Montgomery Peer vs. the screenwriters from Hell
I.
I´m walking in the park on a sunny Sunday morning, well after the overpriced blueberry muffin at a nearby Starbucks, well past the moment M. hopped a taxi home then left me to wander back home for sunblock lotion and my headphones. I´m sort of bummed because she´s taken my flip-flops, see, because the sandals she´d been wearing last night are no good for walking down the street - - but once the music starts it´s like I can´t even think anymore, maybe except from noticing those twin old-fashioned airplanes circling up past the vultures and the smog, doing their skywriting for a mobile phone company.
Life, meanwhile, happens down here.
II.
...yet somewhere else even further below, the writer´s guild under Satan´s employ have all punched in their cards for the day and started sharpening their pencils, taking their typewriters out of their cases and lining them up on the big round table. Cigars lit up, pitchfork, trident-things glisten against the brimstone, someone begins pitching the first ideas in that brainstorm which will most likely bring upon Montgomery Peer the series finale: Who will he fight? Will he fall in love? What´s gonna happen in the climax? Will there be a denouement, maybe a spin-off? What happens to the protagonist once the series ends and is eventually sold into syndication?
I´m obviously posting this one a little too far ahead of its time, at least so that Peer can use it as a warning... But 2009 beckons up ahead nevertheless, and the sound from that first keystroke into the script for the series finale being written in hell will reverberate like thunder rolling somewhere beyond the horizon.
III.
There would be some fine, fine analogy there, maybe a metaphor, there in holding the ad skywriting from those twin planes from the mobile company on a sunny Sunday morning at the park, against a bunch of screenwriters typing predestination over a round table in hell- - yet there is none.
I´m sitting on the couch in my living room under the last rays of the sun on the tail-end of a Sunday afternoon with my arms leaning over my knees, hands held together by fingers intertwining, weight of the world on my back: Please don´t press that first typewriter key down, I´m almost asking the empty walls.
Yet in the end, before night falls, I get to ask another thing entirely:
I don´t suppose you´ve ever had to ask it yourself but... have you ever wondered? What would Montgomery Peer do in your place? What would Montgomery Peer do if he were here today, right now?- - He with his self-entitled, made-up mock-trans-Kierkegaard-ian existentialism, cocky half-smile, and glass of vodka-and-lime in his hand?
Peer is the sort of guy who, upon leafing over the script for the series finale for the first time, would turn to the devil and ask whether he could come up with his own lines himself. “Of course not,” Satan would reply.
To which Peer would say nothing for about thirty seconds or so, never taking his mocking gaze away from Satan, then finally blurting out impulsively, and mimicking some obscure cartoon character to boot, the very first of his own lines: “Then you should never have hired a prima donna for the part, Poindexter!”
So that´s what Montgomery Peer would do, and what he would say, when the world came to an end.
I´m walking in the park on a sunny Sunday morning, well after the overpriced blueberry muffin at a nearby Starbucks, well past the moment M. hopped a taxi home then left me to wander back home for sunblock lotion and my headphones. I´m sort of bummed because she´s taken my flip-flops, see, because the sandals she´d been wearing last night are no good for walking down the street - - but once the music starts it´s like I can´t even think anymore, maybe except from noticing those twin old-fashioned airplanes circling up past the vultures and the smog, doing their skywriting for a mobile phone company.
Life, meanwhile, happens down here.
II.
...yet somewhere else even further below, the writer´s guild under Satan´s employ have all punched in their cards for the day and started sharpening their pencils, taking their typewriters out of their cases and lining them up on the big round table. Cigars lit up, pitchfork, trident-things glisten against the brimstone, someone begins pitching the first ideas in that brainstorm which will most likely bring upon Montgomery Peer the series finale: Who will he fight? Will he fall in love? What´s gonna happen in the climax? Will there be a denouement, maybe a spin-off? What happens to the protagonist once the series ends and is eventually sold into syndication?
I´m obviously posting this one a little too far ahead of its time, at least so that Peer can use it as a warning... But 2009 beckons up ahead nevertheless, and the sound from that first keystroke into the script for the series finale being written in hell will reverberate like thunder rolling somewhere beyond the horizon.
III.
There would be some fine, fine analogy there, maybe a metaphor, there in holding the ad skywriting from those twin planes from the mobile company on a sunny Sunday morning at the park, against a bunch of screenwriters typing predestination over a round table in hell- - yet there is none.
I´m sitting on the couch in my living room under the last rays of the sun on the tail-end of a Sunday afternoon with my arms leaning over my knees, hands held together by fingers intertwining, weight of the world on my back: Please don´t press that first typewriter key down, I´m almost asking the empty walls.
Yet in the end, before night falls, I get to ask another thing entirely:
I don´t suppose you´ve ever had to ask it yourself but... have you ever wondered? What would Montgomery Peer do in your place? What would Montgomery Peer do if he were here today, right now?- - He with his self-entitled, made-up mock-trans-Kierkegaard-ian existentialism, cocky half-smile, and glass of vodka-and-lime in his hand?
Peer is the sort of guy who, upon leafing over the script for the series finale for the first time, would turn to the devil and ask whether he could come up with his own lines himself. “Of course not,” Satan would reply.
To which Peer would say nothing for about thirty seconds or so, never taking his mocking gaze away from Satan, then finally blurting out impulsively, and mimicking some obscure cartoon character to boot, the very first of his own lines: “Then you should never have hired a prima donna for the part, Poindexter!”
So that´s what Montgomery Peer would do, and what he would say, when the world came to an end.
posted by 186282mps at 8:02 PM
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