Hypthetical Movie Pitch

[Editor's Note: This post is about the Hollywood feature development system. There's an upside and a downside to the pitching gauntlet which most projects have to run: it tends to favor films with a strong central idea or premise, which is good, but it also leaves little to no room for subtlety or complexity.

Sometimes people in Hollywood get to be so powerful, the studios assume their movies will be successful no matter what (which is indeed often the case). Such iconic filmmakers get a creative carte blanche, which also has an upside and a downside. The upside is these artists finally have the freedom to focus on making art instead of selling a successive series of pitches. The downside is that there's no mechanism to check bad ideas.

What follows is a hypothetical pitch for one of those movies. See if you can guess the movie's secret identity!]

SETTING

A major US city past her prime, full of old tenements, bombed-out factories, dark, looming skyscrapers, and stylized Art Deco / Art Nouveau relics. A shadow of her formerly proud self, the depressing, aging city is now practically overrun by post-industrial grime, corruption and lawlessness. Imagine Chicago or, more poetically, Pre-Giuliani "Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November." (--Dennis O'Neil)

THE HERO(ES)

The movie will confuse and baffle the audience by presenting them with two protagonists, one of whom is a red herring, and one of whom has a story arc and is actually well-rounded and interesting.

The title character will be the orphaned heir to a massive fortune who has decided to use his wealth to fight crime. By the beginning of the movie, his vigilantism has already won him the trust of local law enforcement. He wants to fight crime, but what he really needs is… to sacrifice himself for the greater good or something? His need will be unclear.

The true protagonist will be an ambitious DA and up-and-coming politician, a noble and likeable man who apparently wants to leave a legacy and make a name for himself by cleaning up the city, but who needs ideals to believe in and stand for, particularly Justice.

ACT ONE

First, we meet the villain. Hopefully this character will be played by an extremely talented actor so that no one will notice how badly written he is.

The movie will go out of its way to obscure the villain's background and motives. He will simply be portrayed as "crazy," "unpredictable," and "evil," so that nothing he does will need to make any sense. We can start by having him orchestrate a bank robbery and then turn around and kill everyone on his own team.

Throughout the movie, this "wild card" villain will present a device by which the audience's suspension of reason may be extrapolated infinitely outward. Thus, the audience will have no objections when we give the villain a deus ex machina ability to will into being elaborate terrorist plots with apparently no need for planning time, assistance from allies / henchmen, or access to funds and supplies. By further exploiting this "theme" of insane, unpredictable chaos, any laziness on the part of the screenwriters can be passed off as intentional and even brilliant.

Having established this villain, Act One goes on to introduce the title character and the protagonist. They get along right away. After a superfluous, preposterous action bit in which the title character goes to Hong Kong to apprehend a previously local criminal named Lau, the villain launches a terrorist campaign to force the title character to reveal his secret identity. The title character decides to fold like a Frenchman.

ACT TWO

The first half of Act Two will be dominated by a totally awesome action sequence. The setup: the protagonist takes one for the team by publically claiming HE is Spartacus, er, I mean, the title character's sought-after secret identity. What's really going on is the protagonist is using himself as bait to draw the villain out of hiding. Oh, and Commissioner Gordon has to fake his own death for some trumped-up reason. What follows is a super-badass, climactic, spectacular car chase / shootout. The apprehension of the villain, and the revelation that Gordon is still alive, should really goose audience expectations and set the high-water mark for the movie.

Having won the audience over, the writers and producers can go cash their checks and the whole thing can basically fall apart. The villain escapes from police custody by magically retro-engineering an agonizing decision regarding hostages and bombs (another recurring "theme"). In this case, the victims are the protagonist and his girlfriend. Who exactly kidnapped them and stuck them in rooms wired with explosives on opposite sides of the city will never be explained.

The distracted police force and title character panic and rush off, leaving this obviously dangerous psychopath in an unlocked interrogation room, without handcuffs, under the incompetent supervision of a single detective. We won't actually see the villain escape from this room, just some chaos in the main part of the station which he also magically retro-engineers to make his breakout seem slightly more plausible. He breaks Lau out too, along with himself, just for kicks.

Then there will be some big explosions. The protagonist's girlfriend dies and the protagonist is horribly disfigured. Then the villain kills his remaining allies, including the guy he just broke out of prison, for no sensible reason other than to reinforce for the audience how crazy and evil he is.

At this point, the villain will magically retro-engineer another massive terrorist scheme involving tons of explosives. This should have something to do with yet another plot contrivance centered on the title character's secret identity. During the ensuing chaos, the villain confronts the convalescent protagonist. (Note: the protagonist's injuries will be ridiculously cartoonish, in stark contrast to the gritty realism that otherwise characterizes the franchise.) Now robbed of both his want and his need, and because the audience will have no problem accepting that the villain's craziness can somehow rub off onto the protagonist during their brief encounter, the protagonist turns senseless, crazy and evil. He will demonstrate this drastic personality shift by a) displaying no interest in avenging himself and his girlfriend on the villain, and b) replacing his shattered notion of Justice with a coin that he flips to decide whether he kills people or not.

A big, pointless explosion marks the end of this act.

ACT THREE

Act Three opens with another cool action sequence involving yet another terrorist / hostage / bomb situation implausibly orchestrated by the villain.

Although the title character eventually thwarts the villain, the villain's plotline will remain completely unresolved. Ideally, instead of killing him, the title character will leave the villain literally hanging upside-down, presumably to go to jail (again) and break out (again).

At this point, the filmmakers can go, "Ha ha, audience! You thought this movie was about the title character and this villain? Joke's on you! That plotline doesn't even go anywhere!" Then the movie will keep going for like twenty more minutes.

The real protagonist dies a tragic hero, the victim of his own madness, and the title character honors his memory by sacrificing his own reputation (which was highly dubious anyway) and taking all the blame to honor the protagonist's memory and preserve the protagonist's image as a hero for the city -- in this way, the protagonists' wants and needs end up fulfilled!

THE END

[PS - Could you guess what movie it was? That's right, it wasKen Kwapis' Dunston Checks In, starring a chimp as Dunston, Jason Alexander as the villain, and featuring Paul Reubens in a wacky expanded cameo as Commissioner Gordon.]