CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE, a comedy with a dark center

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: Juliette Binoche (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.

The Pleasures of the Screenplay

I mean aside from writing them.

My director of photography on EMMA BLUE, Giorgos Arvanitis (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002187/http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002187/), likes to say that it takes three things to make a film: a good script, a good script and a good script.

But it's not QUITE always enough. THE OUTLAW is a case in point—screenplay by Jules Furthman and the great, the unparalleled Ben Hecht; starring Jane Russell (her debut) and Walter Huston, THE actor of his day if we think of Barrymore as theatre. And yet I never saw a movie lie there quite so dead. The directing of Howard Hughes, even helped out by Howard Hawks, somehow embalms it before your eyes. It's like hearing the actors do a read-through—indeed you watch the film not to watch it but to hear the screenplay.

A screenplay is a poem, with a form as tight and limiting and intricate as a sonnet, and those limitations and intricacies must be made to sing.

I have other favorite screenplays (not that THE OUTLAW is my favorite—it's just that it stands there nude), like THE LONG HOT SUMMER, script by William Faulkner, Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr: "Well, life is very long and full of surprises, Miz Varner, you may jess bah sumpm yet"; and like Truman Capote’s BEAT THE DEVIL: “Harry, we must beware of those men—they’re desperate characters.” “What makes you say that?” “Not one of them looked at my legs!”

And which Rat Pack movie is this from? Dean: “Where’s my drink?” Frank: “In your hand.” Dean: “Is that my hand?”

But the best of all must be TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT by Faulkner and Furthman. ("Take the money and run," said Papa about Hollywood.)

Hawks told Bogart, "I'm going to pair you with somebody who's even more insolent than you are." So in walks nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall: "Anybody got a match?"

She calls him Steve, though that's not his name. "Listen, Steve..."

"Wuz ya ever stung by a dead bee?" Walter Brennan asks her. "They lie upside down in the grass and you come along barefoot and step on 'em!"

Drinking in a Martinique bar and the cops come in. Bogey smiles. "A lot of them, aren't there, kid."

The cold beauty who resents Bogey faints as he's operating on her husband. Bogey catches her, carries her into her stateroom to drop her on the bed and hesitates just that instant when Baby comes in and catches this. "Tryna guess her weight?"

Some Senryū

She’s like a good book:
One is avid but in a
Hurry to finish.

Life is where you can’t
Believe what your friends tell you
About your haircut.

Men prefer women’s
Bodies to their souls because
They change more slowly.

Poems are like farts:
Other people’s stink; one’s own
Have subtle perfume.

Going to the loo
At a party is like death:
No one misses you.

Was it Heraclitus
Who said you never
Get the same haircut twice?

My skills as a thief            
Have enabled me to steal
What belongs to me.

The library of
The inner self publishes
No glib synopsis.

So obscene in the
Strainer of biography,
The warm cheap detail.

The pointlessness of
Principles: to keep you from
Behaving badly.

Too frivolous, we
Are betrayed by our depths; too
Deep and we get bored.

To consider what

One wants is to go in a

Hundred directions.

Human risk, wretched

Human purity: nothing

Unsubtractable.

Forty-nine years old and

I made it without 

Killing anybody.

At least life is brief:

It holds your face in the shit

And then lets you go.

Chaos eats outward

At the compact order in

The heart of chaos.

My daemon uses me

To read every book 

I can get my hands on.

It was the poets 

Who invented God, after

Which they swallowed him.

My vulgarity

Is all that stands between me

And my suicide.

The avant-garde is

Founded on the fairy tale

That art moves forward.

Who has not changed channels

In belief that the

Broadcaster felt the blow?

I think of Homer

Or Shakespeare and I want to

Weep.  And some women.

Naiveté and

Cynicism: pups in the

Same noisy litter. 

The laughing gods weren’t

Aware of being gods.  That’s

How we got caught here.

Consciousness grazes,

A random velvet sweeping

Animal muzzle.

We try to make artists,

Like our own children,

Into ourselves, and can’t.

We seek the poet

Who’s right all the time, but who

Could bear to find him?

The moment we have

A feeling it has always

Been exactly so.

With an adequate

Stomachic one has no need

Of philosophy.

We neither transcend

Nor identify ourselves.

Something prevents it.

The humiliating

Message: you can’t think

The thought that brought you here.

What is poetry

But poverty, the will in

Tight circumstances.

The serpent holds to

His lines, shouldering through the

Maze of his pattern.

Very pretty.  But

Imagine having to feel

That way all the time!

Oh, my fuck-eat-drink-

Swim-sleep-write-feel machine, do

Not abandon me!

Seducible high

Spirits meld with statements, and

Are contradicted.

There is no diversion.

Diversion itself

Engages our passion.

Claustrophobic confession:

Try not to

Characterize me, I’ll scream.

He descended into

Hell to write these things.

And it ain’t over yet.

Pretentious Pictures Presents

My husband suspects

A 20-minute romantic comedy without much dialogue

A middle-aged woman in love with a younger man is frustrated at every turn in her attempts to bring them together. But she doesn't know how to quit. 

A restaurant. The patrons are in evening clothes, the waiters formal. There is no music, only the soft sound of voices in conversation. Michaela, elegant in a black dress, participates in one such conversation.

We can't hear what's being said but the atmosphere is happy, polite. Her husband presides with an easy charm. Over her shoulder we see the couple they are dining with, Philip and his wife. Philip's eyes are toward the other two, perhaps carefully so.  

Michaela is absorbed in the general conversation, self-forgetful, but she too is restraining her gaze. When it does rest on him it is with a gaiety that seems a touch contrived.

She gets up and walks away, pausing to greet friends at another table. As her husband and the younger woman continue chatting Philip permits himself a discreet but lingering glance at Michaela. She is several yards away in profile, smiling, nodding.

Suddenly, absurdly, she is nude. She stands there talking with someone, in heels and necklace, tiny purse in hand, oblivious to her nudity, as are those around her. This is Philip's fantasy. 

But now, even more absurdly, she does notice!  She looks down at herself, shocked. The others don't see.

She does not convulse and cover herself but stands her ground, purse lifted in her hand, and glances at Philip—too briefly to be eloquent, but sharply. He looks away mortified.

Instantly she is dressed again and, taking leave of her friends, she proceeds to the bathroom...

Michaela has reached a certain age, and worries about her beauty—but Philip, her husband’s business associate, is mad about her. And she about him: lightening has struck. 

They do everything they can to meet but are constantly frustrated—each episode an assault on her dignity.

He's not a bad husband; she loves him. And his passion for her is keen, so keen that he can tell something, or someone, is on her mind, and watches even as the lovers try to elude his eye.

So does Philip's wife. He's starting to disappear at odd times. In fact she's sure there was a stranger in their bedroom while she was asleep. Did someone reach the balcony from the street outside and—?

As Michaela climbs a steep street past Philip's apartment, where the balconies hover near the steps, her friend hails her from up high—from where she spies at the other couple. That night she steals down and stretches their balcony—

The co-star is Athens, the only place this story could happen. Every opportunity, every chance meeting, every frustration is a piece of Athenian realty.

Always elegant, always in a little black dress and heels, she hangs from balconies, climbs cliffs, crosses deserts, clings between moving taxis—

—but her dignity prevails, and the sound of her steps as she threads the Athens labyrinth is the music of the film.

Pretentious Pictures Presents

My husband suspects

A 20-minute romantic comedy without much dialogue

James Joyce

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Here are some notes on Finnegans Wake—“a bag-man’s babble, a bomb site, a druid’s curse on Rome, an Irishman’s revenge on English,” etc.

I’ve got a fair bit o’ the Irish in meself, as I confess in My Racial Profile.

Which may account for my positive outlook: Joyce said yes, Becket said no.

On the other hand, Joyce made a dubious choice.

Beckett? I prefer Pinter.

It’s all in the book, if you like books.

Casanova, or rather Casanova’s descendant, is trying to get a lecturer appointment at Oxbridge, when he makes the mistake of defending Finnegans Wake: “It’s a bit of an avalanche—a comic monologue—a barroom rant—a child’s private language. The one thing it’s not—is serious.”

Uh-oh. You want a job, you gotta be serious.

Seriously,

Bob

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, 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

Older Women

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Here are a few of that delightful species.

Here’s that athletic connoisseur Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn, now married to a superb specimen.

Here’s Toby in Cannes having a thing with an older countess.

Here he is in his unwoke film series.

Overall, though, I have to confess that women bore me.

Which is why I put the most unboring examples ever, just to trim the balance, in a movie, now on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox.

Such a relief!

RM

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.

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

The Devil's Pleasure Garden

Pretentious Pictures Presents:

CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE

A comedy with a dark center

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up "older" and finds her life with a younger man undignified. The stage version was produced in at the Creative Place Theatre in NYC.

Attached: Bo Derek

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.

She deals with a birthday by throwing him out. They're right for each other, she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back, because her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

Proposed: Willem Dafoe

So she makes do with the respectable but empty life she'd thought she needed, with her lawyer Griff—more her age, and on her success level. Griff has been in love with her for years. Now’s his chance.

Proposed: Gael García Bernal

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: Jennifer Coolidge

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. He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.

Proposed: Adelaide Clemens

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: Owen Teague

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: Rosie Perez 

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: Amy Brenneman

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.

Pretentious pictures presents

a comedy with a dark center.