Movie Script Treatment #129*

He’s a hot Chinese-American interior designer by day, crime fighter by night. FENG SHUI. Our Hero, Robert Chan, takes on Dr. Devon Unkulssen, a German crime boss and neo-Nazi leader who is extorting Chan’s lovely client, Susanne Luft, over some nude photographs. Using his FENG SHUI skills, he is able to infiltrate Unkulssen’s operation and overcome his henchmen, the suave and sinister Mr. Scissors and the troll-like Urdu.

Here is a sample scene: Chan and Luft have been caught trying to infiltrate Unkulssen’s neo-Nazi headquarters. Urdo ties them up while Mr. Scissors points a gun at them.

Urdo: That oughtta hold ’em.

Chan: You’ll never get away with this!

Mr. Scissors: We don’t have to. By the time the authorities find you, Herr Doctor’s death gas will have killed all non-Aryans on the face of the earth, and we’ll be living in the giant underground city we constructed!

Luft: Hard to believe he had time for petty extortion.

Mr. Scissors: Shut. Up. [The actor should really say this line with the periods between the words, to emphasize his cold, methodical malevolence. In fact, he should say “Shut, period. Up, period.”] Come, Urdo, let us tell Dr. Unkulssen he has guests. We’ll be right back.

Urdo: And then it’s lights out for you!

Urdo and Scissors leave.

Luft: Oh Robert, what will we do?

Chan: Wait! I think I’ve got an idea.

Using alternating below and overhead shots, we see Chan, with his feet, misalign various chairs and a desk, creating disturbing and confusing angles. He pushes a stack of papers and a wastebasket under a table.

Chan: It’s a risk we’ll have to take. If I can generate just enough negative
room energy...

Scissors and Urdo return.

Scissors: So he wants us to kill them, eh?

Urdo: It’s lights out for them!

Scissors pulls his gun.

Scissors: All we have to do is...um...let’s see...

Urdo: Uhh...yeah...uh...lights out...um...uh...

Scissors: WHY IS EVEYTHING SO CLUTTERED IN MY LIFE!

Urdo: DON’T YOU YELL AT ME!

Scissors: I’LL DO MORE THAN YELL AT YOU!

In a furious gun battle the two thugs shoot each other to death.

Luft: One of those bullets cut my ropes!

She frees Chan.

Chan: Now let’s find Herr Doctor Unkulssen and...rearrange his room!

* A lot of thought went into the selection of this number, 129, to be the funny number for this movie treatment. Obviously this is actually the first and possibly only movie treatment bit I’ve written, but to call it Movie Treatment #1 isn’t amusing. I’m trying to suggest an ongoing process whereby I have come up with hundreds of these implausible script ideas, this just one selected at random. Thus the idea becomes glacial, with the reader perhaps conjecturing as to what ideas may have come before, or as to whether even worse fare comes later on down the list. An anthropologist who falls in love with a million-year-old skeleton? A politician who decides to communicate through rapping? I liked 129 because it suggested a very large collection of treatments, and because it is a pleasantly ungainly number. It’s not quite prime but it’s hard to do math with. It’s got nice round feminine loops, which is pleasing to the eye, without being sluttish, like 363, and it’s silly without being too zany, like 517. Other numbers I considered were 28, 73 and 146. Okay, 146 was never a serious contender.

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--Dan Kilian

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---------------------------------------------- A dream

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---------------------------------------------- Garfield Minus Garfield