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: Sharon Stone (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: Bill Murray (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

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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: Jason Connery (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: John Goodman (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. 

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Nifty quotes from Will You Please Fuck Off?


“The Fat Girls Contest”
The problem as I see it is to negotiate the busy canal of life from the gondola of one’s passivity. I like the little things. Lunch. The nap. The haircut. Looking in the mirror all that time puts me in such a good mood.

It was otherwise with Toad. He was always looking for women with whom to excite himself. I’d rather just lie here and await ravishment.

He wanted to soak himself in flesh, drown in it, extinguish for a moment his Toadness—and who can blame him?—in it.

Consider the luxury of encountering in the object of desire a maximum surface, of finding the object of desire if not limitless at least global. Planetary. The woman as world, if you will. Habitable. Not just the image of what is bigger than oneself, of what threatens, nay promises, to engulf one, but the very thing. I mean he’d done everything else.

"All women," he said, addressing the applicants as if handing down the tablets, "see themselves as fat. It is a condition of femaleness that it is incapable of distinguishing between itself and obesity. They will see nothing but what they feel to be the truth projected before them."

“And,” said Toad, “there will be a bonus for anyone whose partner tops the hundred-kilo mark! We got thirty entrance fees here, that’s five hundred extra to be shared by all contestants with ladies over two hundred and twenty pounds! I,” he added with a flourish, “will pay the caterers myself.” That’s the kind of dog biscuit the rich can throw you.

She weighed two hundred and seventy-five pounds, I clocked her. You didn’t want to give her any mouth. A single backhand could affect your dental work for decades.

“Attack of the Giant Feminists”

Naked, zombie-eyed, they loom over the landscape, advancing slowly, almost aimlessly, arms limp. We fall to our knees in wonder, rabbits in the headlights of a final revelation. Their gaze excludes us.

We jump into our Porsches and race back to the city.

What has happened transcends our understanding, a thing we are used to.

Someone has to be first. I steal forward. The seam is a pucker of delicate elephant skin, so tall I must arch my head back to see the summit. I pat it with both hands, gentle it, put my ear to it for oracular rumbles. Pulling nervously at my pants I glance up at the crests of her thighs. If they close I am done for. Holding it, as it were, by the lapels, I engage. It is a potential cavity! I press my cheek to it and give it my best stuff, pry at it with my tongue, surrender to its warmth.

“Certainly Something”

"You can’t be serious."  "No, but I can ball-room dance."  She restrained a smile and cocked an eyebrow. Funny how you can hear the old ball drop into the pocket.

"I’ll bet my mother’s uglier than your mother," I said.
He lit right up. "That’s a fool’s bet," he said. "I’ve got pictures right here."
"Art," said Barb, and he cooled it.
So we all just sat there.

"I’m not even sure I’m all that interested in having a good time!"  What was one to say? We carry a special burden, those of us who dare to love the world. I shrugged. "Somebody’s got to do it."

“The Great Detective”

"Joe-John! You fat! You stink de beer! You never get op de bed! You balls hang outa you shorts! How come I love you so much?” She fanned flies off him.

“Will You Please F Off?”

Whether or not to be a gentleman. Always a tough call. It depends.

"You are eating dead flesh," she observed. My mouth was already full. "I like mine with a cream sauce," I managed to say.

"Toby," the child turned around and said, "do we turn here?"  "No," I said. I had no idea whether we turned there or not but I like saying no to the child.

"How did you find me?"  "Not bad. A little skinny."  "No, how did you locate me? The room."  "Oh. The cabby. He was polite enough not to abandon me on the sidewalk." "Smart-ass."  "You are not," I said, opening my coat, "unright." I let it fall and struggled with my belt. "My brains must be somewhere."

I didn’t care. I just wanted to lie there and be thrown around by my feelings.

The Book:

Giant Feminists 
Toby for Streaming,
And a Comments Can. Toss one in.

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox, and YouTube, 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, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

I-could-not-love-thee-dear-so-much-loved-I-not-moi-même-more sort of thing.

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