Real Housewives, the Wrath of God

The problem is, in typing this post, I am confessing that I watch Bravo’s venerable Real Housewives franchise, three of their myriad incarnations anyway. But you know what? I’m not confessing. A confession implies formally admitting guilt and guilt suggests having committed a crime and this is no crime, figurative or otherwise. If you wonder in this age of superhero spandex and PG piffle, where all the outrageous 1950s and 60s-styled Hollywood melodrama went, it’s on Bravo in the form of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. The recent Season 4 premiere was all galactically haute fashion, a cornucopia of withering putdowns, enormous personalities operating at the known limits of eccentricity, and a typically wild study of postmodernism, people fully inhabiting their own warped realities. “You don’t come for my family,” declares Meredith Marks, Pharoah of Park City, after taking offense to a fellow cast member taking offense to her and her husband seen on camera together in the bath, “and you don’t come for my bathtub,” fusing home life and home decor until they become virtually, hysterically inseparable. The season premiere concludes with a deliberate snowball fight meant to expunge lingering resentments that is conveyed like a horror movie, jibing with the episode’s opening, a Bermuda flash-forward that is the Real Housewives equivalent of the storytelling promise. 

That brings me to my point here. One of the recurring tropes of these shows for the uninitiated is a girls trip spanning several episodes, and despite typically being in some sort of tropical paradise, these ostensible vacations almost always devolve into calamity, none more famously than Real Housewives of New York’s so-called Scary Island episode, where events on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands went off the rails. And in last year’s Real Housewives of Potomac, when the ladies go swimming in a Tullum cenote, what should be spiritually rejuvenating, becomes mosquito-infested (semi) agony, the editors and producers deploying horror movie like cuts and needle drops. 

Aguirre, the Wrath of God, above, Scary Island, below, or maybe it’s the other way around...

And that’s when it hit me. “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) produced by Andy Cohen, a Real Housewives girls trip to some seemingly tropical idyll that gives way to madness. Of course, to make this movie, we will need a group of faux housewives, and because the Tampa/St. Petersburg area of Florida seems fruitful for the kind of abnormality we require, let’s set our fictional Real Housewives show there.

Real Housewives of Tampa/St. Pete

Abbi Jacobson. The contractually obligated Nick Prigge Player, yes, but tell me Abbi wouldn’t make for the ultimate Rosé warrior. 

Natasha Lyonne. The peanut gallery as a person, her confessionals would eventually dominate social media. 

Regina Hall. Hall’s housewife shows up for the girls trip with a gaggle of interns and multi-person glam squad, all of whom will be picked off one by one, gradually reducing her to a shell of who she appeared to be, like Tisha Campbell in the earthquake episode of “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” if she and Will had been stuck in the Nostromo instead of the basement. 

Jennifer Aniston. If rewatching a lot of “Friends” during the Pandemic taught me anything it’s that Angry Aniston rules, and I see Angry Aniston as the housewife dealing with feuds on multiple fronts. 

Reshma Shetty. The British American star waiting to be born will play a housewife claiming some sort of convoluted Royal heritage while parlaying it into a nominally successful music recording career. 

Anne Hathaway. The pre-eminent pot-stirrer, taking this one’s strictly confidential confession about that one to that one hella quick and then stepping back, feigning innocence, a haughty and content version of Ken Watanabe in “Godzilla.” 

Anne Hathaway as a Real Housewife

Mira Sorvino. Sorvino was on fire in “Union Square,” which not enough people saw, but I have come to realize that the one thing I failed to appreciate is how it essentially was her Real Housewives audition reel. 

And starring... 

 

Academy Award Winner Michelle Yeoh...

as The Grand Dame®.

Making Pitches: Vintage Hollywood Casserole

I finished reading Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson’s “Hollywood: The Oral History” a little while ago, and while that might make it seem like a proper book review is in order, it seemed more Cinema Romantico-appropriate to scour the book for possible fake Hollywood pitch material. After all, in a Hollywood gone madly sterile, we need as many pitches as we can get. 

Pitch 1: Page 59. In speaking of being D.W. Griffith’s assistant, the director Raoul Walsh explained for how so many so-called cowboys and Indians movies, he would be tasked with gathering extras for 

“And all of a sudden around five o’clock (Griffith would) say, ‘Raoul,’ he’d say, ‘round up about ten or fifteen cowboys for tomorrow,’ and then I’d have to get in the car and go down to Main Street to find these bastards in bars.” So, here we would find our fictional version of Raoul Walsh (Colin Farrell) in a cross between the “Lancer” scenes of “Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood” and “Get Him to the Greek” trying to track down the most volatile and famous of all cowboy extras (Robert Pattinson) in time for the big scene tomorrow at 10 A.M.

Pitch 2: Page 200. Director-producer Alan Dwan told a rip-roaring yarn of his movie production stealing a B-29 because the military would not lend them one. “So one night we put it on two of these gigantic trucks, drove it off the base at Tucson, Arizona, right though the gates and past the guards and up the road to our studio all through Arizona and California.” I know Quentin Tarantino has announced his intention to retire in the wake of his next movie, but Q.T., baby, stick around for one more, won’t you? 

Pitch 3: Page 417. We return once again to our friend Raoul Walsh talking about how Bette Davis wanted “In This Our Life” (1942) to end one way and the director John Huston wanted it to end another way and so Huston enlisted Walsh to have dinner with Davis. Walsh explained: “…the unit manager came in and handed me the script, the new ending. So I said, ‘Bette, this will interest you,’ and passed it over. She read it, and you never heard such a volley of oaths in your life. The ceiling went off from her screaming and yelling. People started to get up.” I mean, are you kidding me? This practically writes itself. Ninety minutes of Dianne Wiest in “Bullets Over Broadway” crossed with Sarah Jessica Parker in “State and Main” going to a martini-laden war with John Travolta from “Get Shorty.” It’s “My Dinner with Andre” as an acidly comic thriller, My Dinner with Bette starring Kristen Stewart (Davis would have been roughly 34 at the time) and Josh Brolin, can Raoul Walsh get Bette Davis to sign off the new ending before key lime pie. Who on God’s green earth says no? (David Zaslav, maybe?)

Pitch Meeting: More Objects as Movies

In writing over the weekend for The New York Times about Ben Affleck’s “Air” (review to come, eventually, someday), an opus of how Nike partnered with His Airness, Michael Jordan, by designing a shoe in his name, Zachary Siegel flippantly if accurately described the sudden new trend of Hollywood historical dramas: “Hey, remember this old thing?” He cites not only “Air” but “Tetris” (obviously), “BlackBerry” (self-explanatory), and “Flamin’ Hot” (the upcoming Eva Longoria joint about the invention of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos), without even mentioning the recently released “Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.” “These are not movies about people or events that changed our scientific or political reality,” Siegel reckons. “(T)hey are interested in men (and yes, I do mean just men) who changed our consumer reality.” More than that, though, Siegel continues, they are “centered on the objects.” Stop the tape. That is what interested me. That, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. 

There are so many objects! What other objects could become movies?! I’m so glad you asked!

More Objects as Movies

The Unique. Kinda like we here at Cinema Romantico fashioned our own answer to the “Winning Time” Los Angeles Lakers HBO miniseries with “Institutionalized Defeat” about the mid-90s Minnesota Timberwolves, allow us to fashion our own answer to “Air” with “Unique,” about The Human Highlight Reel Dominique Wilkins’s patented Brooks red and white high top. After all, Brooks is kinda to Nike as Blogspot is to Substack, making it feel right at home for our burgeoning ersatz production company. 

Surge. You remember Surge, my fellow Class of ‘96ers, the citrus-flavored soda haplessly enlisted by Coca-Cola to go toe-to-toe with Mountain Dew, marketing itself as the soft drink of the extreme sport crowd, or something, and a fitting metaphor for “Surge.” Directed by Middling Thriller titan Gary Fleder, this will be our object biopic to demonstrate that sometimes all Xtreme energy gets you is discontinued.

VHS vs. Betamax. “King Kong vs. Godzilla” as the famed Videotape format war. Possible sequel: “VHS vs. Toshiba DVD Player.”

Monopoly. If the studio is worried that all of these potential movies merely objectifying consumer objects will fail to bring Young Americans to the movie theater, worry not, we will simply greenlight “Monopoly” as an action-packed critique of capitalism, and failing that, just, like, you know, commission a remake of “King of Marvin Gardens.”

Rubik’s Cube. The UK Christmas Number 1 reimagined as the UK Christmas Number 1 Selling Toy of 1980 set against the backdrop of the emergent Thatcher regime. 

Bartles & Jaymes. Now we could make a movie about the Frank Bartles & Ed Jaymes ad campaign that ingeniously fused a 1980s yuppie product with 1950s folksiness, but we would rather turn Frank Bartles & Ed Jaymes into real characters, sort of “Grumpy Old Men” as Jay and Silent Bob meets “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Marr.” Bartles & Jaymes: Blue Hawaiian. 

Busch Beer. A Ponce de Leon-like quest in which a gullible viewer searches American mountain ranges for mystical Busch six-packs cooling in literal streams, just as the TV spots of yore promised. 

Fly the Friendly Skies. Granted, this is not an object, this is a slogan, but I enjoy watching old college football games on YouTube, especially college football games from the 80s, and one I watched at some point in the recent past included a vintage United Airlines spot. I had forgotten that Gene Hackman worked as the voice-only pitchman and, man, I gotta tell ya, on this ad I saw (heard), Hackman’s “Come fly the friendly skies” was nails, just ad-reading brilliance, not friendly, really, now that I think about it, because it’s Hackman, you know, but, like, majestic, regal, truly worthy of the accompanying “Rhapsody in Blue,” for a brief couple seconds embodying how air travel might have sounded during the Golden Age of Flight, long before the friendly skies transformed into poultry plants at 35,000 feet. Would I like to see a movie about Leo Burnett’s famous ad agency devising this slogan? Sure. But really, I’d like to see a whole movie about convincing the irascible Hackman to do this ad.

I should probably stop now.

Pitch Meeting: Third Saturday in October

The University of Tennessee Volunteers defeated the University of Alabama Crimson Tide over the weekend (stay with me - eh, if you want) in a 52-49 game epitomizing why college football will forever be the sport closest to this blog’s heart. It was a crucible of plot twists and pressure under the lights of a 102,000-seat stadium yielding as much electrifying brilliance as eye-covering folly that opened incredible cosmic portals to the sport’s history (we were on the precipice of The Fifth Down sequel for a minute there), demonstrated crucial shades of dimension (to my mind, the best player on the field was, in fact, the losing quarterback) and concluded not simply with a last-second field goal (that went over the crossbar as a kind of pigskin knuckleball demonstrating how even then the college football gods saw fit to throw in one more twist) but with the field overrun by bewildered, jubilant, orange-covered humanity and goalposts uprooted from the end zone and paraded through the streets of Knoxville, living out the sport’s perfect nexus between exultation and insanity. And that insanity, that’s what I’m thinking about. Because college football movies, whether the plethora of them released in the 30s and 40s when the game was king in America alongside baseball, or the more recent ones, tend to channel that insanity through the comedy genre, a la “Horse Feathers” (1932) or “Necessary Roughness” (1991) or some sort of gritty drama, a la “Saturday’s Heroes” (1937) or “The Program” (1993) (there is also the reverential fluff of “Rudy,” but don’t get me started). Rarely, though, if ever, do you see the college football thriller. And that is where Cinema Romantico comes in.

Tennessee’s game with Alabama is a rivalry even if it had been some time since Tennessee had prevailed, bearing its own nickname – The Third Saturday in October, simple-sounding, perhaps, but evocative of how, in their own minds, the date is reserved just for them. But I have always envisioned that moniker as something more, the title of my college football thriller, one I have heard for years and years in the voice of Don LaFontaine as an aerial shot of Neyland Stadium unfolds on the screen. “On the Third Saturday in October, tensions always run high. But this year, they are about to explode.”

An Alabama man, Henry Mize (Michael Shannon), with a personal history tied to the Crimson Tide football team gradually doled out over an hour and forty-five minutes, pilots a boat loaded with a bomb from a dock in Huntsville, Alabama and up the Tennessee River toward Knoxville, lowering his Crimson Tide flag at the border and raising a Volunteer one, a la “Captain Blood.” The plan: he will dock with the famed Vol Navy – an armada of tailgating boats moored on the banks of Neyland Stadium – where in a pre-planned ceremony the football team’s bluetick coonhound mascot Smokey will be brought aboard the boat of the informal Admiral (Luke Wilson) of the ostensible navy and blow them all to kingdom come. 

Henry’s preparations and voyage are crosscut with newbie UT Daily Beacon reporter Kelsey Slocum (Ayo Edebiri) who discovers in would-be puff piece about Smokey that the dog has received a death threat. When the local police laugh the threat off as just some jokester blowing smoke and her editor advises it is fake news (“Really? That’s really your response? You’re being serious right now?”) she skips her latest deadline, class, and huge exam to travel to the Yellowhammer State and open a time-sensitive investigation, taking her into the sordid heart of college football, from Paul Finebaum-ish radio personality John Theodore “J.T.” Pope (Bruce McGill), the self-proclaimed supreme pontiff of SEC Football, who becomes Kelsey’s unlikely co-detective, to an unctuous booster (Michael Rooker) who Knows More Than He Is Saying, to Henry’s ex-wife (Amber Benson), to some entity called the Huntsville Touchdown Club that proves to be less a non-profit for children’s medical needs than the front for a militant football fan organization, and finally, to a shady boat and RV salesman Grady Smith (Walton Goggins) who unlocks the mystery. (“You’re a Volunteer,” I imagine Goggins saying in his resplendent native Alabamian accent. “Why don’t you volunteer to show yourself to the door.”)

Kelsey and Pope then make haste upriver, aided by an idealistic river cop (Emily Procter) who in an emotional conclusion to their longstanding argument over whether Nick Saban is the superior coach to Bear Bryant (she says yes), commandeers the vessel by pushing her superior (Dwight Yoakam) overboard, outfoxing the inside man (Johnny Knoxville) operating a lock and dam, and racing to prevent the Third Saturday in October from being a day that lives in infamy. 

Pitch Meeting: Flagrant Two

Last week it was announced the Gonzaga and Michigan State men’s college basketball teams will play a game this Veteran’s Day on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln at North Island in Coronado, California. This occasional event first took place in 2011 when Michigan State played North Carolina on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson, a game attended by then-President Barack Obama. On Twitter, Ryan Nanni noted that had such games been around in the 90s, Hollywood would have undoubtedly sculpted an action movie blockbuster around it, going so far as to suggest a couple stars and a possible title – “Flagrant Two.” I like where Nanni’s head is at, you don’t need me to tell you that, but I also don’t understand why this has to be a pipe dream. This is it, this is our chance to revive the 80s-styled tentpole. John McTiernan has been out of prison and off house arrest for tax evasion for several years and this is the project to get him back in the directing game. He did his time, and so did Wesley Snipes, who we will cast as the President in “Flagrant Two” (I’m pilfering Nanni’s title because I’m bad with titles) when Russian terrorists (actors to be named later) swoop in aboard the USS Rutherford B. Hayes and take both POTUS and the two competing basketball teams hostage, triggering a 1980s/90s action movie blockbuster in 2022. 

Our cast:

Carl Weathers. At 74 years old, it’s high time we provide Weathers his deserved action movie swan song. And because he is but one year younger than just-retired Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski why not have Weathers play about-to-retire Georgia Tech coach Reginald Kerns who also happens to be a graduate of the Naval Academy, hence his coaching nickname The Admiral (a la David Robinson). In reality, however, Kerns never came close to achieving such a Naval rank, a fact which gnaws at and embarrasses him. But now, with the USS Rutherford B. Hayes under siege, Coach Kerns becomes the carrier’s only hope, finally proving he has the stuff of which Admirals are made, taking the terrorists on one-by-one in escalating scenes of non-CGI derring-do and saving the day. 

Sam Rockwell. Opposing University of Kentucky coach Joel Hatch is lauded in the media as a Leader of Men, a myth he helps perpetuate, even as those in the biz know him to be a sleaze ball. His ruse is outed when the hostages are taken and he fails to Lead any men at all, functioning as hapless comic relief to Kerns. But at a crucial moment, he rises to the occasion when Kerns implores him to ensnare the terrorists in his vaunted 2-1-2 3/4 court press.

Kevin Dunn. Head referee Dave Davis proves the inside man for the Russian terrorists, giving Kerns an undeserved technical foul as a signal. “All of America thinks I’m on the take every time I make a call,” declares a fed-up Davis. “Well, this time you can tell America they’re right.”

James Vincent Meredith. To avoid a defamation suit from the National Association of Sports Officials, we will have Meredith play Marcus Grant, another ref on Davis’s crew who refuses to accept his colleague’s treason and fights back. “That was always your problem, Marcus,” Davis intones at the climactic moment, referring to their contrasting officiating styles. “You never knew when someone should be tossed.” At which point Marcus picks up Davis and tosses him off the carrier deck and into the ocean. 

Dylan Baker. A frequent narrator of audio books who was born in Syracuse, Baker has the necessary credentials to take the role of the ESPN play-by-play man who finds himself broadcasting the Rutherford B. Hayes takeover to the outside world.

Matt Malloy. The ex-Napoleonic Duquesne coach turned ESPN color commentator Gus Schmerpel who finds himself woefully out of his depth attempting to analyze and explain geopolitics.  

Zoë Kravtiz. Despite winning the women’s NCAA basketball championship at Temple University in just her second year as coach, Rosanna Kerns toils in the shadow of her legendary father, dismissed in the game’s pre-show by the idiotic Schmerpel as “merely the second brightest bulb in the Kerns barn.” But when she is taken hostage along with the respective teams, she cuts through their bickering and selfishness to unite them in opposition to their hostage-takers, proving a woman can coach up dudes as well as any man.

Rokas Jokubaitis. The starting point guard on the Lithuanian national team will play the starting point guard on our made-up Kentucky team who all the players keep accusing of being Russian. “I keep telling you, I’m Lithuanian!” he hollers. “I hate these guys even more than you do!”

Michael Shannon. What, you though the chief Nick Prigge Player wouldn’t get in here somehow? Shannon will play a barista on the ship’s Starbucks who becomes a combination of Steven Seagal in “Under Siege,” Michael Richards in “Airheads,” and De'voreaux White in “Die Hard.” 

Pitch Meeting: Method Madness

In a recent interview with the Daily Mail (grain of salt), Tom Cruise’s first manager Eileen Berlin said that in 1981 her client refused to speak to a waitress who asked him if he was one of the actors in “Taps.” “Tom said to us, ‘Please tell her not to ask me any questions. I’m still in character.’” It mirrors the story Alana Haim told of Bradley Cooper working for a mere 5 days on set of “Licorice Pizza“ and staying in character the whole time. This is often thought of, rightly or wrongly, as The Method, born of Konstantin Stanislavski’s so-called Magic If. “To get audiences to suspend their disbelief,” Alexandra Schwartz recently wrote in The New Yorker of Stanislavski’s system, “actors must suspend theirs.” “But could it work so well that an actor loses sight of reality in the process?” Schwartz rhetorically wondered. “Nemirovich-Danchenko, the first in a long line of skeptics, called the system stanislav-shchina: ‘the Stanislavski sickness.’”

All that, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about a movie called Method Madness if only because the studio would never let us get away with a title called The Stanislavski Sickness. It’s a movie where an intense Method actor, Albert Brust (Michael Shannon), playing the megalomaniacal villain of a doomsday epic gets so deep into character that he gets stuck in character and can’t get out, literally walking off the set in the middle of the scene where his megalomaniacal villainous character is setting off to steal nuclear launch codes. Frantic, the movie’s young, overmatched producers Jordan and Evan (Abbi Jacobson, Burl Moseley) summon Albert’s long-suffering agent, Lonnie McVain (Kevin Corrigan), who, unsurprised and unpanicked, tells of the urban Hollywood legend of an actor who got so deep into character as Macbeth that he walked off the stage as Macbeth, causing the production to hire another Method actor to get so deep into character as Macduff that he “kills” Macbeth and brings the actor back to “life”. “So who can we hire to track him down?” the producers ask of Brust. “There’s only one actor up to this job,” replies McVain.

Cut to: Jordan and Evan wearing totally inappropriate clothes for ascending a windswept English hill in the middle of nowhere ascending a windswept English hill in the middle of a nowhere to find a small cabin where Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Day-Lewis) currently resides, alone, making porcelain figures of famous English footballers. Though Day-Lewis tries chasing these pesky producers out, intoning over and over that he’s retired from acting, Jordan and Evan finally appeal to his inner-acting titan by explaining it’s the role of a lifetime. “I’ve played the role of a lifetime,” Daniel Day-Lewis irritably replies, “twenty-three times. What can you plebes possibly offer me?” “A chance to save the world,” says Evan. “For real,” Jordan adds. Daniel Day-Lewis sets aside his half-finished Raheem Sterling figurine and accepts the role.

After a training montage in which Daniel Day-Lewis gets into character as the world’s greatest tracker, he tracks Albert Brust halfway across the world, swimming the whole Atlantic along the way, and finally meeting Brust mano-a-mano on a gravelly backroad beneath a darkened sky where Day-Lewis, really getting into the swing of things, thunders “With the fate of the world on the line, I meet you here, rabid scum, on this rocky road-” Except it turns out that Brust’s Method safe word is rocky road ice cream, immediately causing him to break character. The world is saved; Daniel-Day Lewis wins his fourth Oscar. 

*In Case Of Emergency: if Daniel Day-Lewis does not agreed to be lured out of retirement to play himself lured out of retirement, we will instead enlist Keira Knightley to play herself as a brilliant (I repeat myself), demanding, tempestuous Method actor who agrees to re-Method herself as the bounty hunter Domino Harvey and go after Albert Brust. 

Pitch Meeting: Leigh

Forgive me for tardiness, since stories that happened two months ago in Internet Time are essentially as long ago as 1491, but I was checked into my Roman COVID hotel when the news came down through the social media chute and I was in no position to write anything other than a diary entry of gloom. But. In late November, in an interview with Christina Newland for INews, the acclaimed British director Mike Leigh confessed that his “steadfast integrity” in how he went about making movies was causing him trouble in finding funding for his next movie. He revealed: “Netflix just turned me down, which is a shame, because they have plenty of money. They said they couldn’t possibly contemplate backing it without knowing who the cast is or what it’s about. It’s nonsense, because if they made it, people would watch it – because it would be there.” It’s absolutely true; it would be there, right alongside “A Castle For Christmas”, which was filmed in and around Edinburgh and seems to suggest that Netflix is not against filming in the British Isles. Granted, Leigh, whose oeuvre includes films like “Career Girls” and “Naked”, might not scream Netflix, but as Witney Seibold noted for Slash Film, it’s not like he makes expensive movies. And even if Netflix figures viewers won’t cue up a Mike Leigh film, what does Netflix do if not game their algorithms? Do that thing you do, Netflix, and mindless content consumers will consume Leigh too. Maybe a few of them will like it! Maybe they’ll check out some more of his work! People are liable to think they dig store bought cheddar cheese until they get some English Cheddar straight from the source!

Whatever. What most amused me was Leigh saying this: “They said they couldn’t possibly contemplate backing it without knowing who the cast is or what it’s about.” Like that would change anything! I’m imagining him explaining who the cast for “Vera Drake” would be and what it would be about and the Netflix executives turning out the lights in the room while Leigh is still in the middle of his pitch and then pretending they were never there in the first place. But now I’m also picturing Leigh, in a meeting with Netflix executives, realizing they need a story idea and cast and just trying, off the top of his head, to make a pitch, telling them about some drama “about, uh, this bloke, this bloke from Croydon…” Netflix Execs’ eyes glaze over. “…and, uh, he works for this dying industry…” Netflix execs’ eyes start to close. “…and he inadvertently gets involved with MI6…” Netflix Execs wake back up, sit up straight. “...and it’ll star, uh, Jim Broadbent…” Netflix Execs slump in their chairs. “…And Lesley Manville…” Netflix Execs shrug, half-interested. “…And Timothy Spall…” Netflix Execs’ eyes glaze over. “…and, uh, The Rock!” Netflix Execs erupt from their chairs and immediately greenlight the picture.

So, rather than having a sequel to the 1999 Steve Martin comedy classic “Bowfinger”, we will have an equal in the form of 2022’s “Leigh” as Mike Leigh is forced to enlist Jim Broadbent and Lesley Manville and Timothy Spall and his writer (Dolly Wells) and cameraman (Rupert Grint) to follow an unwitting Dwayne Johnson around Los Angeles, filming him as the star of their movie without him realizing he’s the star of their movie, and desperately trying to make Rodeo Drive and Mulholland Drive and Colorado Boulevard look like London.

Pitch Meeting: The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party

The Florida/Georgia game was played Saturday (stay with me!). It’s a significant rivalry in college football and a rare rivalry too in so much as it is generally not played on one of the school’s respective campuses but at a neutral site in Jacksonville, Florida along the St. Johns River. Colloquially the game is known as The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party, an evocative moniker coined way back in the 1950s when Florida Times-Union sportswriter Bill Kastelz noticed people employing binocular cases to carry flasks into the stadium with police doing little policing in regards to public drinking. Though that nickname was, for a time, official, it was rescinded in the 80s and eventually CBS, which began broadcasting the game in the late 90s, was asked to stop saying it too because such a sobriquet did not necessarily help the game’s reputation as a drunken hundred thousand person bender. In fact, preeminent college football scribe Spencer Hall, writing for his subscription site Channel 6 last Friday, recounted that in 1985 his friend’s Dad went to the Florida/Georgia game and did not come back.

“Like, not a few days,” Hall wrote. “I mean a while, a week or two at least.” He did “eventually come back,” Hall continued, “but with no explanations and without his mustache. This was my first introduction to the Cocktail Party. My friend’s dad traveled there for two nights with a mustache. He returned several weeks later without a mustache. Whatever the (The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party) was, it held the power to make men disappear and whip the hair right off their lips.” You know what’s coming... Stop the tape.

I imagined a movie: “The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.” I imagined a movie with Michael Shannon as a Florida Man, a Florida Man with a mustache, one who bids his family goodbye for the weekend to drive to Jacksonville for the Florida/Georgia game. Except we wouldn’t start there. No, no, no, no. This is one of those movies where we’d start with Florida Man in the Jacksonville Zoo, being attacked by alligators, as if his own Gator fandom is coming for him, and then comically freezeframe with Shannon making a facial expression like this one as he says the traditional “You’re probably wondering how I ended up here” thing before flashing back to his setting off for the Florida/Georgia game.

It will sot of be Cinema Romantico Films’ spiritual sequel to The Sun Bowl Follies, a Harold and Kumar-ish comically harrowing adventure in which Florida Man eats the nuclear spicy pickled pigs feet of some fellow Florida Fan from the panhandle (Kevin Corrigan), hallucinates and essentially misses the game despite being present, kidnaps Uga, the Georgia mascot, with a blitzed Florida Woman (Abbi Jacobson) he only realizes later is the chair of the UF College of Medicine before the Georgia Alumni President (Holly Hunter) recaptures Uga and drops Florida Man and Florida Woman in the alligator exhibit at the Jacksonville zoo. They escape, of course, if barely, and, exhausted, Florida Man collapses onto a couch that seems to just be out on the street for no apparent reason, nodding off without realizing that his makeshift bed is about to be set on fire by some Georgia students celebrating their team’s victory. His mustache is incinerated. 

Pitch Meeting: Goldfish

You have probably seen the story, the one about goldfish being deposited into lakes and growing to sizes seemingly impossible for small specimens mostly known, perhaps, for being starter pets of children who generally forget they even have them in the first place. If people are being cautioned against this, I thought, then perhaps it is time for a cinematic cautionary tale, a la the 1980 horror movie “Alligator”, which memorably warned us against flushing alligators down the toilet. And so. 

I thought about young Raina Shockley in Judson, Ohio improbably winning a rigged carnival game where she somehow manages to land a ping pong ball in a fish tank, winning the goldfish swimming therein. A burgeoning environmentalist, however, and not wanting to keep a goldfish cooped up in one of those scrawny tanks, she decides of her own volition to release the itty bitty freshwater fish into nearby Buttle Lake, bidding it a fond farewell, to live its best fish life. A sweet moment, however, grows ominous as the camera pulls back to reveal the nuclear reactors bellowing smoke just behind the quietly lapping water.

Flash ahead a couple decades and Raina (Abbi Jacobson), having grown up to be an ecologist and having not been to her hometown in years due to Reasons To Be Written Later, is reluctantly summoned back home by a Fish & Wildlife Service Agent Gary Hadwin (Burl Moesley) after strange doings out at Buttle Lake. On what seems like a routine excursion, Gary is eaten alive by a goldfish the size of a 1980s Buick Station Wagon, which follows Raina ashore, improbably able to breathe on land (“like the Northern Lodgepole,” observes Raina), and flaps away.

Raina and Judson Sheriff Joe Wheed (Michael Shannon) are then forced to pursue this nuclear waste-fueled goldfish as it flaps from lake to lake, wreaking havoc along the way, seemingly bent on reaching Lake Erie, and seeming to recognize Raina. “That’s impossible,” says Sheriff Wheed. “Everyone knows goldfish have no memory.” “That’s a fallacy,” explains Raina. “They have memory up to five months. And if its memory was nuclear powered, there’s no telling how far it might go back.”

Their pursuit, meanwhile, is complicated by the unwelcome presence of both Howard Faberghanz (Kevin Corrigan), president of the local Nuclear Power company who claims he is just here to make amends to the community but secretly wants to sell the goldfish to a Detroit fishmonger for a hefty price, and Stan Jervis (Bruce McGill), calling himself the best big game hunter in the Midwest until it becomes clear he just works the gun counter at the local Cabela’s.

Pitch Meeting: Gale Force

I should clarify right up front: this is not my movie pitch. In a minor breach of protocol, I am pilfering someone else’s pitch. But, what choice do I have? See, in doing a little post-“Cliffhanger” research, I discovered that “Cliffhanger” only came to be when a previous would-be Sylvester Stallone vehicle, after multiple attempts, foundered. That abandoned project was “Gale Force”, a screenplay originally written by David Chappe and that Carolco Pictures producer Daniel Melnick bought for $500,000 in 1989, according to Anne Thompson’s reporting for Entertainment Weekly in October 1991. “Gale Force,” Thompson writes, “(was) a tale about a lone man defending a seacoast town from a band of marauders during a hurricane.” I mean, yes, absolutely, sign me up. Carson Reeves, writing for ScriptShadow in 2010, said “of all the Die Hard rip-offs I’ve read and seen throughout the years, this is clearly the best.” Yet that screenplay ultimately did not work for Melnick, who, as Thompson went on to report for EW, at some point sought a fresh take in the form of none other than Joe Eszterhas, who “scrapped the Chappe story,” per Thompson, for “an arty love triangle.” But that apparently didn’t work either, leading to more cracks at a reworked screenplay, all of which led Harlin to eventually opt for “Cliffhanger” instead

The first iteration of “Gale Force” makes sense; it would have been Sly’s answer to “Die Hard” a few years after “Die Hard.” Maybe then there never would have been a “Daylight.” And while Sly in an arty love triangle, never mind one set during a hurricane, doesn’t really seem to make sense, after the 3,327th social media kerfuffle of 2021, one involving Sharon Stone and Meryl Streep, I also kind of like imagining Stone and Streep as the two women involved in this stormy love triangle. Can we retroactively make this a go picture, just by dumping Sly and having, say, Andy Garcia take his place? Can we have two retroactive “Gale Forces”, like “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II?” 

Alas, this is not 1990; this is now. And I’m looking to get “Gale Force” up and off the ground again for, say, summer of 2023. Problem is, we really don’t have someone who can do Sylvester Stallone stuff anymore. Liam Neeson, I suppose. We could put him in the arty love triangle “Gale Force II” with Julianne Moore and Nastassja Kinski. Or we could just put him in “Gale Force I” and have him reprise the whole “Taken” thing. But I don’t know. None of this feels like A Cinema Romantico Fake Movie.

The issue, I think, is that the actual Chappe script, as Reeves notes, does not contain pirates, not in the Warner Bros. swashbuckler vein, “just boring old modern day pirates.” That simply won’t do, not for this phony movie studio. When I think “Gale Force”, I think of that Capital One commercial, the one from over 20 years ago when the marauding pirates magically plunked down in the 21st Century are briefly thwarted by interest free plastic. So, with all due respect to my usual cast, for “Gale Force”, I’m seeing Mark Duplass as the owner of a ramshackle diner on a North Carolina cape who refuses to close in the face of an oncoming hurricane and then is forced to fend off Walton Goggins’s pirate cosplaying as Basil Rathbone in “Captain Blood.” Maybe Abbi Jacobson could be a tourist as a Tyler Endicott-like surfer in town to catch some Category 5 waves.

Pitch Meeting: Sonic Espionage

Last year The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, author of the excellent “Say Nothing”, released a fabulous podcast in which he explored the rumor that The Scorpions’ 1990 song “Wind of Change” was, in fact, written by the CIA as covert Cold War propaganda. I will not spoil the end in case you haven’t listened to it and podcasts are your thing, but I can’t recommend it enough. In fact, the other day I was recommending it to my friend John, leading us to envision the whole scenario, dreaming up images of a recording studio deep in the bowels of Central Intelligence, a few agents crowded around a microphone, like one of those Saturday Night Live We Are the World spoofs. That naturally led us even further, to imagining it as a movie. And while Hulu has already landed the rights to adapt “Wind of Change”, I wasn’t necessarily thinking of a straight podcast-to-screen adaptation anyway. No, I was thinking of something else.

I was thinking of a prodigy, one who enlisted in the CIA in his early 20s, a prodigy named Sean White (Kevin Corrigan), nicknamed The Wizard for his unlikely role as Langley’s premiere songwriter, having secretly penned “Wind of Change” by The Scorpions to help fuel the end of the Cold War and “Courtesy of The Red, White and Blue” by Toby Keith to help solidify the Patriot Act. In recent years, though, the Wizard has run out of magic. His attempts to write anti-Hugo Chavez and anti-Raul Castro rock songs for Venezuela and Cuba, respectively, failed to achieve similar success. “Rote,” Sean overhears one operative say at a Langley urinal of his latter day work. Still, when the CIA requests musical intervention in Hong Kong in response to China’s crackdown, CIA Captain Joe Geckle (Matt Malloy) enlists The Wizard nonetheless. “This is your last best chance,” says Geckle. 

Meanwhile, Rebekah Bowlin (Abbi Jacobson), barista at the Langley Starbucks (culled from a Washington Post piece by Emily Wax-Thibodeaux), finds herself commiserating with frequent customer Sean over the coffee shop’s milquetoast choice of music. Taking this to heart, Rebekah convinces her overworked shift manager (Burl Moseley) to let her set up shop one Friday afternoon and provide a little live music. Drawing on her love of Cantopop, she plays a few original songs composed on her synthesizer, one of which Sean overhears as he enters for a shot of espresso to get him through another marathon songwriting session. His ears perk up. “What’s that?” Sean wonders. “That’s Cantopop,” says Rebekah. “Cantopop?” Sean asks. “Some people call it HK-pop,” Rebekah explains. “You know, Hong Kong-pop music.” Realizing the code might have just been cracked, Sean convinces Geckle to enlist Rebekah as his songwriting partner, transforming “Sonic Espionage” into “Music and Lyrics” at the CIA.

Together, Rebekah and Sean compose a Cantopop song of covert democratic propaganda, Free Girl, an ode to Anita Mui’s “Bad Girl.” And, after tryouts within the farm, they enlist junior CIA officer Samantha Xǔ (Angelababy) as their frontwoman. But as the trio records and fine-tunes their track ahead of a Hong Kong music festival secretly put on by the CIA under the guise of being administered by a jailed rock producer Karl Matterhorn (Michael Shannon) seeking a reduced sentence, Geckle begins to fear Samantha Xǔ might be a double agent while the CIA task force commander, Rick Fernstrom (Kurt Russell), overseeing the whole op, who fronts a 70s and 80s rock cover band – The Ruff Ryders – in his everyday life, expresses concern that Sean and Rebekah’s song is not overtly patriotic enough. “I was thinking a cross between Vixen and Uriah Heep,” he says. Rick names himself third songwriter and assumes creative control as Sean explains to Rebekah the need for artistic secret intelligence compromise. Disillusioned, Rebekah returns to Starbucks.

At the festival, just before Samantha takes the stage to sing Rick’s song, she confesses to Sean that she doesn’t think it will help turn the tide. “And ye shall know the truth,” Sean says quoting the CIA’s unofficial motto, “and the truth shall make you free.” Samantha takes the stage and performs their song rather than Rick’s, leading he and Geckle to momentarily believe she is a double agent, seeking to shut down the concert...until they see the crowd react, carried away by the melody and the message. At the Langley Starbucks, Rebekah’s shift manager shows her a clip of Samantha’s performance uploaded to YouTube. “Have you heard of this song?” he asks. “It sounds a lot like one of yours.” “No,” she says, smiling. “Never have.” 

Pitch Meeting: The Greatest Game Never Seen

Last week I was listening to an interview with sportscasting legend Al Michaels on The Ringer’s Pressbox podcast, ground zero anymore for all my inane movie ideas. Michaels talked at length about his start in the broadcasting business calling games for the old Hawaii Islanders, a one-time Triple-A Pacific Coast League team. He talked not only about essentially living right on the beach but how, to cut costs that traveling with the team would have brought, he would quote-unquote recreate road games by reading the live ticker and then calling the game as if it were happening right in front of him. You know what’s coming next. STOP THE TAPE.

This story got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about an aspiring baseball announcer, Lucy Davenport (Abbi Jacobson), relegated to calling games for some independent baseball team, the Hawaii Sea Turtles. Thinking no one will ever hear her in such a far-flung place, she is surprised when the owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, William Betterton (Carl Lumbly), vacationing on Oahu, happens to turn on a Sea Turtles game and hears Lucy’s call of a game-winning home run. Impressed, he seeks her out and advises his team’s current play-by-play announcer is contemplating retirement at season’s end. If he goes through with it, and if Lucy continues doing A+ work, then Betterton would consider her for the job. “I’ll be listening,” Betterton says. 

Alas, the Sea Turtles’ wily owner (Bruce McGill) pulls a fast one on a road trip, effectively canceling the season and destroying the team by selling all his players to opposing squads, like spare parts, all while they are still in the air, pocketing the cash high-tailing it for the Caribbean. Disheartened, Lucy tells her best friend, Kiana Lee (Sanoe Lake), with whom she plays in a co-ed softball league, who councils Lucy to not simply give up. “But what I do?” Lucy asks as they shag fly balls in the outfield. “The team doesn’t exist! They canceled the season!” “Not if you recreate it,” says Kiana.

So, with the help of her producer, Jake Garbanzo (Kevin Corrigan), refashioning himself as a 1930s radio special effects man, Lucy keeps calling the Sea Turtles’ non-existent season by concocting a sea story in which a tidal wave has placed the team’s field underwater and forced them to play the remainder of the season the road. She recreates games all the way to the championship at which point, taking things too far, she recreates their field as being reopened just in time for the Big Game. Big mistake! Betterton phones, saying he plans to attend the championship, forcing Lucy to employ Kiana and the rest of her co-ed softball league in a desperate bid to recreate a Sea Turtles game...for real!!!

Will the ruse work? If it does, will Lucy really decide to forsake paradise for the humidity of the Midwest? And will the sexist windbag of Honolulu sports talk radio, Devin Blabelford (Michael Shannon), who has made it his life’s work to expel every woman from the announcer’s booth, succeed in exposing Lucy’s gambit, or will he come to realize she’s the best at what she does after all? 

Pitch Meeting: Ups and Downs

On a recent episode of The Pressbox podcast, co-host Bryan Curtis interviewed NBC’s U.S. Capitol reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell about what it’s like to work on The Hill. In explaining the unwritten rules of asking Senators and Representatives questions, Caldwell revealed that because reporters can only be invited on to chamber elevators by Senators or Representatives, these lifts become something of a convenient escape hatch for politicians seeking to elude giving responses. Sometimes, she explained, the lift operators will even hustle to close the door on behalf of their charges, co-conspirators, so to speak, in evasive tactics. And that, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. 

It got me to thinking about a movie, “Ups and Downs”, in which a longtime Hill lift operator, Marvin Alexander (Kevin Corrigan), has befriended myriad politicians over the years, none more than Jim Mullins (Michael Shannon), Republican Senator from the great state of Ohio. An intrepid reporter, new to The Hill beat, from The District Blade, Taylor Stallings (Abbi Jacobson), has drawn the ire of Senator Mullins for repeatedly trying to hold him accountable for refusing to condemn a President (Jim Gaffigan) who has spent most of his first term trying to sell federal land to Wyndham Hotels & Resorts®. After all, Senator Mullins is a Wyndham® rewards member. And as “Ups and Downs” opens, Taylor is once again peppering the Senator with questions when, desperate to evade her, Mullins steps aboard the elevator as Marvin closes the door in her face, exchanging fist bumps with the Senator. “You’re alright,” says Senator Mullins.

One evening both Marvin and Taylor are dragged to a karaoke bar on 14th St for “Hamilton” Night (celebrate Big Government with the Lowest Prices on beer!). They meet cute and bond over their belief that Sondheim’s “Assassins” is the superior musical, doing karaoke to “The Ballad of Czolgosz.” They fall in love, though Marvin repeatedly states he cannot let her on the elevator without Senator Mullins giving the go-ahead. “It’s the code of The Hill,” says Marvin.

Meanwhile, one day Senator Mullins notices that his nemesis, Democratic Senator Olivia Kratzer (Jada Pinkett Smith), from the Great State of Michigan, invites a reporter onto the elevator, explaining that she made one compromise with a Republican Senator on a particular bill in order to get a dozen other items added to the bill that would benefit her constituents, resulting in a glowing profile. In the Senate dining room, Senator Mullins reluctantly breaks bread with Senator Kratzer about how they can prevent the President’s expressed desire to sell the American side of The Great Lakes to Canada given how would adversely affect each of their states. One condition of their plan, however, is that Senator Mullins must publicly resign his cherished position as Honorary Chairman of the Wyndham® Golf Championship.

When the President, in a desperate bid to interfere with The Hill hearings on his Wyndham® Resorts Scandal, goes on prime time television and tells the nation he has hidden a special prize inside the Capitol Dome and that a huge reward awaits whoever finds it first, the Capitol is besieged the following morning. As alarms sound and people flee, Senator Mullins steps aboard his usual elevator to be whisked to safety. A frightened Taylor looks at the elevator, desperately, and then at Marvin, who looks at Senator Mullins, who finally says between gritted teeth “Permission to step aboard.” 

When the power is cut, the trio is stuck on the elevator, discussing their fears, their desires, their secrets. Senator Mullins admits he wants to cut Defense spending; Taylor admits that even though her Twitter bio says Dog Lover she is really more of a cat person; Marvin admits elevators make him nauseous. 

Pitch Meeting: Rhode Island Rhapsody

Recently I was listening to an episode of This Had Oscar Buzz – a podcast all about movies that “once upon a time had lofty Academy Award aspirations but for some reason or another it all went wrong” – and co-hosts Joe Reid and Chris Feil briefly mentioned the Hollywood Film Awards. If I had heard of the Hollywood Film Awards before, I had forgotten them, but Feil explained that these ostensible awards were essentially bought by publicists, generally handed out before the winning movies themselves were even seen, recollecting that in one case Amy Adams won an award for “Arrival” before the movie even had a trailer. STOP THE TAPE. Before there was a trailer? Ok, ok, Feil hedged a bit, saying he wasn’t sure if it was true or not, though he also they would cut that part if it wasn’t, so it must have been? Doesn’t matter and I’m not doing the research to find out. What matters is that this newfound information, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking.

It got me to thinking about, hmmmm, let’s say Joe Valley (Michael Shannon), a claims adjuster turned movie producer who can only view art in terms of risk management which is precisely why he’s never won an award. Deciding to take a risk and pull the kind of fast one he would have sniffed out from a mile away back in the day, Valley buys a Hollywood Film Award for a movie starring the last woman in town who will work with him, Kayla Prentice (Abbi Jacobson), a diva without the definitional success, constantly talking to her imaginary entourage, before the movie has even been made (!). When his non-existent film wins the Hollywood Film Award for Best Picture and Best Actress for Kayla, then, Valley has only 60 days to turn around and make an entire movie based solely on a title, enlisting the hapless but desperate Gordon Monson (Kevin Corrigan) who, thinking the title “Rhode Island Rhapsody” sounds funny, accidentally starts shooting a comedy until, sitting down to watch a cut of the movie, Valley realizes this and orders him to change it to a drama since comedies never win awards forcing Gordon to reshoot the entire movie in 17 days before its premiere.

Meanwhile, as the Hollywood gossip rags close in on getting the truth out of the party animal Hollywood Film Award President, Yale Manley (Jonah Hill), Glenn Close (herself), peeved that she may lose yet another Oscar race even after starring in “Eleanor of Aquitaine”, dispatches her personal assistant (Tiffany Haddish) to find out what’s really going on with “Rhode Island Rhapsody” and put a stop to it. The movie ends with Joe Valley and Glenn Close fighting in front of the Hollywood film sign if for no other reason than it makes for a striking image.

“Rhode Island Rhapsody?” Yale Manley asks watching the fight from below with a margarita in his hand. “I heard that was a real piece of crap.”

Pitch Meeting: Football Monastery

In a recent piece for the Omaha World-Herald, Dirk Chatelain did a deep dive on the grand college bowl game drama (stay with me!) that played out across New Year’s Day 1971, culminating in a mythical national championship for my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers. The story is heavy on anecdotes and joyful specifics, none more than the one Chatelain pulled from the Rose Bowl between Stanford and Ohio State, the latter coached by the legendarily disagreeable Woody Hayes. Chatelain sets the unlikely southern California scene: “Hayes could’ve cut his team some holiday slack. He did not. The old tyrant lodged the team at a California monastery.” STOP THE TAPE. During the 2017 Rose Bowl, the Oklahoma Sooners stayed at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live; the Georgia Bulldogs bunked down at the InterContinental Los Angele Downtown. The former claims to set “a new standard for luxury”; the latter “revel(s) in glamour and exhilaration that defines what it means to live the InterContinental life.” Hayes, to reiterate, lodged his team at a freaking monastery. And while it gave me a chuckle, it also gave me an idea. After all, I am a less than successful Hollywood producer, having brought you the likes of “The Sun Bowl Follies” and “Downtown Athletic Club — The Movie”, each one a quasi-uproarious college football comedy. No movie production company is more dedicated to quasi-uproarious college football comedies than mine. And here was another plot for one staring me straight in the face.

Chatelain’s teaser sent me Googling for more backstory. It did not take long to find a 2009 L.A. Times piece by longtime college football scribe Chris Dufresne (who sadly died last year) detailing Woody Hayes’s dedication to No Fun. “The Mater Dolorosa Passionist Retreat Center, still operational, was established in 1924 on 83 acres in the foothills in Sierra Madre. The monastery, built in the 1930s, was torn down after the 1991 earthquake. The property was taken over by the Army in World War II and used as a weapons staging area and a place to quarter wounded soldiers.” Dufresne continued: “Hayes could not have found a better place for solitude -- never mind that the monastery scared the wits out of many of his players.”

Dufresne quotes a guard on Ohio State’s 1968 team, Phil Strickland, recounting the team flight to the 1969 Rose Bowl: “(Hayes) had the trainers tape everyone up on the plane. That meant we were going to go directly to the practice field.” And that is where we will begin our tale — “Football Monastery” (a play, you see, on the old expression Football Factory) — with a Hayes surrogate, Joe Melch (J.K. Simmons), coach of Hart Crane College, going up and down the aisle making sure his players are being taped up, banning the flight attendants from food and beverage service and literally throwing the The Columbus Dispatch reporter (Abbi Jacobson) off the plane in a nod to “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.”  Upon landing, the team will go straight to the practice field for a brief and brutal scene before being bussed to the remote monastery, passing Knot’s Berry Farm along the way, the bright lights and towering roller coasters calling to them like a forbidden beacon. 

The rest of the movie, save for an ending we will get to, takes place inside the monastery. The real-life Strickland deemed his team’s experience as being akin to a Lon Chaney movie, star of silent horror movies, a genre which we will merge with both philosophical drama and John Sturges’s “The Great Escape” (1963) into Cinema Romantico Productions’ patented blend of quasi-uproarious comedy as the mad and controlling Joe Melch runs amok before facing up to his feelings and fears while in monk-like isolation (helped by chats with an eccentric monk, played by Kevin Corrigan, over Trappist ale in the grotto) and the players scrupulously plan a breakout attempt. Finally, on New Year’s Eve, when they are all supposed to be in bed early for the next day’s big game, the team flees as Joe Melch wakes bright and early the following morning to discover the monastery only contains monks. Ten minutes before the Rose Bowl, Melch finally finds his team at Knot Berry Farm. 

The movie cuts to the Rose Bowl where the head referee looks at an empty sideline and then at his watch in confusion. 

The movie cuts back to Knot Berry’s Farm where Coach Melch rides the Xcelerator, hands in the air, with his whole team. End Credits. 

College Admissions: The Movie

Yesterday a total of 50 people were indicted, per CBS News, in a widespread college admission bribery scandal. Academically un-gifted students of well-to-do parents were recruited as athletes despite possessing no athletic talent to elite universities where they were given help in cheating on their entrance exams. (The details are dizzying.) Among those charged were Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin. And Cinema Romantico would not be doing its job if it did not turn this tale of spectacular privilege and wealth run stupidly amok into a movie pitch. I’m so sorry (you’re welcome). 

College Admissions: The Movie

In a nod to Lori Loughlin’s Hallmark Channel roots, we will cast Candace Cameron Bure (shout-out to my friend Naomi for this suggestion) as Laura Laffler, the Lori Loughlin character, and Hope Davis as Fable Moritz, the Felicity Huffman character, who conspire to get their spoiled, less-than-academically-inclined daughters into prestigious University of California Catalina Island (UCCI) on bogus beach volleyball scholarships (sex sells!). When the moms are busted by the FBI, they are summarily locked up as cellmates where they are forced to search their souls.

We will cast Vanessa Hudgens as Ophelia Laffler, daughter of Laura, and AnnaSophia Robb as Savannah Moritz, daughter of Fable, whose scholarships are revoked when their moms go to jail. Alas, UCCI is down one beach volleyball team when its two best players are coincidentally injured in a parasailing accident, forcing the beleaguered athletic department to strike a deal: Ophelia and Fable can earn back their scholarships if they win the beach volleyball conference title. Thus, these two good-for-nothings are forced to dig deep for something more as they reach for the stars, learning to volleyball and love themselves along the way!

Dina Meyer will play their coach, Karla Sloan, a disgraced former beach volleyball star who was caught doping at the Olympics and is promoted from who-cares assistant to win-at-all-costs head coach when her boss is implicated in the admissions scandal. Though Karla seeks to have Ophelia and Savannah dope too, since what other hope do they have, she eventually learns performance enhancing drugs are no match for a little hard work. 

Kaitlin Olson will play Ophelia and Savannah’s supervisor at the Whataburger where the two girls are forced to get jobs to pay their way after the government freezes their family’s assets and they got no money.

Queen Latifah will play Tina, prison mentor to Laura and Fable, who is jovial and full of helpful advice despite serving a 20 year rap for loitering. At movie’s end, Laura and Fable are released on good behavior despite an early comical scene where they bungle an escape attempt; Tina is denied parole.

Melissa McCarthy is the UCCI dean attempting to prevent Ophelia and Savannah from winning the beach volleyball conference title to save scholarship money. When Ophelia and Savannah emerge victorious anyway, they accept a free meal from a fast casual restaurant, unbeknownst to them a violation of NCAA rules. Their title is forfeited, their scholarships remain revoked, and the Dean receives a bonus comprised of money from the very same college admission scam slush fund.