John Domini - Movieola!

Silver Lake: We’ll have a recording device too. She makes notes while she’s working, she does our explaining, because otherwise, honestly, who could keep up with the changes ? How many times have you seen a sequence where, honestly, you don’t know what’s going to happen? Our girl doesn’t fail to notice he’s cute, either—she makes a note. But meanwhile he’s trying to sink his teeth into her jugular!

Venice: In one hand she brings up the hatchet or the blade, and in the other she’s got her lab-tested Eye of Newt.

Silver Lake: A visual dialectic, right there, psychedelic as well as dialectic. And did you forget she’s at lunch? When our boy broke in, we were thinking, she’d be working on a platter of crayfish.

Venice: They eat the screen, crayfish. Plus, think of the fight choreography. Nobody can fail to notice this guy’s cute. Trim, buff, and he’s had the undertaker’s facial besides, the kind of blush-on MJ used in “Thriller.”

Silver Lake: “Thriller” could be useful in the choreography. The music wouldn’t work, and not just because of the estate, what they’d ask for permissions. They’d ask the moon and the price of a limo round-trip—but artistically, aren’t we in a different place?

Venice: Our concept and arc, they line up better with piano and strings. Especially after the girl throws the dust in his face.

Silver Lake: You see the beauty of it, the Lady or the Tiger, one hand full of death and the other full of cure? See the hesitation? A hesitation, and then she heaves the dust right in his face, Krakatoa!

Venice: We can go more FX or less. That’s your call.

Silver Lake: Tea leaves, ashes, glints of mica.

Venice: She throws it, he snorts it, and boom, he falls on the crayfish.

Silver Lake: When’s the last time you saw such a sequence? When you really didn’t know? There’s the hesitation, the inoculation, and he falls on the crayfish .

Venice: He wants the fish. The dead fish, not the living flesh. A change of diet, think about it. Think about the consequences.

Silver Lake: A paradigm shift throughout the totality of the zombie narrative.

Venice: We domesticate ’em. Their diet changes and everything changes.

Silver Lake: Have you ever seen anything like it? A sequence that sets you asking—what, already ? Already the world is saved?

Venice: I mean, it’s still only the first reel!

Silver Lake: Ah, “the first reel,” a lovely anachronism.

Venice: I mean, just look at us move . A zombie wedding and then a fight tooth and nail, then we save the world and set up a mystery.

Silver Lake: A brace of mysteries. One, up in the old brown photo, doesn’t that seem like someone we ought to know? And two, what was our world-saver thinking, when she went for that third Ph.D.?

Venice: Meantime, already we’re on to the follow-up. We’re going theory to application. Next sequence, domestication of the zombie. Put ’em to work.

Silver Lake: Remember, our Rappaccini’s Daughter, she stopped her attacker with an herbal goofer. An antidote like that, you understand, we don’t have to mess with needles? To get up close and pin them down and then inoculate?

Venice: We don’t need some ex-wrestler pinning the zombies down. Our concept, it’s wrestler-free. We’re about a spray. A spray, and just listen to our visual.

Silver Lake: Yes, listen, we begin in an alley perhaps. A confined area, anyway—you picking up on how much room we leave for the director? You getting how much discretion he has, the backdrops, the choreography?

Venice: Could be an alley, or it could be, think about this, a movie theater. Think about going meta here.

Silver Lake: You picking up on the possibilities, the director could even go meta, screen a commentary on the folks before the screen…

Venice: Anyway it’s a small space, confined area, and in there we’ve got our inoculation crew. Them, they’ve got the food set up. Crayfish, hot dogs, melon balls, cheese and crackers…. Actually, there’s an argument to be made for pizza.

Silver Lake: Isn’t there an opportunity in pizza? It’s an eye-catcher to begin with, maybe a visual pun—all that red sauce? But additionally one thinks of Italy. Couldn’t Southern Italy work as well as, say, Old New Orleans? Places like that, don’t they share the interracial conflation, the trans-oceanic interpenetration? Plus we like the possibility of going huge in Europe.

Venice: Your call, of course. Unions, distribution, the price of a limo round-trip, you know better than we do. What we know is, if we do Italy and pizza, then for the fight in the girl’s greenhouse, before she hits him with the dose, we have to figure out something. We have to figure out how she ordered pizza in the middle of the zombie apocalypse.

Silver Lake: But isn’t that our true calling? Isn’t that why you invited us, to think of something, to rub these antiques till a genie pops out? Don’t we want to be the first living-dead movie to break huge in Europe?

Venice: It’s weird how zombies never took off in Europe. I mean, they went for Avatar . In Avatar , you’ve got a crip who marries a cartoon. You ask us, that’s not so different from a zombie who marries a brainiac.

Silver Lake: Isn’t there a certain interpenetration? And wouldn’t it just eat the screen, no less, if for the next sequence we went to a medieval hill town? Cobblestones, crooked alley, and there’s our inoculation crew.

Venice: The pizzas are delivered, the boxes are opened. Picnic tables, maybe.

Silver Lake: Then there’s the human bait, a track star, a lot of skin showing. And isn’t she making a spectacle of herself? The way she keeps jogging around the piazza, chanting and sweating and spitting on the cobblestones, what self-respecting zombie could fail to notice?

Venice: They notice. They start coming. There’s a wailing and a gnashing of teeth. But the jogger toddles calmly into the alley.

Silver Lake: When has anyone seen a sequence like this? A horde of the undead clamber into the alley, ravenous, merciless, and why don’t the living in their path get a move on, why are they just standing there, fresh-faced, perhaps with a hint of a sneer—and what, what is that they’re swinging up into action before them? What, bottles of spray, really?

Venice: They spray the baddies. The baddies fall on the pizza.

Silver Lake: When’ve you seen anything like it? When’s the last time anyone came into your office and actually took you by surprise? But our metamorphoses, they’re barely past the so-called first reel, and we’ve got tame zombies.

Venice: We’ve got Ghouls Gone Mild.

Silver Lake: And aren’t the ambulatories still in one piece? Can’t they still hoist and carry and put away? We’ve created a new labor force!

Venice: We domesticate ’em and put ’em to work.

Silver Lake: Can you see it, no exposition necessary, just one slow pan after another? Provocative color saturation? The zombies tote baskets down the rows of a vineyard. They truck carts along the aisles of the Amazon.com warehouse. They yank the levers on the molds for hard-rubber dog toys. Then there’s children’s toys—you wonder about those, perhaps?

Venice: Children’s toys would need living workers. Quality control.

Silver Lake: See how our inspiration brings up one promising fillip after another? See how it keeps opening, unfolding, showing fresh colors? Let a hundred flowers bloom!