SUBGENIUS NEW WORLD ORDER
Takes place in the Future... a combination of my LET'S VISIT THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE and Church of the SubGenius. A future where the Conspiracy's obviously got it locked down... disguised as the Church of the SubGenius! If you play by the rules you get to live in a "Leave It to Beaver" SET kind of world, a boring endless purgatory of blandness, meaningless toil and bad TV. This wouldn't be a big special effects movie, because the ruler priests of this One World Religion want everything to look normal and old fashioned and Pink. Sometimes when the characters open the window, you get a glimpse of this futurist city with monorails and flying cop cars -- the usual futuristic city thing. (Which could actually be a miniature set rolled outside the window!) Because nothing would be as it seems anyway. As in WORLD OF THE FUTURE, the evil SubGenius overlords would make it so that you would never know where you were, or if the endless indoor mall around you was real or just a holographic projection.
It's your basic Antichrist and One World Government theme. 1984 squared. Satan's rule, you might say, except Satan's not in it,. "Bob" is the evil "Big Brother". A FALSE "Bob," that is.
The REAL "Bob" would be seen occasionally, in flashbacks and cutaways, in silhouette, fighting bad guys, converting world leaders and wowwing dames. (Part of the laughs would derive from the outlandish extents we go to to NOT directly show the True "Bob.").
There would be a "Bob" on TV, an ever-present personality that follows you around, constantly spewing homilies, but he's computer animated; the S.L.A.K. Police are the brutal thugs of the decadent priesthood, etc. etc. The main plot would involve some Winston Smith type who is trying to rebel against all this and comes upon a group of secret freedom fighters who explain what the REAL Church of the SubGenius was about, and how this False Bob on TV is not the Real "Bob". Someday the True "Bob" will return...
I'm not sure how we get the hero to the palace boardroom, or whatever, but he would find that the False "Bob" computer program is run by none other than Rev. Ivan Stang and Dr. Philo Drummond, gone bad! An evil Stang, like the Emperor in Star Wars. Of course, right after you learn that, the evil Stang gets to have a HORRIBLE DEATH SCENE. The True "Bob" comes and punishes the evil Stang... which would give ME a chance to act in the movie! I would play myself, but the crazed evil Invisible Man type ranting Stang, an old monstrous guy kept alive by weird science. At the end "Bob" would throw the evil Stang off the building or something. (We'd leave that open for subsequent movies, so the evil Stang can be scraped up and brought back to life.)
I had not previously thought about the angle of putting ME in the movie as the evil bad guy. Last guy to do that was Frank Zappa with 200 Motels. This way, even if I wrote a script, and they took it away from me for a million dollars and said they'd direct it, I'd still be IN it. At least I'd still have to be part of the whole project. I had considered writing the protagonist as a man and then changing it to a woman at the last second.
My original concept had been big budget, what eventually actually became several Schwarzenegger movies (RUNNING MAN and TOTAL RECALL both use the main plot gimmicks that I had originally had in mind). But now I'm thinking that one of the delights of the movie would be the clever ways in which we would FAKE or else SIDESTEP a big budget. For one thing, the Conspiracy Church deliberately builds buildings that look like shitty miniatures, or toys! Instead of showing crowds of millions revolting in the street, you'd show a guy looking out the window saying, "Wow, look at that! Crowds of millions revolting in the streets! It's almost like a movie! But think how much they'd have to pay extras!"
We also have to come up with some RIDICULOUSLY convoluted time-travel-paradox-routine, a la BILL AND TED'S BIG ADVENTURE, whereby "Bob" has to go back in time to kill himself, or rape his mom so he'd be born. (Check with Hal Robins re: time travel conundrum jokes.)
Could "Bob" give the evil Stang Slack, so he doesn't have to die? Nah... the whole reason for me to do this is so that I get to scream blood curdlingly in a real heavy payback death scene. Plus, our villains should have to go through FAR more agony and torture than most movie villains do. Xist tech can always bring Stang back to life more hideously fucked up than ever for the next movie, with what's left of his face mostly held together by steel rods and supports.
We can even have X-Day happen in the movie, if we end it soon after the moment of Rupture (people vanishing and empty clothing falling to the ground) -- but before the SubGenii start taking revenge on the Pinks. The mass destruction is what takes a budget.
Original file name: SUBG MOVIE notes -- Stang
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.