A Hollywood True Story: Difference between revisions

A Hollywood True Story (view source)

Revision as of 22:03, 26 November 2023

4,061 bytes added , 26 November 2023

Whole new synopsis

Arthur Peabody

Bureaucrats, Interface administrators, Administrators

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 == Synopsis ==
+:10: 'Behind the desk, there's a wall of pigeonholes, each one
+bearing a room number.  You sign the guest register and walk outside
+by a small fenced-in swimming pool and pass an ice machine and a
+laundry cart and walk up a stairway to your room.  You unlock the door
+and find rows of dead bodies stacked up to the ceiling.  Should you
+call the front desk to complain?  These things are hard to decide.
+Courage and wisdom in conflict.  Rain falls on the roofs of the other
+motel rooms where your enemies sleep.'
+:10: Joe tells a story about hearing a story about 2 professors at
+Caltech who developed a valuable Internet technology.  (The professors
+and the technology are fictions.) a few months after he moved to Santa
+Monica in 1986.  The professors fought over the patent, one
+fraudulently defamed the other; a student involved in the former's
+machinations confessed; both had their careers destroyed.
+:50: Joe told the story on his show, which attracted the attention of
+a big-shot director, Winston, who wanted to make a movie out of it.
+Winston tried to cheat Joe; Joe hired a lawyer who got him a better
+deal.  But Joe thought he was being being cheated still, because he
+was doing all the work in their sessions.
+:40: Winston gets a wealthy producer, Gustav Weinberg, interested.
+Over breakfast, Weinberg recommends additions to the script which Joe
+dislikes but feels he has to accommodate, 'and began that insidious
+slide down the road of compromise'
+:50: A few weeks later, at the Four Seasons, they got a Universal
+executive to approve the project.  Joe imagined becoming wealthy, a
+Hollywood big-shot.
+:40: Winston called, invited Joe on a trip to Auschwitz with his Zen
+Buddhist order.  Joe accepted.
+:30: 'You're alone in a motel room.  You've just finished driving
+from a town you left that morning.  Your room faces a parking lot, a
+field, with cars and trucks passing on the highway in the distance.
+You're tired and go into the bathroom, where you see glasses covered
+in plastic, each bar of soap individually wrapped, and a paper seal
+over the toilet.  You gaze into the mirror and hear a toilet flush in
+the next room.  The motels and gas stations and fast food joints all
+seem the same, and you get the feeling you're going nowhere, making no
+progress, traveling on a revolving road.'
+:30: 'From the beginning and throughout the trip, I experienced
+recurring headaches and nausea.'  After the long flight to Warsaw Joe
+rode the local train to Krakow.  The weather was cold and wet.  Joe
+was miserable the whole time.
+:20: When Joe got back to LA, he realized that he hadn't bonded with
+Winston, as he had hoped.  The Universal exec was fired, the film
+project disappeared, Joe didn't hear from Winston or Weinberg again.
+:10: 'It's winter, the sky is gray, your car is pleasantly warm,
+your instrument panel with light green colored needles is backlit in
+blue, the air outside is filled with light swirling flakes of snow.
+Where are you going?  What can you possibly accomplish?  You could
+turn around, but what would be gained by going back?  Maybe you should
+just stay on this road and avoid making any decision at all.
+'At a red light, you stop next to a storefront.  In the window, you
+see statues of the Madonna, a copy of Leonardo's painting of the Last
+Supper, decorative crucifixes, rosary beads, chalices, prayer books,
+everything old and dusty.  Later, at a truck stop, a fly falls into
+your cup of coffee.  You lift it out with a spoon and lay it down on
+your napkin.  It dries itself and flies away.
+'Back on the road, you see what appears to be the carcass of a dead
+animal or a baby wrapped in a blanket, and you feel a hollowness in
+the pit of your stomach, but it turns out to be a shredded rag, and
+this hallucination of seeing death on the highway repeats itself again
+and again.'
+<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="width:100%; overflow:auto;">
+<div style="font-weight:bold;line-height:1.6;">Legacy Synopsis</div>
+<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
 In an attempt to advance his career in Hollywood, a screenwriter finds himself implausibly in Auschwitz. As his film project  -- which has nothing to do with the infamous death camp -- implodes, the screenwriter sees his life unraveling on a revolving road to nowhere.
+</div></div>
 == Music ==