Let’s begin at the beginning— welcome to 2024 and all it has to offer. If I’ve got this right we’re in for one hell of a fight to put down the forces arrayed against democracy. So, that’s something to look forward to. I do love to disappoint unwelcomed Nazi power grabbers.
Just when I thought I was in charge of what I put into my body I’ve learned that is hardly how it is going to work from here on out. If I was in charge I’d eat peanut butter, but I’m afraid peanut butter makes me miserable. I am allergic to this old reliable friend. So, it was goodbye and sayonara to a favorite.
About the time this dietary crossroads arrived so did the advice a bicyclist friend provided to me about his preparations to ride from San Francisco to Providence, Rhode Island. He cut the discussion about what’s good and what’s not good and hung the truth on the scaffolding of calorie counting. He wanted to take a much smaller person across the continent and to do so meant his sticking to 2500 calories a day until he was that smaller scaled man.
I’m not planning on biking across America but I am interested in knowing a smaller me. That quest began in the dog days of last summer and has been a feature not a bug of my current predicament.
For fun I’ve been collecting bossa nova lyrics. I’m stuffing Brazil’s lyrical gift into a file then I’ll begin the arduous task of writing several songs for this next script I’m developing. This is the creative person’s version of non-artificial intelligence.
The situation looks like this— a band is traveling by bus up the coast when a storm hits, triggers a landslide, closes the road, and forces the bus to turn back. Instead, the bus pulls off and the band discover the nearby resort is the perfect venue, that they will stay and instead they’ll put on their show right here.
The band’s leader is a woman, her name Cintia Tolentino. It is her sultry heartbreaking bossa nova tunes that leave even the most hardhearted men in her audience transfixed, it is her ability to transcend sexual desire and to awaken the most authentic inner emotional drive to love and be loved, a state of being the road repair crew working on the landslide find very hard to metaphysically appreciate.
To make matters more complicated our fetching bossa nova singer remains convinced that for her there is only one man that will have his way with her and that is the man she plans to have a family with, anything less would violate her deeply held belief that there is something profoundly important about creating the conditions where lifelong love may have its chance to happen. This of course completely undoes the men that have convinced themselves that they possess special seductive powers and can make quick work of transforming this goddess into a willing and temporary girlfriend.
There is also the matter of who her father is, and this turns out unbeknownst to her the proprietor of the resort where they are putting up the show. How this happened requires us to know that the proprietor was sailing back in the 90’s and had a tryst, with the singer’s mother, and that he continued with his voyage and after several failed attempts to reach out to him, the mother gave up convinced he’d never believer her anyway, blood test or not, she had no confidence his being the father would change anything. Then— three decades later.
Since this is a climate change comedy and in this case the landslide, atmospheric river fueled storms, and geologic upheaval surrounding the resort along the coast all provide us with a chance to explore how we feel about belonging, how we cope with sudden change and the lack of there being anything remotely permanent or reliable in our landscape. Everything is in a state of flux. Some of this can be funny.
I’ve got the resorts main showroom being nearest the cliffs next to the ocean and it is the demise of this building and the efforts to try yet fail to save the building that will be part of all the various plot lines that will collide together.
Like legislation there is a lot of sausage making going on as I prepare. I work from a list of potential scenes, and then how to put the scenes together, what’s my running order, how can I make this story work, how do I keep it on the boil and not just left to simmer, I don’t think the world is ready to crawl along, I think the world wants to be swept off their feet and completely caught by surprise.
Now will I ever find an actress that can sing, someone that knows how to work their way around inside a comedy, they’ll need to dance, and they’ll need to convince us that their beauty is both radiant on the outside and exquisitely developed on the inside. They will be unpredictable and not just passionate but somewhat expert on the very nature of passion itself— the singers capable of bringing a bossa nova song alive and changing how a man sees himself— that sudden lovesick macho animal will be one type of man while the other type of man considers whether the risks and rewards of lifelong love are truly worth the effort. The target of her plans suffers from wanderlust, same as her lost now found father, and he is reckoning with leaving on a long voyage or changing his plans to form a lifelong love with this passionate singer.
This reluctant one, this restrained man, the one that isn’t mindlessly pursuing her turns out to be exactly the one best suited to her romantic plans, isn’t that the way it always is—
I’ve sketched out lots of the space with doorways, windows, and walkways where I can capture the escapades of her band and the road construction crew all sneaking around so they might all enjoy the pleasures of clandestine late-night rendezvous with members of the band that are less driven by this lifelong love thing. This is physical comedy.
So, that’s how the first day of the year is going. I’ve got a bike that wants me to take it out for a good brisk ride. I’ve got these calories to count every day. I’ve got lyrics to write, geological landslide studies to become familiar with and of course I’ll be arriving in the Coachella Valley for the Palm Springs Film Festival that opens this Thursday.
While I’m getting this next script ready, I’ll be pitching my first screenplay, The Last Drop to ambitious filmmakers looking to make a rollicking comedy about the water shortages triggered by the Southwest’s megadrought.
The difficulty of writing a good screenplay is such many gifted producers, directors and actors don’t bother trying, it is specialized work, and the process will bedevil even the most gifted writers among us. That’s where I come in, that’s where my experience on stage doing my comedy variety act, where the four novels toiled over nearly two decades, all the material for my five decades onstage, the songs and lyrics I’ve written, and the years I trained as a dancer will all be pieces of my experience I’ll use to build this next script.
There’s my New Year’s resolution right there. Write something funny while getting my audience to think about the climate emergency and all the millions and billions of consequences we must face down before it’s too late, before humankind undermines itself here on earth, before we trigger the mother of all environmental catastrophes. Best not just break the bad news, best to get folks to laugh at this predicament. It’s never too late.
