Back in Asheville in the winter of 2002-03, I had what seems now like a lot of conversations with different, mostly funny, people. Thanks to drugs and alcohol, these otherwise poignant moments of real human connection rapidly gelled into an idea for a bad movie, a mean-spirited comeback vehicle for the Alzheimer's-addled Danny Glover of the future. Now, by request, a synopsis:
On the mean streets of an unspecified gritty eastern seaboard metropolis (new York by default, I guess) a new street drug is turning its addicts into mummies. Not just desiccating them, but turning them into fully wrapped, Boris Karloff-style Curse-of-the-Mummies. The street slang for this drug is that it is called "Mummy," and its users are typical movie street-toughs: skaters, bikers, punks, and ethnic people. Post mummification, they are still identifiable as such: The main character in the movie is the bubbleheaded-but-lovable fiancé of a mafia dude, who narrowly avoids trouble in life with the sage advice and timely antics of her trash-talking talking dachshund.
For that old-school "
fantastical-and-evidently-for-children-but-totally-not-R-rated-comedy" feel, the dog's catchphrase is "Fuckballs!" and he likes to look at naked women. Dog-penis jokes would abound in a fleshed-out script for this.
Anyway, the aforementioned Mafia Dude is charged by his Mafia Superiors to transport a quantity of "Mummy" to some other Mafia People in Las Vegas, so he takes his aforementioned Fiancé along, in her car, under the cover of "getting married in vegas," a plot point designed to appeal to the morass of inane moviegoing jerks who might find that spontaneous and thrilling. Because only "that pesky weener dog!!" sees this man for the evil shit that he is, Mafia Dude tries to ditch him. But guess what's REALLY in one of those packages taped into the wheel well through some sort of mixup or hi-jink!!!!!! A foulmouthed dog with little sunglasses and maybe a little windbreaker!!!!
Only one man outside of the mafia suspects that Mafia Dude has an ulterior motive for this trip to Vegas, the special FBI agent who's been shadowing him for months, Danny Glover!
Danny Glover drives a beat-up-but-cool 70's sedan full of guns.
After the dog ditches Mafia Dude in a classic Truck Stop Altercation and drives away with sleeping Fiancé, the Mafia is informed, and a madcap cross-country chase ensues, involving the dog and girl in the car full of secret drugs, Danny Glover, Mafia Dude in an increasingly improbable assortment of stolen vehicles, and carloads of mummies yelling and shooting guns.
One scene would involve the dog barreling down a hill in a shopping cart, pursued by mummies on skateboards. Just before the shopping cart jumps over an construction site, but the mummies collide with each other in mid-air and all land in wet cement, the dog yells "Fuckballs!!!"
Eventually, everything ends well somehow, so that the dog is able to wink directly into the camera just as the Huey Lewis song that will play during the credits starts up.
As I said, this exercise in talking-an-imaginary-movie-to-death was, at heart, pretty mean-spirited, and this is the reason: it was presumed that by the time I could have this thing going, script-and-$$$-wise, Danny Glover would work for cheap anyway, having long since become elderly and lost his brain to Alzheimer's disease. Poor Danny Glover. Jesus christ why would I pick on such a cool guy? OK, here's why. The during-the-credits-blooper-reel is all Danny Glover forgetting what's going on and doing stuff wrong, or becoming agitated and angry. Pretty brutal in itself, but
picture this, lost and crying in a grocery store. I still kind of think that would be funny.
