The Devil's Pleasure Garden: January 2011

Pretentious Pictures Presents:

foreign matter

The next Pink Panther: light classy international humor, one of the

Trials of a gigolo

series, based on

Toby travels with a woman who pays, sweet blonde bubblehead Marcie, who adores him. He’s got it made. Trouble is, her nine-year-old daughter Andrea is his mental superior, and sees him for what he is. From the novel:

Toby likes to sleep. He leaves America one step ahead of the collection agents—"Hello, Ma?" "Who is this?"—and gets by for a while in Paris giving English lessons.

But it’s a know-your-words kind of thing, he’s not really good at it. Also it’s cold. So he tries it further south as a tour guide. "Free time" is the secret. He gives them lots of "free time" to climb around on the monument, while he catches forty in the bus.

Proposed: Camilla Cleese

Marcie Harding, sweet, fresh, blonder than blonde and all heart, is a lonely widow who takes a tour in Venice. Toby abandons his group to surrender to her, and when he runs out of cash is about to abandon her. (He loves her more than he knows.) "To-bee! Let's just live on my money!" He hesitates—"Yeah?"—and relaxes into a life of late mornings and long lunches.

Perfect—except for "the child," her nine-year-old daughter Andrea. Toby and Marcie are no smarter than anybody else. The child is smarter than anybody else. It sees Toby for what he is, and doesn't approve of him.

It would get rid of him but it sees that its mommy loves him, so it keeps him around to amuse itself with. When you’re not looking it rotates its head like Linda Blair.

When he’s hung over it comes around and disturbs his sleep so they can go pogo-sticking. Aw, you will say, it just wants to play! Control yourself.

Proposed: John Cleese

Even less convenient, the money is held by Marcie's father-in-law, billionaire Hazelton Turnbull “Hard Turd” Harding IV. Haze too sees Toby for what he is, and finds projects into which to divert Marcie’s allowance so he can scrape Toby off.

When they hook up in Athens he spends it on a painting for the Hazelton Turnbull Harding IV Memorial Museum, and Marcie sends Toby to the gallery to get the price down. Quite by accident—really!—he steps in it. And can’t get it off. Very embarrassing.

Attached: Louiza Zouzias

The artist, a butch nightmare, physically attacks him. While it’s being repaired, rich old Greek patroness Hermione buys it and takes it to her island, where her teenage American granddaughter Darleen is visiting.

Proposed: Lily-Rose Depp

Marcie passes Toby off as Andrea’s tutor (this is Andrea’s idea—everything is Andrea’s idea), and Haze takes the "family" to the island to bid for the painting. Darleen flirts with Toby, Hermione attacks him with her cane, her bulldog attacks him, and Johna the butch nightmare attacks him.

Proposed: David Faustino

Toby escapes to a portside café to get some sleep, but is awakened by his old friend Toad Fuller, an abrasive man who is nevertheless fabulously successful with women. Hard to figure. Of course, he’s rich.

Toad has come to the island in search of the only woman he’s ever really loved, i.e. the only one who’s ever turned him down. Darleen. He has already tried to get to her at the house but Hermione set her pair of prize bulldogs on him. Toad shot one. He has it right here in a bag. The police stroll by. Toby gets up to leave.

Relax, Toad and his butler are going to row it out to sea, sink it with rocks and have drinks. "Hey, neat! I want a butler!" But the net doesn’t hold, and Toad sticks Toby with the dead dog.

The child insinuates it into the evening meal. Toby gets drunk and sits on the painting, and can’t get his ass out of it. One of the lady guests comes to his room and—well.

The child organizes Toby and Toad to burgle the painting through a skylight over the salon. In exchange, it will ingratiate Toad with Hermione, and have Haze restore Marcie’s allowance. Rock-climber Toad will be lowered in—

—but things go wrong, Toby is swung through the wrong window and lands in bed with Darleen. Everyone rushes in and looks. Despite the bungling, though, the painting is gone. Disgrace. Exile. Goodbye to Marcie and their delicious lives together.

Of course the child has the painting. And it will orchestrate the happy ending—if they can go pogo-sticking.

Pretentious Pictures presents

a summer comedy.

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His recent The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

“I was beastly but never coarse. A high-class sort of heel.”

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

The Devil's Pleasure Garden

CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE, a comedy in the spirit of Lubitsch

Reg’d © Library of Congress

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up middle-aged and finds her life with a younger man undignified.

The stage version was performed in New York at the Creative Place Theatre. Think of...

...only this is her movie, and she gets the younger guy.

Diana, a woman of a certain age, deals with a birthday by throwing out her younger live-in Jim.

They're right for each other, and she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back: her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

So she makes do with the respectable but empty new life she'd thought she needed—with older lawyer Griff.

Jim gives a driving lesson to frantic neurotic Betsy, who almost shoots them off a cliff. He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.

Proposed cast: Barbara Hershey (Diana)

DIANA, the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she can’t handle—except getting older.

Proposed cast: Gael García Bernal (Jim)

JIM is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that never comes. Together they’re fast company. They must have been brilliant at her birthday party last night.

This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s spooked. She tells him he has to go. She wants something more presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late.

Which shocks him. He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.

Proposed cast: Kathy Bates (Betsy)

BETSY, the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take him with her.

Proposed cast: John Goodman (Griff)

Diana's lawyer GRIFF, more her age and on her success level, has been in love with her for years. Now’s his chance. When Jackie tells Diana the lie that Jim has seduced her Diana gives up on Jim and tries to make a go of it with Griff.

Proposed cast: Adelaide Clemens (Jackie)

JACKIE, Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at and defy her. Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy. She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a father.

Proposed cast: Jack Roth (Dylan)

Betsy's son DYLAN—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans uncontrollably. He disgusts her.

Proposed cast: Rosie Perez (Maria)

MARIA, Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.

Proposed cast: Stockard Channing (Gwen)

GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego. She'll take Jim if Diana doesn't want him! Just kidding. In an attempt to bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them, but it turns into a confrontation....

And the final character is Beverly Hills—

—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide.

The stage version of Chocolate and Champagne was produced by Love Creek at the Creative Place Theatre in New York.

Pretentious Pictures presents a comedy with a dark center.

Nifty quotes from Mortal Coil

“I have nothing. I owe much. I leave the rest to the poor.”— François Rabelais

What is life, anyway, but a lingering feeling of guilt? Might as well enjoy it!

Don’t worry about photographs of yourself. You don’t look like that.

He thinks she farts fairy dust, and so does she.

“I thought you were going to change!” “Well, I’m still me.” I sighed inwardly. Still me.

She made a little swoon as if I already had her in the bowling grip and Mae-West-walked away.

The head tells you it’s all random, the heart tells you it’s not and the generator is too busy to think about it.

We are caught between the ding and the dong of the dialectic, ambivalence the very law of life, for it is inherent in this system, in this particular system, that there is no system, inconsistency is a principle of the system, each new formula a liberation from the last, everybody’s got something to sell, and it’s nice, oh, it’s so nice when we find something we can stay with for a while—Nabokov, Letterman, Crest—but we move on, we move on, upping the ante with each success, with each defeat, it doesn’t matter, put in on this number, stabilize here, but on we go, grabbing at an illumination that can only come when we have exhausted everything, though we never do, we know we never will, it’s all there to keep us moving, keep us interested, distract us perhaps, from the crushing conviction that God in his Infinite Boredom broke himself into a trillion us just to have somebody to talk to!

But this too is a contortion, life is a series of contortions, pushing us into every possible position, having us every way it can think of, and even when we lie there, sated and sore, we are still sealed in, still have no clue what’s next, our ignorance so seamless as to suggest a law in ambush, another law, the corollary to The Law, inscribed in stone over the exit sign: YOU DON’T KNOW SQUAT!”

What did I do, she wanted to know.
I told her I was an artist.
Oh, how interesting, what kind?
Conceptual stuff.
What was it, painting? Sculpture?
It wasn’t much of anything, I told her. I was a minimalist who had arrived at the supreme elegance of statement. I just didn’t do it!
She ambushed me on my way back from the toilet and held me against the wall by the love handles. I was too stunned to protest!

That other incarnation that is living in the south

“Of course money can’t buy happiness,” she reminded me.
“Not unless you know where to shop.”

She touched her chin to her shoulder in a way that suggested I might as well throw my chops on her right now. Just walk right up and achieve bliss. It would, her look said, be a bun-clenching experience.

A stooped elderly man came over and spoke to me. “Are you Delmore Danruther?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“I’m Walter Dadd. This is my crematorium.”
“Oh,” I said. “Gee. I’m sorry.”
Fire trucks were pulling in.

Nadine could put you back together if you swallowed depth charge.

The Book:

The Play:

The Movie:

An appropriate poem—

—which can be found in this book:

Vos commentaires?

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, lives Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.