CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE, A Comedy with a Dark Center

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: Meg Ryan (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: Jack Davenport (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.

Reg’d © Library of Congress

Fear

(A chapter in YOU HAVE UPSET THE BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE BY BEING BORN: Advice on How to Live by Dr Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html. A new chapter every so often.)
    
    You are a swashbuckler.  You live beyond your means, both financially and psychologically.  You live dangerously, which is to say naked and unashamed.  Play and danger are what you need.  There is no security anyway and heaven loves those who dare.
    Fear is a bore (see BOREDOM).
    And what is guilt but fear of punishment?  Also boring.  Surrender to the air and ride on it.  If there is a cosmic bureaucrat monitoring your behavior (see GOD), give him a good show.  Sell it, baby!  Be selfish.  Be a monster.  Sin, as Martin Luther said, bravely.  You have an obligation to indulge yourself.  Once you start going for safety it never stops, it's like money.  Never enough.  Go without assurance.  Safety is vulgar.
    Taking this attitude towards fear--an attitude of disdain--gives the right relation.  Fear is ignoble.  You are noble.
    You are more than noble.  You are divine.  Fear is forgetting that one is divine.  What can possibly happen to you?
    But here is the paradox: anything can happen to you, because divinity is vulnerability.  Insofar as you are divine, that far are you vulnerable.
    Which leads to a seduction: if you make yourself tall enough you'll fly, fine, but do you want to fly?  To get high, to experience joy always can only be desirable (see JOY), and yet you find yourself yearning for a vision with a little blood in it, even if it's your own.
    The analogy is to religion.  On each of the several continents the vast majority of sentient adults are apparently bores committed to some form of religious practice or metaphysical speculation; whereas if they really believed in their eternal natures as you do it might occur to them that eternity is adequate for the contemplation of the eternal.  We have made a privileged intrusion into time.  It is the moment for things of the earth.  If they're not to your taste you'll just have to wait for the bus back.
    So it is with your fear.  You cling to it not perhaps because you are afraid but because you find it cozy, like gray weather (see WEATHER).  You suspect that it may be the price of sensitivity (see MANNERS).  Uncertainty and ambiguity are the stuff of life.  How can they be relished without fear?  Your very sensuality requires that you feel fear.  There can be no shiver of anticipation without it.
    Make yourself tall enough and you'll fly, yes, but make yourself small enough and you'll get by.  Humility is comelier than pride.  If you are of a higher race it is the condition of your moment here that you forget that.
    Fear, that is, is luxury.  An indulgence.  If it makes you feel better, go ahead.
    (See also MORALITY).

Pretentious Pictures Presents:

You Need Money to Be Rich

stealing with style

Reg’d © Library of Congress

Nobody ever met cuter:

She's tough; he's refined.

She's practical; he's cultured.

She's brilliant; he's elegant.

She's serious; he's frivolous.

She's a lawyer; he's a crook.

She never loses; neither does he.

Romeo Balue is a handsome light-hearted charming thief, and he has his sights set on a wide selection of paintings originally stolen by the Nazis from his friend Ada’s family during the war, now in the hands of the Kremlin. But Ada, weary of the constant anxiety associated with high-profile theft, forbids him to steal them. Then again, she can’t afford £10 million to buy them back. The only option, then, for Romeo, is to steal the money to buy them. Right?

Daring British barrister Francesca Smithson, the darling of the press for her courtroom tactics, is appointed to defend American CFO Hugo Danch at hearings to extradite him to New York for absconding with a fortune from his crashing company Engone.

Due to a mix-up—well, is it a mix-up?—Francesca, when she comes to meet her new client for the first time, goes to Romeo’s room and the call-girl Romeo had asked for is sent to Hugo’s. 

And, what is it, her spirit of fun? She is in a rut—she plays along!

Soon she's leading a double life—by night Romeo's bird of paradise, by day the defender of a man with a briefcase full of bearer bonds.

Hugo Danch, an American embezzler, has fled to London with $100 million worth of bonds—and has the hotel room next to Romeo’s. Watching Hugo on TV, Romeo spots a pin number written on Hugo’s hand, which piques Romeo’s interest.

To avoid arrest Hugo turns the bonds over to her—and then Romeo disappears with them, and with a truckload of paintings. Who's been conning who?

At Ada’s house in Como he relaxes—until Francesca shows up with a pair of thugs after her, and the game heats up.

Set in London and Como

Pretentious pictures presents

You Need Money to Be Rich

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.

"A serious man has few ideas. A man of many ideas cannot be serious."—Paul Valéry