Amazing Plan to Revolutionize our Industry and Save Movies!

Psych! Totally used hyperbole to draw you in just now! This plan is mediocre at best!

I’ve been following news about the City Council moratorium on new fast food restaurants in South L.A., which sought to limit fast food options and encourage residents toward food that was better for them. I don’t know that I agree with this policy unless some healthy, affordable fare is going to be offered in place of the stifled Carl’s Jr.’s, but I do think that forcing people to consider new options by limiting their most convenient, existing ones is an intriguing –though admittedly anti-capitalist- notion. And possibly a film industry-applicable one, since I have noticed a few things that pop up really frequently in scripts that aren’t necessarily bad, but that at this late stage in the development of movie storytelling, are basically the filmic equivalent of the MacDonald’s Dollar Menu: easy, convenient, even cheap ways out.

I’m wondering, if we disallowed certain of these screenwriting Dollar Menu items for a year or two, whether other, fresher ideas might rise up and present themselves –like in crop rotation when you switch one crop for another in order to refresh the soil’s nutrients. Might be worth a try. Might even make those worn-out items seem fresh again a few years later. Possible places to start:

1) Main Characters Named Jack: I’m not the first to remark on this by any means, but from Lost to 24 to Tom Clancy movies to every script I seem to read these days, it is f-ing New Jack City out there. I know and love a lot of these fictional Jacks but personally know zero actual people named Jack, indicating the name may be taking up disproportionate fictional space and a Jack off-period might be a good thing (<– I didn’t just say what you think I said). Besides, too many Jacks kind of dilute the power of Jack, don’t they? All Jack and no Not Jack makes Jack a Dull Boy, Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that.

My Suggestion for an Interim Replacement: Well, how about Fred? I have met many dashing, handsome Freds in my lifetime who would gladly throw their coat over a puddle or punch a terrorist right in his or her face. Yet where are the swashbuckling, Handsome Fred Sparrows stealing pirate ships or the dreamy, dashing Fred Dawsons making out with Kate Winslet on the prow of the Titanic? They don’t exist. Because Jack does.

Or maybe Hal? Highly Jack-like in it’s playfully shortened, King of England nameishness, yet highly underused except as name of homicidal computers. Or Perhaps Harpo? Or Bullwinkle? Those names are silly, you say? Well maybe that’s because the Harpos and the Bullwinkles of this world have been locked in silly boxes because Jack, that testosterone-pumping a-hole, is always stealing the spotlight, booking all the gigs and killing their dreams. Jack, man. Who does that guy think he is?

2) Romantic Comedy Characters Who Work at Magazines: Ohma Goodness. So many. In fact, this character job/plot device is practically the only thing anymore that brings two opposites together and then forces them apart and then brings them back together again, usually in front of a whole cheering baseball field or governor’s ball, thus sanctioning the reconciliation.

My Suggestion for an Interim Replacement: Forestry rangers who are just romancing each other because they want a different kind of trees to get planted on each other’s part of the forest due to their competing, wiz kid theories of soil erosion. They get swept away by their passion, so that when the one forestry ranger finds out about the play the other one has made for *gasp* white pine instead of balsam, their seemingly evergreen love goes all deciduous-in-fall—that is until the one forester begs the other forester’s forgiveness at the big forester’s convention in front of all 8 other foresters in their field. What’s the soil erosion theorem for ADORABLE? I think we just found it.

3) The Minority Couple On the Trip That Turns Horrifying: Horror 101 says that when you are going to isolate people to be terrorized, you should isolate a group of them so that you can kill a few off as you go, and one way to isolate a group is to have them all be on some sort of trip or vacation together and get stuck in a house, a wooded area, or, most spine-chillingly, a foreign country. Lately when this happens in scripts and movies I see, it seems like there’s always a minority couple mixed in with three lily-white couples. It also seems like this black or Latino couple is always put in charge of (a) all the attitudinal “diversity” for the entire story in the form of the foxy latinoness or sassy blackness forced into their every interaction, and (b) getting killed first and oftentimes humorously (this is where your “¡Ay, dios mio!” or your “Aw HELL naw” comes in), which doesn’t seem at all fair.

My Suggestion for Interim Replacement: Actually, I could do without this completely and forever and just see people of color be treated like everyone else in horror films (equal opportunity evisceration), sometimes dying first and sometimes dying last and not having to say “aw HELL” anything unless they’re actually being played by Will Smith, whose contract stipulates that this dialog be included in all his film appearances.

But it might also be interesting to see different nationalities get in there and take the places of the go-to races. And so I nominate a Swedish couple or a Finnish couple to be killer fodder since, (a) Scandinavians can drink like fish and as such would help with important group cohesion in act one and (b) as our popular representations of these peoples clearly demonstrate, they are unflaggingly funny and colorful. Come to think of it, we should probably just simplify further and cast the Muppets’ Swedish Chef in all of these roles. He would be colorful, hilarious and very easy to kill. Picture it: “Ev HELL Nev, Dun’t Keell Me-aBork Bork!!” Magical.

4) Hip Grannies: By this I mean scripts where someone’s Nana raps or says stuff like “strap-on” all the time. These grannies can be funny, I think. In theory. But I don’t know they can be funny in practice because I now expect nearly every grandmother I run into in a comedy to be going to spin classes and playing her G-Love and the Special Sauce album and it all just washes over me so that I can’t distinguish between funny hip grannies and unfunny hip grannies enough to decide if there really is a difference. But after a break, who knows?

My Suggestion for Interim Replacement: Intergenerational interaction that’s funny even if the olds in question don’t watch The Shield. My friend’s grandfather didn’t know who Perez Hilton was, but he used to take out his dentures and make them into a hand puppet that said “hello!” in a low, gravelly voice – a bit that, to my mind, would play in any room. My own grandfather, though actually hip in many ways, will still, when left to his own devices, eat sardines and buttermilk all afternoon while yelling “how about that, sports fans?” at the golf game on the TV, all of which even he would agree is pretty funny old guy business.

5) Emile Hirsch (aka The Man of Zero Faces): I don’t really have a leg to stand on with this one. He’s not attached to all that many scripts or in that many movies, so I guess it’s personal. Okay, I know it’s personal. Sorry Emile Hirsch, but I don’t want to watch or imagine you in any more movies. I find your acting to be undetectable to the naked eye and am slightly suspicious that you are actually not a live, human being at all, but a Real Doll who keeps getting cast in movies I’d otherwise be excited to see.

My Suggestion for Interim Replacement: Oh, Anyone else, really. I would even settle for a slightly more lifelike model of Real Doll. Change that shiz up, film industry!

Voila, le plan. You’re welcome, Hollywood.