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.

Proposed: Virginia Madsen

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, to star and to direct: Danny Huston

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.

THE HEART IS A KITE, a lyric from SEXOPHOBIA

The heart is a kite.

It’s heavy, it’s light.

At maximum height

It quickly takes fright,

Descends to the trite

Then turns itself right,

Out-races its plight,

A speck in the sight

And, feeling its might,

It shudders in flight,

The string stretching tight,

A moment of night,

Then falls away, slight.

You Have Upset the Balance of the Universe by Being Born

By Dr Robert MacLean, PhD

INTRODUCTION

You are doing something wrong. By now that should be obvious.
You have failed at love (see LOVE).
You have failed at your work (see WORK).
You have failed to acquire enough power (see POWER) even over your own life to be able to control your future. You are still, after all this time, "on your way."
Or, conversely, you have succeeded. You have made it to the top. But there is something you have neglected to do that would permit you to enjoy your life there. Something you don't have. Some lack in you. You are at the top of the wrong profession. You are admired by the wrong people. You have married the wrong person. You have the wrong children.
And you are getting older (see AGE). It is a time, for you and for the culture, of sexual withdrawal. You are divided as by a glass wall from everything you want. You have made the wrong choices. The moments of decision, botched, or fled unnoticed. There is nothing now but celibacy, darkness, age and death (see DEATH).
Am I close?
You may not even exist. The greater part of the East and a substantial number of western intellectuals--Buddhists, Hindus, linguists, logical positivists, behavioral psychologists and webmail employees--are prepared to argue that your existence is an inconvenient mirage. A non-thing.
You would not survive as you at all if you did not irrationally and shrilly insist on so doing more times a day than you care to recall. Your sense of yourself in the world, over and against the world--as opposed to the world, let us say--is maintained by a series of fictions not of your own authorship frantically shuffled by your imagination at a rate of several per second and so hysterically contradictory that the sorting process never quite stops. You are impressionable almost beyond reclaim. Some slow-witted c and w lyric can have you lurching around moodily for days. Your opinions, your feelings, your memories, quite possibly even your "self" are not things of your own (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR).
Only your suffering verifies you. You suffer, therefore you are. Of this you are almost certain. It may be fleeting. You may be no more than the tip of a brief flare of suffering but you do have your pain. You may even need it.
With what thoughts shall we comfort ourselves?
You have put aside the old commandments, the old theories. The various therapies are no longer persuasive. You are not even sure any more what it is you want.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, in Whose eyes we are but scuttling insects busy beyond our own deciphering, grant we beseech Thee enough light to sin by and know what we're doing.
But prayer no longer works. It has been castrated by the contradictions (see GOD), is nothing now but an arbitrary attitude, a pose before the mirror, an act of futile self-encounter.
You are, when you think about it, desperate. You are not what you want to be. You are not where you want to be. Or how. And you have not the courage to face your own death.
Little can be done for you at this stage. You need time. You need language that will put some distance between you and What Is. You need someone to sort things out for you, a dispassionate figure in a lab coat to interpret the X-rays and guide you in your struggle to become more truly yourself, sort of thing. You may not be able to stand it.
Are you sure you want to do this?
It won't be easy.
And of course, you can't breathe this air indefinitely. Sooner or later you will dive back into life and forget everything again. Which is more or less how it all happened in the first place.
But for the moment at least, the Doctor is here.
Get on the table.