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Distractions
1) I was reading the breaking news about the London bombings when the phone rang. It was Becky. She was fine. She’d been driving the truck in Oakland Chinatown, was in the rightmost of two left-turn-only lanes, and the old guy in the lane to her left drove straight into my poor truck.
I went back to reading about the carnage in London, wondering why everything bad always happens to me.
The truck is at the body shop for a week.
2) Becky and I went to see War Of The Worlds last week, and there’s this scene in which the Dakota Fanning character, who is completely freaked out to begin with and only gets more so when the aliens attack, asks the Tom Cruise character to sing her a lullabye. But Cruise evidently learned no lullabyes at Scientology Camp, and so he starts singing Little Deuce Coupe to her instead. And I’m all like, come ON, Martians! Where are you when the audience needs you?
It made me realize that the notion of Tom Cruise being vaporized by Martian invaders is enough to make me plunk down ten bucks to watch an otherwise regrettable movie. And I bet there are a lot of people who feel the same way. Movie production companies would do well to keep this in mind. So your script’s plot hangs on the Olsen Twins accidentally taking each other’s purses, with all the implied ensuing hilarity? Or you’re working on HomeAlone XIV, in which Macauley Culkin’s frat brothers leave for Evanston without him? Just put Cruise in a cameo, running down the street and ZAP! And I’m there.
This could work for Turnerized re-edits of old movies as well. Like Debra Winger’s at the supermarket checkout, and she doesn’t have enough cash for everything on the belt so she puts stuff back despite her kids complaining, and then John Lithgow pays her tab and berates the gum-chewing cashier for being rude.
Cashier: “I don’t think I was being rude.”
Lithgow: “Well then you must be from New York.”
Tom Cruise, in the supermarket parking lot: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
SFX: zap!
Box office gold.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
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