Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

We HEAR a toilet FLUSH and then the spray of a stall SHOWER.

WARDEN (off-screen)

(her voice raised in order

to be heard over shower)

That’s interesting … that you’ve never written a screenplay — in fact, you’ve never exhibited the slightest interest in even attempting to write a screenplay — yet you’ve concocted this ersatz critique.

MARK

I guess I can picture things once they’re done — I just can’t picture actually doing them.

It’s not laziness. Concepts excite me. Theory. Form. But the actual screenwriting seems so tedious, so superfluous. I’m not into praxis. I’m more a dialectician of absence. Writing per se always struck me as terribly vulgar. To actually commit an idea to paper is a desecration of that idea, a corruption of the mind. It’s not laziness. Heavens no. It’s simply that I’m loathe to violate the Mallarméan purity of the blank page. “Le vide papier que la blancheur défend … Le blanc souci de notre toile.” And let me tell you, teachers, particularly in the 7th grade, do not appreciate the Mallarméan purity of the blank page. But I suppose I’ve always been rather precocious. After all, I’m only thirteen, and I’m already a screenwriter-manqué! One must resist succumbing to the blandishments of actual accomplishment.

WARDEN (OFF-SCREEN)

(shouting)

What? I can’t hear you.

MARK

(shouting)

Sitting down in the morning, sipping coffee, smoking a cigarette, and opening up the newspaper to read a review of my movie … that just always seemed like it would be the coolest fucking thing in the world. So one day I just wrote a review myself. I was like, let’s just skip the boring part (i.e., coming up with a story idea and a treatment, writing the script, shooting and editing footage, etc.) and go right to the cool part — reading about it in the paper. I figured that writing the review obviated the need to write the movie.

WARDEN (off-screen)

(shouting)

I’d like to read it sometime.

MARK

I … uh … have it with me.

WARDEN (off-screen)

(shouting)

What?

MARK

(shouting)

I have the review here. I carry it with me at all times … like a talisman.

WARDEN (off-screen)

(shouting)

You have it with you?

MARK

(shouting)

Yes!

WARDEN (off-screen)

(shouting)

I’d love to hear it. Why don’t you read it to me?

MARK

You sure?

WARDEN (off-screen)

(shouting)

What?

MARK

(shouting)

Do you really want to hear it?

WARDEN (off-screen)

(shouting)

Yes!

MARK locates his trousers on the floor. He reaches into a pocket and retrieves the review, which has been compulsively folded into a compressed rectangle the size of a commemorative stamp. He carefully unfolds the sheet of paper and smooths its creased grid.

DISSOLVE TO:

SOFT-FOCUS MEDIUM-SHOT of MARK at window.

He is naked, seated on sill, holding review, framed by casing and profiled against the vermilion gloaming.

This is definitely THE SHOT to use for commercials, print ads, billboards, posters, Web site, and licensed merchandise.

There’s a SERAPHIC, almost EPICENE quality to the image that has allure across the demographic spectrum from the CHRISTIAN COALITION to NAMBLA.

INTERSPERSE several single-frame FLASH CUTS of Formula One god Ayrton Senna’s blue and white Williams-Renault slamming into a concrete wall at 190 mph on the seventh turn of the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, in order to SUBLIMINALLY create a disquieting undercurrent of dread in anticipation of this movie’s shocking climax.

MARK

(reading aloud)

“There are those who will not want to miss The Tetherballs of Bougainville for its opening scene in which two revoltingly sleazy teenagers in filthy, reeking Terribly Toothsome warm-up jackets unzipped to the pubes, automobile air-fresheners dangling from cheap gold chains around their necks, cruise the Piazza Navona in Rome, hustling tourists for loose lira and doing grappa shots until they’re vomiting into the Fountain of the Four Rivers, as other kids sit around, high on the popular club drug Special K, strumming guitars, singing ‘Mandy.’ There are many, many more who will want to make sure to miss it. Especially when they find out that this scene — surely unsurpassed in its rapt depiction of emesis — has absolutely nothing to do with the movie that follows — a movie that takes place not in Italy, but briefly in suburban Maplewood, New Jersey, and then primarily in Bougainville, a squalid, war-torn island in the Solomon Sea.

“The Tetherballs of Bougainville was written, directed, and edited by 13-year-old Mark Leyner, whose only previous credit is as musical director of a video of the abortive execution attempt of his father, entitled ‘I Feel Shitty.’ Extravagantly mannered and constantly undermined by a nose-thumbing nihilism and hollow flashiness that reflect its creator’s rock-video affinities, Tetherballs is an autobiographical account of the year that follows the sentencing of Leyner’s father, Joel, to New Jersey State Discretionary Execution (NJSDE). One can’t help but marvel at the sheer chutzpah required to actually base a movie’s formal structure on the vertiginous mood swings of adolescence, so that moments of flabbergasting kitsch (the control tower at Bougainville International Airport is a 160-foot statue of Herve Villechaize as Tattoo from Fantasy Island ) and Grand Guignol sadism (a philandering insurance adjuster, archly played by Charles Durning, is filled with candy, hung from the ceiling like a piñata, and savagely beaten to death by the sugar-frenzied, bat-wielding, blindfolded children at his own daughter’s 6th birthday party) alternate with wrenchingly passionate scenes of paternal devotion and filial ambivalence.

“Unfortunately, the movie’s self-congratulatory misery, showy camera tricks, and overindulgent, almost compulsive emphasis on medical imaging are frequently unbearable. For example, in what would otherwise have been an extremely poignant scene in which Mark returns home from the New Jersey State Penitentiary at Princeton and attempts to console his disturbed, kamikaze-guzzling, Thierry Mugler-accoutered mother (smolderingly played by Nell Carter, who was absolutely riveting as Madame Verdurin in George Romero’s terrifying remake of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past ), Leyner inexplicably chooses to shoot the scene using a positron emission tomography scanner, emphasizing the glucose metabolism of the characters instead of their emotional interaction.

“With the exception of several Bougainvillean tetherball stars who play themselves — most notably Offramp Tavanipupu, whose sinuous, taunting performance conjures up a Melanesian Adam Ant — the movie’s characters are predominantly 13- and 14-year-old kids played by adult actors. Mark’s best friend from Maplewood Junior High, Felipe, who suffers brain damage from a skateboarding accident, is played with great magnetism and triumphant bluster by Roddy McDowall. Stellar cameos include Ze’ev (Benny) Begin, son of former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, as ‘Creepy Man at Futon Store’ and Tommy Hilfiger as ‘Demented Kid on Railroad Trestle.’

“Amazingly for a movie that includes scenes of wild-haired men with bones in their noses eating ‘long pig’ (cooked human being) aboard the Mir space station; boy soldiers who, having just looted a women’s clothing store, lurch down some blighted boulevard in flouncy hats, billowing dresses crisscrossed with cartridge bandoliers, huge spliffs in their mouths, lethal fusillades bursting errantly from their AK-47s each time they stumble in their spike heels; and supermodels Nikki Taylor, Helena Christensen, Carla Bruni, and Yasmeen Ghauri backstroking in an Olympic-size pool filled with gin and vermouth, its lanes demarcated by strings of olives; The Tetherballs of Bougainville was shot entirely in Leyner’s bedroom in his parents’ Maplewood home.