But there’s always a fly in the ointment.
Beau Elliot
Today’s high will be 38, the National Weather Service cheerily tells me. (That would be Fahrenheit. If it were 38 Celsius, all the snow would be gone in around 20 minutes, give or take a molecule. If you’re counting at home.)
And tonight’s low will be 40, the National Weather Service cheerily tells me.
Perfect, I think. We finally live in a world in which today’s high is lower than today’s low.
So this is a perfect world in which to repitch my movie, I thought. Nobody will laugh at me this time. Nobody will snort and exclaim, What’s next? A high-school chemistry teacher becomes a drug baron?
So I call my agent, Ajax. Her real name is Christine, but, you know, branding.
Jax, I say, it’s perfect. It’s time to repitch my movie idea.
Beau, she says (maybe a little too calmly). Have you forgotten the Radioactive Spider Theorem?
No, no. But it’s the perfect time for my movie. I got a message from on high. (The Radioactive Spider Theorem states that all modern movies must have a radioactive spider, at least metaphorically. It does no good to point out that a radioactive spider must be metaphorical.)
Let me refresh your memory, Jax. There’s this New York real-estate developer, call him Bumby, who keeps going bankrupt and keeps coming out of it smelling like 900 million bucks. There’s your damn Radioactive Spider.
So he latches on to a dumb reality TV show, and it unbelievably becomes a huge hit. He becomes a huge hit. So big he smells like a couple billion with a “B” bucks and buys, to meet girls, the Miss Universe pageant and sends it to Moscow so he can meet bigger “B” billionaire oligarchs and start making deals and meet Vlady Poteen, the Russian leader who is rebirthing the USSR, only with big “B” billionaires.
Poteen? You have a Russian leader named Poteen?
Yeah, I know, like the Irish whiskey. I’ll page through Dostoyevsky and find a real Russian name not too hard to pronounce. So he’s become such a success that he decides to run for president, even though he doesn’t have any political thoughts other than cutting taxes for rich folks and disliking people with darker skin hues than his.
And he wins the presidency, which nobody, including him, expects. A little help from the FBI right before the election, but so what? But there is a proverbial fly in the metaphorical ointment.
This will never fly. Too many proverbials, too many metaphors.
Gimme a chance. The bug in the jelly is that Bumpy’s campaign is under FBI investigation, as was his opponent. It’s like Russia in here, more than we think. And after President Bumpy fires the head of the FBI, a Special Prosecutor takes over. Bumpy refers to the Special Prosecutor as the Grand Inquisitor, but whatever the name, aides to Bumpy keep getting indicted. And indicted. And indicted.
What’s a president to do? Well, he yells NO COLLUSION, in all caps, a lot, sniffs around firing the prosecutor, makes big thump-thump-thumping of the chest noises. Right in the middle of this, enter a British company on the edge of spydom with a CEO with the heart of an assassin and the eyes of Garbo, and she has a cool French accent.
You have a British CEO with a cool French accent?
Out here in Iowa, we have a star British tennis player with the Dutch name of van Heuvelen. The whole world’s a Radioactive Spider. Anyway, this British firm data-mined 50 million Americans during the campaign and sold the data to Bumpy’s campaign. So we’ve got British collusion. We’ve got Russian collusion. We’ve got collusion collusion. Bumpy should have arranged collusion insurance. Have to be some kind of shootout at the end, I guess.
It’ll never fly with the studios. You have to have a Radioactive Spider that’s not so metaphorical.
