Will You Please Fuck Off?—the movie

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.—Salvador Dalí 

Toby travels with a woman who pays. He's got it made, except that her nine-year-old daughter is smarter than he is.  Based on the novella:

Lazy, good-for-nothing, pleasure-loving Toby, in flight from his creditors in America, has tried it as an English-teacher in Paris ("know-your-words sort of thing") and as a tour guide in Italy and Greece ("I've always regarded Europe as more or less of a restaurant.")—

Proposed cast: Stelio Savante (Toby)

—and has now relaxed into the good life, traveling with rich bubblehead Marcie,

to Bali, Hydra, Puerto Vallerta, wherever he can avoid cold weather and alarm clocks.  Marcie is the widow of a scientific genius, now dead in some wacko experiment, and her nine-year-old daughter by him, Andrea, thinks in megabytes.

And there's the rub: "Marcie is no smarter than anybody else; the child is smarter than anybody else"—including Toby, who she treats as her yo-yo.  She'd have got rid of him long ago but her mommy loves him, so she keeps him around to, what, play with. 

Proposed cast: Ben Shockley (Haze)

Marcie’s father-in-law, billionaire Hazelton Turnbull “Hard Turd” Harding IV, loathes Toby, and loathes giving Marcie her allowance to feed him.  But he loves his little granddaughter, and there lies the control.

Now Haze has summoned Marcie and Andrea to London, so they can pose as a family while he pretends to buy and old house, but in fact wants to marry Marcie to Lord Michael, and pass the title on to Andrea.

Proposed cast: Scott Hinds (Lord Michael)

They distract Toby with Dr Lu, a hooker posing as a psychiatrist,

who lures him into compromising situations; one of which involves dropping his dry goods in front of the Queen.  

Proposed cast: Mary Reynolds (HRH) 

And as if he didn't have enough trouble, the house is haunted by a gay ghost who's in love with Toby.  

Proposed cast: Mat Baynton (Oliphant)

  Will You Please Fuck Off? is part of the Toby series:

 Pretentious Pictures presents a London comedy. 

Complete slate

IN THE US:

1)    Thriller Kiss of Death, on which we have a business plan.

2)    Older-woman-younger-man romantic comedy Chocolate and Champagne, also with business plan.  The late Frank Capra Jr and I had been going to shoot this at Screen Gems Studios in North Carolina, where he was president, and grab the exteriors in Beverly Hills.  When Frank died he left a big hole, not least in this project.

3)    Funeral-home comedy Mortal Coil.  Paul Mazursky will take a role. 

4)    Woman-centered psychological thriller Alice.

5)    Washington comedy The President's Palm Reader.

6)    Woman-centered comedy Love without Kissing, about making it in Hollywood. 

LESS THAN A MILLION IN THE UK:

1)    Thriller Kiss of Death, script and business plan.

2)    Comedy Will You Please Fuck Off?, part of the "Toby" slate, based on the books, this one set in London. 

2)    Woman-centered comedy Linda: A Highly Successful Call Girl.

3)    Comic thriller Me and My Daemon.

4)    Comedy Casanova, Come Back!

THREE MILLION IN THE UK:

1)    Woman-centered thriller Masquerade was ready to go—lead attached, sales company aboard, co-pro papers signed, 60% of the budget covered—when our equity portion failed.  It doesn’t have to be a co-pro, but those pieces are there to pick up.

2)    Woman-centered romantic thriller Stolen Pleasures.

INDIA:

Action adventure Shipment from India, set entirely there.  Budget prepared by Bangalore line producer.  We're planning 30.7% from Australia, 54.3% from the US/UK and 15% from India, which I'd like to have an loi on before going to a Western company.  But Indian investors are wary of Western projects, and prefer films for the Indian market, which this is not.  Australian producer Steve Stubbs of Pacific Island Films accounts for the Oz portion as Screen Australia direct investment, cash-flowed 40% Producer Offset, domestic pre-sales and gap financing.

ITALY: 

Hitchcock-style thriller City of Masks.  Venetian line producer Nicola Rosada has done a preliminary budget of €5,400,000.

FRANCE:

1)    Woman-centered comedy Linda: A Highly Successful Call Girl.  Set in Paris.

2)    Comedy Total Moisture, part of the "Toby" slate, based on the books.  In the south of France.

GREECE:

1)    Thriller Greek Island Murder, based on the novel, possible TV series.

2)    Thriller Kiss of Death, micro-budget if shot in Greece. 

3)    Comedy Foreign Matter, part of the "Toby" slate, based on the books.  This one is in Athens and on an island.

4)    Comedy The Cad ("Toby" slate), Toby as a tour guide in Greece.

5)    Comedy They Call Me Mr Love ("Toby" slate), Toby as gigolo, this one not based on a book. 

6)     Woman-centered comedy Linda: A Highly Successful Call Girl.  Set in Athens.

CANADA: 

1)    Thriller Kiss of Death.

2)    Woman-centered comedy Linda: A Highly Successful Call Girl.  Set in Montreal. 

SELF:  Bio.  IMDb.  A 7-minute comedy that will make you laugh out loud.

Anger, Your

(A chapter in You Have Upset the Balance of the Universe by Being Born, by Dr. Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html)

Anger simply cannot be made to disappear. Not by you.
It isn't like sex. Sex can sometimes be commanded away, at least for the moment (see SEX). It doesn't have to deform the judgment.
Anger does. It can be appeased by the object of your anger. He/she/they can acknowledge your value, recognize your pain, reward your effort and dissolve your anger from without. It's like reading a book that has an effect on you, seeing an exceptional film, falling in love with a painting--it can change your rate of metabolism for hours, days; alas seldom forever. This can be done to your anger but, I repeat, only from without.
In the absence of the world's solicitude your anger lies there wedged, a boulder in a gorge, blocking you. You have to go around. You have to climb. You have to leave behind much--sometimes everything--that you were. Your comfort, your dignity, your sense of being able to control what happens to you. You will resume these in another life, the life that awaits you on the far side of the boulder.
This, by the way, is why so much of the world believes in reincarnation (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR). You are never sure whether reincarnation is to be looked upon as a reward or a punishment. As much as you revel in your own existence you find the idea of having to do it over and over again, odds are in relatively wretched circumstances, dreary beyond relief. Be assured. The fact that half the world believes in reincarnation is no more reason even to glance in that direction than the entire world's believing the earth is flat. Theories of the hereafter are invariably pictures of the now. Panic looks in the mirror. When it realizes it's looking in the mirror it disappears.
You reincarnate several times a day, and never more so than when you are angry.
There is something essentially unfair about anger. With every other emotion--love, sex, hunger, ambition, even fear (see FEAR)--you go forward to engage with the world in a way on which you can reasonably expect to follow through. Follow through on anger and you can wind up on Death Row.
(Freud ascribed guilt feelings to sexual desire. This may have been the case for the Victorian culture he rose to diagnose--see FREUD--but not for you. What makes you feel guilty is anger.)
It is seldom, to the point of negligibility, that your anger can be harnessed to some project that will benefit you. You want to destroy. You want to annihilate. It is irresistible, exponentially self-generating and inevitable. Anger, that is--and as bulky as these observations are they can crowd onto the pin prick of a murderous wrath--makes you angry.

Comedy of corpses MORTAL COIL

A funeral director in love with an heiress kidnaps her grandfather’s corpse to help her find the will the old man wrote and swallowed before dying.  

Based on the book, short-listed for the London Observer's P.G. Wodehouse Comic Novel Prize:

WARNING: there are details in here about the back room of a funeral parlor that you might rather not know.

The stage version is at Bakers Plays.

This:

plus this:

equals this:

Proposed cast: Seth Rogen

Delmore Danruther—clown, slacker, womanizer, wild man on the dance floor—takes nothing seriously, especially his job as a funeral director.

He fields the calls, picks up the bodies (sometimes from accident scenes, grotesquely distorted), sells the coffins, organizes the ceremonies, occasionally presides at them himself, and has to do all the jobs that go with the turf—help with the embalming, wash the cars and clean the toilets.

Amidst all this chillingly realistic death he's a Bugs Bunny of a guy—playful, ironic, false eyebrows as he reads a service, ball-and-paddle in the back room, loves driving the big cars.

But if he gets a call from someone whose family member has just died, he can suddenly be tender. And despite his boss's nagging he won't sell grief-vulnerable people coffins they can't afford.

Had a job hosing down buses at the terminal, then was picked up in a bar by Hannah Merklinger, whose husband owns the funeral home. She got him the job, part of which is keeping her happy.

Falls so deeply in love with Merrilie that he almost dies for her. When he gives his all and then finds her in bed with someone else, it breaks his heart and his spirit.

Proposed cast: Rebecca Hall

MerrilieGornton, twenty-five, beautiful, refined, the potential heiress to a huge fortune, moves in a horses-and-sports-cars world out of Delmore's reach, has a blond-god boyfriend in the background.

Combines innocence and curiosity in a way that keeps us guessing. Is she caring or calculating?

Is horrified when Delmore lets her see some realities in the back room, but discovers in herself a fascination with them that amounts—fortunately for him—to a fetish.

In discussion: Paul Mazursky

Anson Gornton, eighty-six, Merrilie's grandfather, CEO of multinational empire Gornton Pharmaceuticals and one of the richest men in the world, is on his death bed.

Creaky-voiced but loud and authoritative all the same.

Surrounded by family members awaiting their share of the pie.

Mistakenly pronounced dead, then wakes, takes Delmore in his cheap black suit for Death himself and confides in him.

We’re never sure if he’s crazy or making sense.

Extraordinarily well-hung.

Wraps his will in cigarette foil and swallows it before dying, causing a scramble for the body, which Delmore abducts.

Proposed cast: Peter Bogdanovich

The boss, funeral-home proprietor J. Luther Merklinger, late middle age, is a pasty, insipid tightwad.

Sucks up to the Gorntons.

Has it in for Delmore, who never makes any big sales. Suspects him of fun-having in the back room.

Has no idea his wife is sleeping with Delmore.

THEME SONG (for cheerful female voices, to the tune of "Shuffle off to Buffalo"): 

When you're in the mortuary

You may find it cold and scary—

No, no, don't recoil.

Off you're gonna shuffle,

Shuffle off this mortal coil!

Comes the undertaker later

And he'll drain your radiator

And he'll change your oil.

Off you're gonna shuffle,

Shuffle off this mortal coil!

First he'll put you on the table,

Then he'll pump out your insides.

He'll make your condition stable

With formal-de-hyde!

You'll be magotty and wormy—

It's enough to make you squirmy—

When you're in the soil.

Off you're gonna shuffle,

Shuffle off this mortal coil!

Just because you feel immortal

Doesn't mean you'll never die.

You'll get hard and rigor mortal—

No use to won-der why!

When you're pushing up the daisies

You'll be lying back and lazy--

No more moil and toil.

Off you're gonna shuffle,

Shuffle off this mortal coil!

Shuffle off, shuffle off, shuffle off, shuffle off,

Shuffle off this mor-tal coil!