaps let them instead think, 'This writer is shallow and his work has leaping faults, but he's luckily touched something deep, something to which my uniquely profound sensitivity responds more than others are capable of imagining. I would give this writer sex, but would I not stay until morning.'

"That's OK.

"You want to know what really sucks? Stuff written by writers whose eyes have mirrors where they should have lens, windows on the outside and windows into other minds. Those mirror-eyed guys, they can only see inward and they write only self-conscious shit about themselves, giant shadows of their little selves splashed big on the cave walls of their own minds, and they expect the whole world to stop and read their stuff in stunned silence and then applaud.

"If you get nothing else from this course, get this: writing is for the secure and reading is for the insecure. Don't try to write for writers. They don't give a shit, even though they seem polite and encouraging. Write for the readers. Write like your sex depends on it."
The girl in the third seat from the left smiles at his direct glance and quickly looks down at her blank notes, still smiling. Max smiles, too, and gets a tingle at the tip of his dick. She will have a question after class.

(curtains close)

(continued on page 3)

Max was sincerely apologetic. " Sorry. I know I should have told you before it got this far. My dick doesn't work anymore, Mary. I lost erectile function completely when the man I loved died in the war."

Mary smiled a genuine nothing-could-be-better smile. Warmed by the ego-glow his appreciation of her fart prints produced, she drew close to him and purred and breathed out a soft and sultry "You won't be able to say that in the morning."

Max smiled a smile that was outwardly appreciative yet demonstrative of hopelessness; inwardly, the smile meant, "This is so easy."

On the far left of the screen, a table lamp falls forward, revealing that it was but a cardboard image propped up from behind by like a photo frame. Mary and Max look at it.

FADE TO BLACK.

CREDITS.

Viewing room lights come on. The Producer throws open her arms in a theatrical display of "What the fuck is this shit?"