Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

I find the Ass Menu equally aggravating. With the introduction of every new male character, however subsidiary, a dialogue box is displayed reading Ass? and offering a menu with several options: Hirsute, Hairless, Dimpled, Smooth, Blemished, etc. Clicking any of these options opens a submenu. For instance, there are six levels of Hirsute, from Blonde Down to Coarse Simian. Within Blemished, you can choose Birthmarks, Moles, Keloid Scars, Needle Tracks, Pimples, Folliculitis, Boils, and then you can customize buttock-boil placement with a click, drag-and-drop feature, etc. Again, although some of you may find these features creatively stimulating, I think it would behoove the makers of SkriptMentor to allow users to more easily circumvent these options. Having to scroll through an Ass Menu whenever a FedEx deliveryman appears at the door can really bog you down, and that’s the last thing you need, especially when you have this looming deadline.

And perhaps most distracting of all is that every two pages or five minutes, a dialog box appears on-screen reading: Requisite Springsteen Dirge?

You click No .

Five minutes later: Requisite Springsteen Dirge? Again you click No .

Five minutes later: Requisite Springsteen Dirge?

No!

It’s really irritating. Perhaps this is a valuable feature for those aspiring screenwriters who may have written a script and inadvertently omitted the requisite Springsteen dirge, but at least they could provide some sort of bypass option. Wouldn’t it be better, when you initially set the format parameters of your screenplay, if you could just choose No Springsteen Dirge , double-click, and move on?

A SCREENPLAY

by Mark Leyner

(7th Grade, Maplewood Junior High School)

Submitted in competition for

the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers

America Award

FADE IN:

EXT. SPACE, 520 MILES ABOVE EARTH’S SURFACE

We HEAR faint CH-CH-CH.

KH-12 PHOTORECONNAISSANCE SPACECRAFT’S POV

SLOWLY ZOOM in from KH-12 satellite (at 98-degree sunsynchronous inclination) to prison

Earth. Western Hemisphere. North America. United States. East Coast. New Jersey. Princeton. New Jersey State Penitentiary.

As CAMERA ZOOMS in from space, CH-CH-CH becomes LOUDER and LOUDER.

EXT. NEW JERSEY STATE PENITENTIARY IN PRINCETON

A SERIES OF ANGLES

Concertina Wire. Guard towers. Exercise yards. Etc.

GAZEBO (originally used in The Sound of Music ) that Michael Jackson presented to then-governor Christine Todd Whitman for use in state’s maximum-security institutions for conjugal visits and punitive solitary confinement.

CH-CH-CH is now literally deafening.

(The loudest sounds that can be tolerated by the human ear are about 120 dB. For CH-CH-CH at GAZEBO SHOT, use Dolby Spectral Recording at 150–175 dB.)

TITLE FILLS SCREEN:

The Vivisection of Mighty Mouse, Jr.

We hear PERSIAN SANTOUR (72-STRING HAMMERED DULCIMER) AND TAR (SIX-STRING LUTE WITH SKIN BELLY) WITH TECHNO RHYTHM TRACK AND SAMPLED CHORUS FROM JESUS AND MARY CHAIN’S “JUST LIKE HONEY”

Hold, then:

DISSOLVE TO:

INT WARDEN’S OFFICE

WARDEN gets down from her desk, crumples two notes into little balls, shuffles them behind her back, and then extends two fists.

WARDEN

Pick one.

MARK’S POV

His eyes dart anxiously from fist to fist — from right fist to left fist, to right, to left, back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth. This oscillating pan continues for seven minutes, becoming steadily faster until camera movement is a pendular blur.

Display boilerplate MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA WARNING at bottom of screen:

Prolonged exposure to this cinematic effect may induce petit-mal seizures in some viewers.

Finally, MARK taps the Warden’s left fist.

WARDEN opens fist and smooths crumpled note.

CLOSE SHOT of note:

You wanna get high?

MARK

(coyly)

You … wanna?

WARDEN

Do you have any drugs?

MARK

(patting pockets of leather trousers)

I have one linty phenobarbital, which we could split. Or if you have any, uh, air freshener or Pam, we could, like, huff the butane …

WARDEN

(De haut en bas, but generous. Keep in mind that this is a woman from a dreary rust-belt town in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania, who, as the child of emotionally withholding working-class parents, grew up with no sense of entitlement, but, motivated by a passion for discipline and punishment and impelled by sheer Polish-Catholic chutzpah, clawed her way up the New Jersey Department of Corrections hierarchy to become the first female warden of a men’s maximum-security facility in the state’s history. At this precise moment in the movie, she transcends the stereotype of the “compulsively glamorous yet tormented warden” and achieves a hard-won noblesse. It’s worth doing hundreds of takes to achieve the finely nuanced delivery that this line requires.)

Hmmm … I think we can do a little better than that.

SLOW-MOTION TRACKING SHOT

as warden puts arm around Mark’s shoulder and walks him to a locked room adjacent to her office.

We hear DONNA SUMMER’S “MACARTHUR PARK” (dance mix).

(The distance between the warden’s office and the adjacent locked room is less than five feet, but the Giorgio Moroder dance mix of Summer’s “MacArthur Park” is some eight and a half minutes long, so this TRACKING SHOT of the WARDEN and MARK should be slowed down as much as possible to accommodate the FULL LENGTH of the SONG.

In addition to super slow motion, intercut long shots, detail shots, retracking dolly shots, high angles, wide angles, reverse angles, freeze frames, canted frames — whatever is necessary to stretch this five-second walk into an eight-and-a-half-minute shot coextensive with the sound track.)

CLOSE SHOT of sign on door:

Contraband Control Room

WARDEN opens door by entering code on mounted numeric keypad.

INT. CONTRABAND CONTROL ROOM

VARIOUS ANGLES showing cornucopia of confiscated material.

Impounded items are categorized according to methods of concealment and extraction:

Body Cavity/Rectal

Body Cavity/Oral

Body Cavity/Other

Swallowed/Excreted

Swallowed/Stomach-Pump

Miscellaneous

The extensive variety of goods rivals an in-flight duty-free catalog: glassine envelopes of heroin, cocaine, methcathinone and PCP; condoms and balloons filled with heroin and cocaine; amytals, Doridens, Fentanyls, Rohypnols, Stelazines, Trancopals; assorted blunts and spliffs; sundry crack vials and pipes; peyote buttons; N 2O cartridges; a plastic honey bear dispenser filled with chloral hydrate syrup; a 75-ml Anaïs Anaïs eau de toilette atomizer filled with liquid cocaine; liquefied LSD painted on the backs of postage stamps; liquefied Ecstasy painted onto the adhesive strip of a business reply envelope in an issue of George magazine; a Richard Simmons Deal-a-Meal card saturated with DMT; an 8″H x 10″W x 5″D Braun Pop-Up Hot Dog Cooker; a polished brass shower head with a 10-inch extension arm; a Black & Decker Xenon SnakeLight; etc.

Displayed in a special vitrine are those objects smuggled in for the pure aesthetic and conceptual pleasures of subterfuge. These items have no practical illicit value, and, beyond the allure of their exquisite craftsmanship, function metaphysically, as talismans of dissemblance: a Toblerone Honey & Almond Nougat chocolate bar in a Godiva Hazelnut and Cherry wrapper; a 200-ml Elizabeth Arden Visible Difference Refining Moisture Creme container filled with Christian Dior Svelte Cellulite Control Complex; and perhaps the most elegant and rigorous formal exercise in dissimulation — a 16-ounce bottle of Diet 7UP, emptied, filled with Diet Sprite, and meticulously resealed, including delicately resoldering the tiny metal flanges that clinch the screw-cap to the breakaway drop ring.