John Domini - Movieola!

Venice: Our zombies need training too, basic training. A young woman with placards and the uglies in rows before her, groaning in unison.

Silver Lake: You wouldn’t have much of a workforce without language, some rudiments of language, would you? Words of single syllables, gestures no one could confuse, doesn’t our brainstorm have room for them all? And yet it never leaves the arc. Have you forgotten we’ve got a dynamic in place? The girl saves the guy, girl of color, guy in mortician’s makeup. And, as a person of color, can’t you imagine her conflicts ?

Venice: She’s got a hairball of conflicts. Grody dimensions, and it doesn’t matter if she’s Sicilian or Creole.

Silver Lake: Imagine, the camera pans across the zombie in her greenhouse, he’s harmless now, he’s a worker bee who can’t even fly…

Venice: He can’t fly, certainly can’t sting, and the camera pans over him, sprinkling the manure or something, and then moves up to that photo over the desk of our Supergirl, or better yet a set of photos. Others of the family, all in sepia. Sepia photo stock, sepia subjects. Her ancestors look whipped, as if without that hoe in their hands they couldn’t even stand upright.

Silver Lake: But mostly there’s the grandmother—some sort of leader, isn’t she? Every shot she’s in, isn’t there some sign of deference, the eyes lowered or the cap pulled off? Photos like these, that’s the fun part, a fun project for the people in design.

Venice: Grandma’s some sort of leader, yeah. But she’s just a pair of arms like the rest of ’em, toting a kettle and wearing burlap.

Silver Lake: And is that a brand on the old woman’s wrist? Our heroine, our girl with all the degrees, could she come of slave stock? She’s a regular Georgina Washington Carver, on a fast track for the Nobel, that’s in both Chemistry and Peace—and my God, what has she done, if not create another slave race ?

Venice: A hairball of ferocious dimensions. She’d never have saved the world if she’d known it meant tearing out her roots.

Silver Lake: See how our vision can modulate? See how we take time for character? The pace has been breakneck and everyone can use a sequence in a lower gear, while our girl perhaps poles a raft into the bayou, Cajun country…

Venice: Or maybe she’ll head for one of those Italian waddyacall’m. The elf-huts they’ve got there, the turrets with a beanie hat.

Silver Lake: And you know who she finds at home, don’t you, humming amid the threads of simmer that rise from the kettle? Who else but Madame Laveaux or Strega Nonna or the very avatar of the botanist and chemist and doctorate of the undead? She might be long in the tooth but she’s still easy on the eyes.

Venice: Mother knows best. Before long, the Old Wise One gets her visitor to admit she has feelings for her first case, her whaddycall’m, the first conversion. You know, Undead Worker #1. We’ll have an establishing shot. The girl lowering her eyes. Blushing…

Silver Lake: Insofar as she can blush.

Venice: Anyway we keep it slow, a sequence for character. Closeup face, then closeup hands, and in her hands, a little bag of herbs.

Silver Lake: A bag, a word of advice, we’ll take our time. But then, you understand, we’re right back in the lab. Back up to speed, straight to the lab, now we’re cooking. Montage. Leaf-clippers, eyedropper, Petri dishes. And don’t we need one of those machines that whirl the test tubes around?

Venice: Always a great visual, whirling those test tubes around. It’s hypnosis, think about it, and in this case it’s our girl, she falls into a trance. She goes after her guy with the first dose out of the lab. Hits him right between the eyes.

Silver Lake: And you want a name director? You want someone whose very name says ambience? Then this is the sequence where you’ll hook him, maybe you’ll get Méliès himself back from the dead—because this is where you tell your director he’ll have to show us a zombie in love.

Venice: Not that we don’t have an idea or two ourselves. We see our Worker #1 for instance pausing over the laundry. There’s a job for the zombie in your house, the laundry. But our guy, after his new dose, when he gets to some of the girl’s things, brassieres, panties, we see him lingering.

Silver Lake: A zombie in love, honestly, doesn’t that allow us a wild serendipity? Wild—and yet at the same time well within limits, PG-13? Well within conventions of a date flick.

Venice: We’ve got all that under control. All solidly this side of the R.

Silver Lake: You’ll see how we handle it later on, but for now, think about this, what it looks like if our boy takes a special interest in her underwear, if he puts it to his mouth, if he takes a little gnaw…

Venice: A little kiss, a little gnaw. In this context it has a different significance.

Silver Lake: In this context, you point out any signifier, it’ll have a different significance. Yet whatever your director works with, nibbling, nuzzling, whatever—by this point, can’t we expect the audience to follow the dots? Our pretty lab magician has made her confession to the old Kitchen Magician. Our #1 Convert has put his face in his savior’s panties. By this point, honestly, I have to ask. Doesn’t everyone get it?

Venice: The girl saves the guy. Rudiments of language. Everybody gets it, and in five minutes’ screen time we’re back to the zombie wedding. Boom.

Silver Lake: We’re back to a happy ending, our happy beginning, how’s that sound? And out in the audience everyone’s on board, though some of them, I’m sure you saw this coming, some of them out there must be wondering—wait, what? Happy ending already ?

Venice: Some of them must be thinking, maybe I did wander into an art film.

Silver Lake: And they’re wondering about a couple-three moments during those last five minutes. Weren’t there a couple-three shots out of sync? A couple times there, didn’t our lover boy bare his teeth? We were watching love bloom, the latest dose had made it bloom, somehow, some-who-knows-how, and so what was that , the lover boy baring his teeth? Even licking his chops ?

Venice: The girl’s showing more skin, too. I mean, a June wedding. And the way her undead crush is staring, uh, uh, that could be taken two ways. Could be romance, the way he’s staring, uh, could be…. Then we come to the wedding, and on the groom’s side of the aisle there’s a lot of touching. The groom’s side of the aisle, his crowd, they’re clumsy, in need of a hand.

Silver Lake: And remember the altar steps? The Best Man, and the one with half a leg, and the one who left his finger in his tie? Those guys are all pressing the flesh, passing the ring, straightening up each other’s monkey suits.

Venice: We could go more FX here. A director who knows his CGI, he could show us microbes leaping.

Silver Lake: You see how the new paradigm keeps unfolding? How even now there’s another petal unfolding? This is the danger petal, a serious scare just in the way the groom smiles, as the preacher says You may kiss…

Venice: Wedding apocalypse. Boom.

Silver Lake: What about the side effects? Didn’t anyone think about the who-knows-how side effects ? But no one did, it appears, and certainly not our girl.

Venice: Whipping up the new prescription had her hypnotized.

Silver Lake: Her happy ending does a cartwheel straight into the end of the world!