Mann Men (For a Livin’)

Friend of the Blog Jaime recently forwarded me a Los Angeles Review of Books piece from March by Clayton Purdom dissecting the oeuvre of Michael Mann, the greatest living American filmmaker, and the work-obsessed men who dominate it. Mann Men, Purdom deems them, tracing them and their professional dedication from James Cann’s titular “Thief” (1981) all the way up to Adam Driver’s eponymous Enzo “Ferrari” (2023). I especially appreciated the latter. Maybe because “Ferrari” was a movie of an all but extinct breed, one in which Mann specializes, the big budget Hollywood art film, it seemed to get lost in the year-end shuffle with so many other releases but was deserving of the rigorous analysis Purdom provides. Indeed, the whole piece is exhilarating, and electrically written, and exhaustive. And yet, in devoting over 4,000 words to Mann’s oeuvre, it never once mentions not just my personal favorite Mann movie but my favorite movie period, “Last of the Mohicans” (1992).

Purdom might reference “Collateral” (2004) as a popcorn movie, but “Last of the Mohicans” is by far Mann’s poppiest movie. It is vintage Hollywood, as Charles Taylor put in his definitive take on the film for Salon, reduced to the most primal of emotions which is, perhaps, why it doesn’t lend itself as readily to academic-styled analysis. Based as it is on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, in a colonial America where indolence, to paraphrase the memoirs of Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, was totally discouraged, Mann’s film adaptation, based in part on the 1936 film adaptation, is in its way about industrious men in pre-industrial America. The two Mohican Indians, Chingachgook (Russell Means) and Uncas (Eric Schweig), and their adopted son Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), are hunters and trappers and you’re telling me that ain’t work? Living in 1757 by trapping is harder than cracking safes and winning the Mille Miglia put together.

“Last of the Mohicans” begins, in fact, with the three men hunting an elk. In Native American culture, the killing of an animal is something sacred, which we see in how the three men honor and give thanks to the vanquished beast, and which we see even more in how Mann evokes the hunt itself, venerating these men and their work with a sweeping visual and musical grandeur. Mann conveys their cooperative effort with nary a word, merely the instinctual understanding of a hundred similar hunts, foreshadowing so many ensuing workmanlike scenes, like when they track a Huron war party and rescue a British regiment, chasing off the enemy with a practiced, reverential ease. When Hawkeye dispatches one Huron warrior in hatchet-to-hatchet combat, you sense the choreography of the movie giving way to the choreography of the character, like our hero knows the moves of his opponent in advance. In these moments Day-Lewis exudes Jada Pinkett Smith’s line from “Collateral” that Purdum quotes: “Take pride in being good at what you do?” Indeed, the famed commitment DDL brings to all his roles effortlessly blends with the commitment Hawkeye brings to what he does and the climactic moment when Hawkeye shoots two muskets at once feels less like an exclamation than a variation of Purdum’s cited Mann Men creed: act like you’ve simultaneously shot two muskets before. 

Of course, the Mohicans also help rescue the Munro sisters, Cora (Madeleine Stowe) and Alice (Jodhi May), with whom Hawkeye and Uncas, respectively, will fall in love. They might have intended to trap during the fall and winter in Kentucky, but something happens, to quote Susan Sarandon in (forgive me) “Elizabethtown” that is not part of the plan. And maybe that’s why after all these years, “Last of the Mohicans” is still my number one Mann movie. It’s a significant irony, after all, that a guy hung up on what people do is my favorite filmmaker when few things matter less to me than what I or people at a dinner party do. (Tell me your favorite color, your favorite regional barbecue, your favorite Canadian province, anything else!) And so, rather than maintain discipline of a rigid professional code in the manner of most Mann men, Hawkeye eschews his work’s strictures to throw himself headfirst feet-first over the falls of passion. Sometimes, brother, those beaver pelts can wait.

Wait, What Did He Just Say?

One of the best recurring bits of of Hulu’s Steve Martin and John Hoffman-created true crime podcast send-up “Only Murders in the Building” that My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I have been enjoying is the obsession nascent podcast host Oliver (Martin Short) has with dips. “Dips can be a meal,” he explains in a line sure to be dutifully recited by fans of the show around veggie platters for years to come. Oliver’s love of dips is on full display in a recent episode set during an NYC blackout. He happens to be at a diner with his two fellow tenants, amateur sleuths and podcast cohosts (Martin and Selena Gomez) when the power goes out and their server, knowing Oliver’s devotion to immersive sauces, gives him all their dips lest they go to waste in a powerless fridge. Oliver accepts, of course, but given his overly dramatic fragility (and bad knees) he abandons them in a stairwell of their apartment building a few floors up when he decides they are too heavy to carry any further. But before he presses on, he suddenly whips back around to face his beloved condiments mini-meals. (All terrible screenshots taken with my phone pointed at the TV.)

“Stay alive!” Oliver lovingly councils the dips, beginning an homage to the famous scene in this blog’s all-time favorite movie “Last of the Mohicans.” “No matter what occurs! I will find you!” 

At which point we cut to a point-of-view shot, the camera drifting toward the bag, not really to suggest the inanimate dips are impossibly in the throes of Madeleine Stowe-ish passion or even might suddenly spring to life but to put a comical point on Oliver’s absurd longing for them. 

“No matter how long it takes,” Oliver finishes, where Short’s expression takes on a true twinge of melancholy. “I will find you.”

It’s been 25 years since I gave a speech to my rhetoric class at the University of Iowa featuring a clip of that scene, though why I included a clip of that scene I cannot for the life of me recall. (Probably I just built the speech around the clip to have an excuse to show it which probably explains why I was not one of Iowa’s most celebrated students.) That means it’s been 30 years since “Last of the Mohicans” has been released. Dropping a “Last of the Mohicans” reference, then, in a 2022 show about a podcast, which wasn’t even a gleam in the eye of early 90s Nick, who would have been so confused to learn about podcasts while listening to Bob Edwards on NPR Morning Edition on his dad’s car radio on the way to basketball practice, would potentially make it seem...dated.

But if the part of “Only Murders in the Building” is about boomers and millennials sort of coming together, it’s notable that the millennial in this case – Gomez’s Mabel – does not ask Oliver what he’s talking about, as if she knows what he’s talking about, as if all these years later “Last of the Mohicans” is what I have long suspected it to be deep down in places I too frequently talk about at parties: timeless. 

Seeing My Favorite Movie on The Big Screen

As it happens, this week – today, in fact – marks 15 years since I attended the Minneapolis wedding of my friends Becky and Eric, one of the great contemporary marital celebrations, with a Unity Gong in place of a Unity Candle and pizza served at midnight to settle our stomachs, in a manner of speaking. The next morning, bright and early, I set off in my Honda Civic, down Highway 61 and through my dad’s hometown of Red Wing, MN, beginning a two-day trek across half the country, through Indiana, along the backroads of Kentucky, plunging into the Tennessee Valley and then climbing back up into the Great Smoky Mountains, ending in Asheville, North Carolina where I spent the next few days exploring the filming sites of my favorite movie, “Last of the Mohicans” (1992), a road trip I had been dreaming of since at least whenever it was in the summer of 1993 I rented the first of Michael Mann’s four magnum opuses and had my nascent experience, which I only realized many years later, of a movie connecting to my un/subconsciousness. This journey would not have even been possible for a directionally challenged idiot like me were it not for a book published by a pair of fellow “Mohican” devotees laying out in precise, helpful detail where to go and how to get there, a book I can recommend for the person in your life who last year mourned the passing of Colonel Munro. 

Last of the Mohicans: opening titles [credit: me]

Despite being a movie I loved so much I went to see where it was filmed, however, I had never seen it the way it was filmed – that is, on film, in a theater, projected up to a big screen. I was 15 and car-less when “Last of the Mohicans” was released, not quite as into movies as I was about to become, and though there are occasionally repertory screenings of it in New York, there had never one in a place where I lived, not even Chicago. Until Monday, that is, when the Chicago Film Society (its noble mission: to show shit on film) hosted its first indoor screening since early 2020 at the Music Box Theatre, a screening of “Last of the Mohicans.” And after too many years spent inappropriately watching Mann’s opus on my parents’ old Sanyo, or the 13-inch Samsung in my college dorm, or even my laptop last April during the Pandemic’s early days when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife was working in the dining room but I had the day off and wanted to get lost in my favorite movie, I bought my ticket and went straight to the front row so the screen could properly overwhelm me. 

The screening was of a 35mm print the Chicago Film Society purchased off Ebay specifically because, given Mann’s tendency to tinker with his own movies post-release, it was the original theatrical cut rather than the Director’s Expanded Cut or the Director’s Definitive Edition. I have always preferred the theatrical cut, perhaps because it’s the one I fell in love with, renting it, recording it off some ABC Sunday Night broadcast, buying my own VHS copy. But it’s also my preferred cut because it contains the wry Daniel Day-Lewis one-liners (“We just dropped in to see how you boys is doin’”) eliminated in other versions, which joyfully heighten his character as a Saturday Matinee Hero, as does Clannad’s “I Will Find You”, laid out over the late-movie pursuit by our intrepid Mohicans of the Huron Indians from the falls to their village in the theatrical cut but then excised at discretion of the director. Maybe retroactively Mann thought a New Age tune had become, paradoxically, outmoded, but I have always liked that song there, functioning as a Hero’s Theme for Hawkeye as he scales cliff faces, and one could argue New Age is just right for a movie that ends looking east to west, toward America’s new age, for better and for worse and all that entails. 

In the end, though, the cut didn’t get me as much as, well, the movie itself. It wasn’t so much previously unnoticed details, like the water dripping from Day-Lewis’s hair when Hawkeye is advising Colonel Munro of the Huron war party, or even finally getting to see those ravishing close-ups in their intended gargantuan screen-filling manner, as it was the immersive, intense nature of the theatrical experience. There’s that line Cora has toward the end about the whole world being on fire, which I genuinely know now is not just a line but the feeling Mann evokes, from the earth-shaking cannon blasts to the literal thunder of the waterfalls to the music, my God, the music. When the title card came up and the Main Theme hit those familiar, famous notes and RATTLED the speakers, ENSCONCED the theater...Lord, I felt that in my bones. Movies now tend to confuse Epic with narrative, wide-reaching and interlocking, not rendering the genuine sensation of an Epic. Up there, on the big screen, the level of the sound design, the scope of the photography, the way Mann uses the tools of the medium to wordlessly tell the story and to impart emotion...that is Epic. 

The movie industry was already in flux before the Pandemic, of course, what with streaming’s ascent and the theatrical experience on some sort of wane. The issues, like all of them, are more complex than the social media warriors lobbing verbal grenades over digital trenches would make it seem and I grasp the differing viewpoints. I was lucky enough to grow up in a small town that was only a 20-minute drive from movie theaters, so I always had access to the big screen experience. But that didn’t mean we got every movie, not in those days, and I knew plenty of people who had to drive hours to see anything of consequence in a theater at all. The theatrical experience is not always readily available outside urban centers; streaming is a good thing. But the movie theater, that’s a good thing too, a special thing. I could appreciate “Last of the Mohicans” on a small screen, that goes without saying, but even if I have watched it dozens and dozens and dozens of times, at the Music Box, on Monday night, during the ambush scene, when Hawkeye helped Cora up and together they spirited off into the haze as the music swelled, I was holding my breath before I even realized I was doing it. 

That 35mm print was so old it was all scratched up, with a green line running down one side of the screen for a little awhile, but it still felt brand new. 

Michael Mann's Miami Vice as an Art Exhibition, part 1

The DVD version of Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice” (2006) opens with the camera emerging from beneath the water to catch up with a speedboat race already in progress, though its presentation is conspicuously stripped of adrenaline such a scenario might suggest, a prologue as a slow burn. This is in contrast to the theatrical version, which is less of a gradual entry than a chaotic airdrop right into a cacophonous club scene; it’s like forgoing Harold Faltermeyer’s “Top Gun” intro and going straight to Kenny Loggins. When I saw this scene in the theater a dozen years ago, it gobsmacked me, like the “Boogie Nights” “Best of my Love”-fueled intro nearly ten years prior. When I purchased the home video version of “Miami Vice”, I sat there and watched that 90 seconds over and over and over. And of all the shots, the one I most consistently found myself drawn to was this.....

I have thought a lot about that shot over the last dozen years. Why, however, it has frequently popped into my mind is something I have always found difficult to explain. And I thought of that image on a Saturday morning last month in London in attending an exhibition at the National Gallery titled “Monet & Architecture” upon finding myself face to face with Claude’s 1872 outpouring of impressionism The Wooden Bridge. The exhibition illustrated the way in which Claude frequently utilized buildings in his work not as a means to highlight them but to highlight the way they refracted light. He also, however, as the exhibition outlined, sought to juxtapose industry against landscapes, like his Train in the Countryside, which I saw last fall at the Musée d’Orsay, where steam roils from an unseen train engine obscured by a line of lush trees. And in The Wooden Bridge a carriage traverses a bridge built during the Franco Prussian War, signaling progress, though the carriage is simultaneously glimpsed in one of those patented heartstopping Monet reflections in the water below, making it seem as if the manmade and natural worlds are colliding, or perhaps fading almost indecipherably into one another.

And because I bring everything down to movies, what popped into my head as I let The Wooden Bridge wash over me was a shot from my all-time favorite movie, “Last of the Mohicans”, this shot.....

It had kind of occurred to me, I guess, and and has no doubt absolutely occurred to cineastes more advanced than myself, but standing there in the National Gallery in that moment I realized how Michael Mann is so often using cinema as his own canvas, composing frames that could double as paintings.

And so as I gazed at The Wooden Bridge and returned to that shot of “Last of the Mohicans” in my mind, so did my thoughts turn back to the aforementioned shot in “Miami Vice”, which we return to now.

I mean, it loses something, or maybe is just viewed differently, if not seen as a moving picture, the way it begins with the camera gliding right to left behind them and past Naomie Harris’s character and then flips to a shot in front of them just as Naomie Harris turns toward where the camera is set with this incredible, ineffable No Scrubs look on her face that is the whole reason why we should see movies on big screens and not at home. But then, the camera cuts to the above shot from the side.

The two men standing rock still are juxtaposed against the whirring everything-ness in the left of the frame. These are men certain in their worldview, indifferent to the noise, which they have put behind them. Ah, but there is ambiguity in the fact that we cannot see whatever it is they are so intently focused on, and that they are rooted to the frame’s darker section might suggest that whatever it is they are so intently focused on is worthy only of trepidation. Thinking of the shot this way makes me dizzy and giddy. I want to frame it and hang it in the Art Institute and go down there and look at it every day for twenty minutes.

And that is why the Cinema Romantico plan going forward is to return to “Miami Vice” every now and again, maybe monthly, maybe bi-monthly, who knows, whenver the spirit moves us, to call up frames from Mann’s movie and treat them as if they are painted compositions hung in a gallery, our first ever movie blogging art exhibition, Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall. It does not even cost extra to get in.

Parallelism vis-à-vis Cinema Romantico-ism

“Hey...” 

“What?”  

“I just wanted to take another look at ya.”

---------------

“What are you looking at, sir?” 

“Why I’m looking at you, miss.” 

Which Did It Better?

“Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation” is set to drop to drop in theaters this week and this got to us thinking, as each new “M:I” release gets us to thinking, about the not-really-immortal moment in “M:I-2” when Tom Cruise totally goes Daniel Day-Lewis and apes perhaps the most famous moment of my all-time favorite movie “Last of the Mohicans” and yells at Thandie Newton “Just stay alive!” And each time I think about Cruise yelling it at Thandie, I think about when Jerry yells “Just stay alive!” at Kramer in the 175th episode – “The Maid” – of “Seinfeld.”





It’s the hip thing these days on the Interwebs, you know, to take one thing and pit it against some other thing by positing the question “Which Did It Better?” and then proceed with a breakdown to determine the winner because this is America and in America you're either first or last. So, which did the “Just Stay Alive!” homage better – “M:I-2” or “Seinfeld”?

First things first, I haven't actually seen “MI:2” since seeing it in the theater all the way back in 2000 and so I totally forgot about this Tom Cruise expression.

Look at that! In retrospect it seems obvious he would grow up to jump up and down on Oprah’s couch and ruin his career, doesn’t it? Crazy-Eyes Tom Cruise is my favorite Tom Cruise after Maverick. Wait, wait, wait. Crazy-Eyes Tom Cruise is my third favorite Tom Cruise after Maverick and “Hippy Hippy Shake” Tom Cruise. No, no, no. Crazy-Eyes Tom Cruise is my fourth favorite Tom Cruise after Maverick, “Hippy Hippy Shake” Tom Cruise and “The goldfish are coming with me” Tom Cruise. Uh, well, actually Crazy-Eyes Tom Cruise is my fifth favorite Tom Cruise after Maverick, “Hippy Hippy Shake” Tom Cruise, “The goldfish are coming with me” Tom Cruise and the Tom Cruise that smacks his hands in “Eyes Wide Shut” (00:40 of this trailer).

Second, however, is that Tom Cruise doesn’t actually completely homage Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis, of course, yelled “Just stay alive! No matter what occurs, I will find you!” Cruise yells: “Just stay alive! I'm not going to lose you!” Jerry, on other hand, does the full Day-Lewis. I imagine Robert Towne, who admittedly cribbed from all over the annals of Hollywood for his “M:I-2” script, was afraid of getting hit with a Michael Mann right hook at some screenwriter's cocktail party. That, however, allows “Seinfeld” to score some massive bonus points.

I also like this idea of Jerry and Kramer at their most vulnerable just sort of inadvertently admitting to their 90’s-styled neighborly bromance.

“I'm infected with Chimeria.” God, does Thandie Newton sell that line. I like that line so much that I’m surprising myself and giving it a slight nod over Michael Richards’ patented and eternally hilarious through the phone Kramer-ish shriek.

Let’s be frank. It’s hard for me to say that my all-time favorite TV show paying homage to my all-time favorite movie could ever be topped by anything else paying homage to it. “Seinfeld” and “Last of the Mohicans” intersecting is an astonishing case of worlds colliding; it’s almost as good as this photo. Of course, “Seinfeld” did it better! And yet…

I didn’t really like “M:I-2” the first time around…or, at least that’s how I remember it. But was the whole movie’s tone equivalent to this scene? Because this scene has an operatic romance, so heightened in cinematic inflection, so merrily absurdist that I find myself to drawn it. Tom & Thandie are not Hawkeye & Cora because they can’t be because no one is. And so even if Mr. Cruise’s homage is still, like, a billion miles away from the impassioned yell of Mr. Day-Lewis, they nonetheless exist in the same solar system, one where the homage trends away from parody and more toward tribute. And yet...  

Jerry was never earnest. Jerry was always a horse’s ass. For a moment, though, even if it was a couple lines explicitly referencing something else, Jerry afforded himself an actual heartfelt moment. Yes, there was the episode earlier in the 9th season that found Jerry becoming briefly emotional when a girlfriend encourages him to get mad, but this is something else. This isn’t just Serious Jerry; this is Selfless Jerry. And the fact that “Last of the Mohicans” triggered it, warms my heart. Even Jerry Seinfeld, sitcomland’s pre-eminent tin man, found himself moved by Hawkeye & Cora. How can we not say “Seinfeld” did it just a little bit better?

In Memoriam: Patrice Chéreau

"Why do you hate the grey hair, Magua?"

The name of General Marquis de Montcalm is first mentioned within the first 15 minutes of "Last of the Mohicans." We do not actually see General Marquis de Montcalm, however, until another half-hour has passed. And that seems about right. He is not there, not in view, but his presence, his role as "the gallant antagonist", quietly hovers over the proceedings. He may be a man of war, but what he really is is a delegator. Delegators don't need to be on screen for large chunks of time. They've got other people taking care of business.

Montcalm is a vital character in Michael Mann's 1992 masterpiece. He is the French general orchestrating the siege of the British-held Fort William Henry, commanded by Colonel Munro (Maurice Roeves). Eventually he takes possession of the fort by offering the British a deal - pack up, leave, go with God. Unless he doesn't actually want them to go with God. But more on that in a minute.

Despite his importance, Montcalm only has three scenes. And, in turn, that means Patrice Chéreau, the Frenchman known for his directorial efforts in his native country more than a few spots of American acting, only has three scenes. In those three scenes, he cultivates an arc that eventually pulls the bearskin rug out from underneath us.

Initially he is seen at a 1757-sorta meet and greet with a few Seneca Indians. He sends them on their way and then says "whatup?" to Magua (Wes Studi), the requisite villain, the Huron Indian hell-bent on revenge against Colonel Munro and his daughters. Even if Montcalm seems gentlemanly, this particular ally leaves us suspicious.

Alas, once Montcalm has battered Colonel Munro's defenses he calls a parlay, and it is there that he offers terms of surrender which involve Munro and all his soldiers and all the inhabitants of his fort to leave unmolested. Our suspicions are allayed.

Unless they aren't. Because in his final scene he seeks Magua's council in a dimly lit forest and essentially gives him the go-ahead to attack Colonel Munro and his men and women and children after they have departed the fort.

In all likelihood, that's revisionist history (or false history, if you prefer). But then Colonel Munro did not have two daughters named Cora and Alice and there was no Mauga seeking blood vengeance against the Colonel. (The Colonel's name was also Monro, not Munro.) And even if the real life Montcalm did not order such butchery, it paves the way for Chéreau's finest moment in the film.

If you pull up the "Last of the Mohicans" screenplay you will find Montcalm spelling out in no uncertain terms what he is asking Magua. In the film, Michael Mann chooses to let Patrice Chéreau communicate his desire for the dirty work non-verbally. He explains to Magua he is certain to face Munro again and then lets his gaze, those hyper-focused eyes, linger for a second before looking down. Contemplating. Wondering. Re-thinking?

He looks back up and it's an expression worth five very specific words: "You know what to do." And then he's gone.

Patrice Chéreau died yesterday at the age of 68. He was beloved for his filmmaking in France, filmmaking with with which I admit in great shame I am wholly unfamiliar. But Mr. Chéreau was a featured cast member in Cinema Romantico's all-time favorite movie. Thus, we honor him.

My Favorite Movie Was Made Into A TV Show

FADE IN

INT. GREEN MONSTER – CONTROL ROOM 

An ADMIRAL in a sharkskin suit enters the primary control room of The Green Monster, a studio located in a bunker deep in the Hollywood Hills that is capable of green-lighting terrible ideas in a maximum 7.5 seconds - quicker than any production studio before. The Admiral bows before the GRAND CHANCELLOR.

ADMIRAL 

We have secured the rights to LAST OF THE MOHICANS. 

Two SUITED UP DUDES enter with NICK PRIGGE, whose hands are bound, dressed in jeans and an indie band tee shirt. Years earlier, in the face of a remake epidemic, Nick secured the rights to FROM HERE TO ETERNITY to ward off any potential remakes featuring Jessica Simpson in the Donna Reed role. The Green Monster wants these rights. 

NICK

Grand Chancellor, I recognized the recycled air the moment I was brought inside. 

GRAND CHANCELLOR 

Nick Prigge, I would like you to be my guest at a ceremony that will make this production studio operational. No one will dare oppose a remake now.

NICK 

The more remakes you green light, Chancellor, the more remakes will fall by the wayside.

GRAND CHANCELLOR 

Not after we demonstrate the power of this studio. In a way, you have determined the choice of the remake that will be green lit first. Since you are reluctant to provide us with the location of the rights to FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, I have chosen to test this studio's power on your favorite movie, LAST OF THE MOHICANS. 

NICK

No! Not LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Please. It's perfect, it's unrepeatable. Who’s been clamoring for a LAST OF THE MOHICANS remake?! No one has! Can’t you just let it be in peace?! 

GRAND CHANCELLOR

You would prefer another remake? A military remake? Then tell us who has the rights! 

The Chancellor waves menacingly at Nick.

GRAND CHANCELLOR

I grow tired of asking this. So it'll be the last time. Where are the rights to FROM HERE TO ETERNITY?

NICK

(softly) 

Inglewood. They’re in Inglewood. I gave them to Jules, our man in Inglewood. He keeps them in a briefcase. 

GRAND CHANCELLOR

There. You see, he can be reasonable. (addressing Admirable) Continue with the operation. You may green light when ready.

NICK

What?!

GRAND CHANCELLOR

You're far too trusting. We can’t green light a FROM HERE TO ETERNITY remake until Jessica Simpson has her baby. But don’t worry, we’ll deal with your precious World War Two characters soon enough.

NICK

No! 

INT. GREEN MONSTER – GREEN LIGHT CHAMBER 

A button is pressed which switches on a panel of lights. A JUNIOR EXEC reaches overhead and pulls a lever. Another lever is pulled and a bank of lights on a panel and wall light up. A huge beam of light emanates from within a cone-shaped area and converges into a single beam of green light. 

INT. GREEN MONSTER – CONTROL ROOM 

The screen in front of Nick Prigge and the Grand Chancellor erupts in green light, eventually revealing a LAST OF THE MOHICANS movie poster paired with the logo of the FX television network. 

NICK

FX?! You’re remaking LAST OF THE MOHICANS into a TV show?! (sobs) 

INT. CENTRAL LONDON – DANIEL DAY-LEWIS’S HOUSE 

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS sits in a glorious wingback chair, sipping tea and reading William Wordsworth. His wife, REBECCA MILLER, sits across from him, in an identical wingback chair, also sipping tea but reading Thomas Hardy. Daniel Day-Lewis, suddenly, falters, seems almost faint. 

REBECCA MILLER

Are you all right? What's wrong? 

 DANIEL DAY-LEWIS

I felt a great disturbance in the Force...as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

FADE OUT