The Last Straw

The frustrations of the past few weeks finally reached the breaking point late last night. I had gone to the offices of Flaming Guerrilla Productions to complain about Brian Eggorian's latest script suggestion (a dream sequence about horses, if you can believe that), and while I was sitting at Darren's desk and waiting for him to finish auditioning yet another female college student I happened to notice the name of one of the characters from the film on some handwritten pages. I assumed that these were production notes regarding costumes or shooting schedules or some such thing, and so I picked them up and started to read. Try to imagine my horror when I realized that what I had in my hands was, in essence, an authorial hijacking of the film by my very nemesis--in other words, a completely new scene for the film penned by the psychotic Mr. Eggorian. My beloved characters were being forced to babble nonsensically at metaphorical gunpoint, and I squirmed in agony as I read an extraordinarily lengthy dialogue between Mandy and her mother in which they discussed, among other things, the emotional trauma Mandy experienced when her mother forbade her to associate with the "rough kids" from the high school marching band, the shame she felt when her mother threw a glass of water at her after her first onset of menses, and the mother's disappointment that the girl was a failure at the art of needlepoint. These pointless histrionics continued on for about seven pages, and the truly infuriating thing about it all was that in the end the two characters did not even reach any kind of accord or understanding; they both simply stamped off to their rooms and phoned their respective therapists.

Here's a brief excerpt of the drivel in question:

Mandy: It was you, mother. You drove daddy away. You and your fancy boys and your mint juleps and everything!

Diahnne: Don't you talk about your father. Don't you dare mention that saint's name, you little tramp.

Mandy: Daren't I? Daren't I?

Diahnne: And let's not bring up the fancy boys again either.

Mandy: Fancy boys! Fancy boys! All you care about are your goddamned fancy boys! They're a sad parade of broken-down pipe dreams and nightmares, they're the clattering arrows of syphilitic cupids who can't see to aim! You shame me, mama! You shame daddy! You shame yourself!

Diahnne: For the love of god, darling, be quiet. The neighbors will hear you. Please, sweetheart, just shut up and fix me a hot toddy.

All in all, it had the rhythm and tone of a Tennessee Williams play ghost written by a mental defective...and this was the new scene earmarked for my own labor of love, Night of the Lobster.

No fucking way.

When Darren finally returned from his exercises in casting and had put on a clean shirt I let him have it. "You can film Night of the Lobster written by me or you can film A Streetcar Named Diarrhea by Brian Eggorian. Take your pick."

Darren's face was fixed into a sullen stare as he listened to my tirade, but I knew that he knew that I was right. There was a long silence as he stared out the window towards the landfill next door, but finally he sighed and looked me in the eye. "Find me a director, then, Joe. Find me a real director and I'll make Night of the Lobster, just the way you dreamed it. Find me a director and we'll make the hell out of that picture, kid."

I stamped down the concrete stairs, wondering where in the wilderness of Connecticut USA I would find a real film director, and, as I opened the door onto the howling cold of the night, I heard Darren roar out one final thought behind me:

"...but he's gotta be cheap!"