You’ve probably heard the news by now that hedge fund Pacificor, LLC has purchased the rights to the Terminator franchise from Halcyon’s bankruptcy auction. This transaction has sparked massive speculation on the franchise’s future. Will McG make more sequels? Will T1 and T2 screenwriter Will Wisher’s treatments turn into the next two sequels? Will Pacificor go for a total reboot?
The future not set: there is no fate but what this shady hedge fund makes, right? Well, I wasn’t content with that. As a rabid Terminator fanboy, I needed to know how this turns out, so I took the liberty of using the Overthinking It Time Displacement Field (OTITDF) to travel ten years into the future to see what will become of our beloved franchise.
My report is as follows. Be warned; it ain’t pretty.
2012-2014: The Sequels
Pacificor’s first move was to get a sequel to Terminator: Salvation out the door as quickly as possible. McG, not having anything else better to do, agreed to helm the sequel. Christian Bale, upon hearing that McG had brought on the same Director of Photography from the last movie, refused to participate.
McG, in a bind, recalled Freddie Prinze, Jr’s fine work in Wing Commander and tapped him for the role of John Connor. Nicolas Cage just showed up on set, and nobody had the heart to tell him he wasn’t actually in the movie.
Pacificor, for its part, contributed the title:
This is not a parody either, really. It's a... what is the word. Fiasco?
Man. Writing about The Simpsons is hard. Even though I’m still a fan, when I sit down to try to talk about the series, I find myself asking, “which series?” It’s been around for so long… the show itself has changed, and I’ve changed, so the way I relate to the show has changed a LOT. Trying to talk about all twenty years at once doesn’t even really seem possible. Note that I’m not one of those people who says that it used to be good and then jumped the shark. It’s just different now. (And it’s not just one before-and-after difference either. I can think of at least three or four different phases in the show’s development — or rather, in the development of my relationship to the show?)
I cannot for the life of me figure out a way to celebrate or analyze their 20th season. So instead I’ll just use The Simpsons as a jumping off point to talk about musical parodies, which have been much on our minds of late.
Waaaay back in the day, Fenzel and I decided that it would be a good idea to write an elaborate Broadway musical. About zombies. There have actually been zombie musicals before, mind you, but what sets ours apart is that it would be played completely straight. Or rather, as I think one of us said at the time, “No parody element that we can dream up is going to be more fundamentally ridiculous than the fact that there are singing zombies on the stage.”
Anyway, that was a long time ago. We put in a lot of work. But we did not put in enough. And for a long time, it looked like no part of Brains! The Musical of The Living Dead would ever see the light of day.
But since we mentioned the project on the podcast a while back, it seemed only appropriate to toss something up this week. This isn’t necessarily the best song we wrote for the show, but it’s definitely the most stand-alone-y. All that you need to know to enjoy this is that the heroes are about to make a stand against the zombie hordes, and they’re reviewing strategy. The guy who is singing is named Hank. (That might not have made the final draft.)
Here’s the sheet music:
The Only Way To Kill A Zombie (PDF)
Here’s a terrible MIDI realization (think of it as lo-fi, if that helps).
The Only Way To Kill A Zombie (MP3)
And here are the lyrics…
I recently had the pleasure of watching a play I had written go up as part of the New Works New Haven theatre festival, and sitting in the green room with the actors and techies before the show, I was confronted by a question that every writer hears quite a lot.
“How do you get started?”
Now, I could tell them the truth — it’s a three step process:
- Coffee
- Don’t fall asleep
- Write a script!
But they don’t want to hear the practical details on the act of writing. Everybody wants to have written, but nobody really wants to write.
Aspiring writers want to know how their impulse to put something on paper can come to fruition in a fully formed idea that basically writes itself. (Thanks to the death of the author, writing is really just a matter of exposing a laptop to the right combination of socioeconomic preconditions. Once you can get started, you can just minimize the window and play Minesweeper.)
“The Secret” that isn’t actually The Secret, but is still about as Secret, by which I mean, not secret at all, plus a real-life Hollywood bonus, after the jump.