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: Jeremy Irons

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.

Catholic Converts

(This is a footnote to Catholics and Puritans.)

They say Bach was a closet Catholic; indeed his son converted. But I hear austerities in Bach that I associate, perhaps wrongly, with Luther.

Anthony Burgess thought everybody was a closet Catholic. There are such people.

His hero Graham Greene thought Henry James was a closet Catholic, which I think unlikely. Greene himself, the twentieth century's idea of the Catholic novelist, was in fact a convert with a Protestant upbringing. "The power and the glory" is not a part of the Catholic Lord's Prayer.

His hero (Greene's, not the Lord's) Evelyn Waugh, also a candidate for the Catholic novelist, was also a convert with a Protestant background, which, when one finds it out, somehow seems it should have been obvious all along. Waugh strained to be what he didn't feel himself to be, Catholic and upper-class.

His hero, T. S. Eliot—"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics"—also started out as a Protestant, and for that matter as an American.

And the third candidate for the Catholic novelist, Muriel Spark, was, yes, also a convert.

What's with these people?

The phrase "Anglo-Catholic" bears looking into: Henry VIII, something of a religious scholar, regarded his Church as "Catholic" no matter what the pope said, since Christ had given power into the hands of all the bishops, not just the Bishop of Rome, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. Hence its Scottish and American versions are called "Episcopal," the Greek word for bishop.

But civil wars and the pull of history gradually inclined Anglicanism towards Protestantism—you won't find any images in an Anglican church—and then the pendulum swung back again and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people like Newman and Eliot and Auden spoke of themselves as Anglo-Catholic, and the American Episcopalian-raised James Agee simply as "Catholic."

Auden
Discovered God in
The Age of Anxiety
And spent the rest of his life worrying about the legitimacy of Anglican bishopry and notions of sexuo-spiritual propriety.

Nevertheless, when my Anglican mother became a Catholic to marry my father she felt, and always continued to feel, that she had "changed religions."

But this is nothing beside the number of people whose names we know that were death-bed converts: Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Paul Verlaine, Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson, Gustav Mahler, Dutch Schultz, Bob Hope, John Wayne, Tennessee Williams—and the art historian Kenneth Clark, whose work had always been an argument for Catholic and Mediterranean values.

It all reminds me of Roman Polanski at Cannes in '68 when communism was the thing. I've been there, he said, and I escaped.

The same might have been felt by Mozart and Bunuel, whose abandoned Catholicism remained so important to them.

I'm attracted to the sacramental view of life I grew up with—there's a gorgeousness about it quite apart from the coerciveness—but as a matter of taste rather than conviction; a form of nostalgia.

And what of conviction? As Socrates said, "The best theory about the gods is no theory at all."

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