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: Dame Emma

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: Sir Kenneth

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.

Not Taking Taking Yourself Seriously Seriously

A screamingly funny play, in which a little girl steers her mother to the right husband by mastering the black arts:

Kiki (a part for a short adult who does sarcasm) is only nine but she’s much much smarter than her mother Liz.

Liz is lovely, likeable and luxurious—but she’s also spoiled and strong-willed, and approves of everything she does.

One thing she does is love Burf, her rich and vaguely criminal husband—who is not Kiki’s father.  In fact he’s in possession of her dead father’s money.  Burf’s brutality excites Liz, but to Kiki he’s an abrasive belligerent bully.

It’s her teacher Kiki wants for a father—Larry Yorgensen, a tender and wistful idealist.

But he isn't the kind of man Liz could even like, nor could Larry have any time for a vapid worldling like Liz, and when Kiki arranges for them to meet they insult each other disastrously.

So Kiki summons up a Devil—ugly and evil but no match for Kiki—and has him prepare a love potion in exchange for sacrificing a cat.

When Kiki arranges the simultaneous drinking of the potion, Liz and Larry do fall in love—but they continue not to like each other one bit.

This is double-bad, because as a chairman of the board Burf is Larry’s boss.  And Larry’s fiancée Pepper has their boring little lives all planned out!

But preparing to electrocute the cat, Kiki inadvertently kills Burf instead.

Liz and Larry decide to murder each other; then try to commit suicide together; then, overcome by love, accidentally hang themselves and swing around till Pepper rescues them.

Larry lets Pepper down easy, the Devil accepts Burf’s corpse as payment  and Liz and Larry marry.

When Kiki finds their non-stop in-loveness a little dull she re-invokes the Devil and does new experiments.

The play had a staged reading in at FirstStage in Hollywood with set pieces, lights, sound and music, directed by Josh Costello of The Magic Theatre in San Francisco:
Hi Bob—
We had our first rehearsal last night and it was a blast.  The cast is great, and they love the play.  We laughed a lot.  I think the audience will do the same.
Another thing that struck me in hearing it out loud is just how right Kiki is about Liz and Larry from the beginning.  I think she's really doing each of them a favor by breaking them out of their personas and getting them to expand their horizons.  She may be evil, but she's also very sweet somehow.
Anyway, I'll keep you posted.  Our next rehearsal is Saturday, and we'll finish the staging and run it through.
Best,
Josh

Hi Bob—
Well, the reading happened tonight and it was a tremendous success. I was so proud of all of it—your script, the actors, and my own work. The audience laughed a whole lot, and stayed afterwards to tell us how much they enjoyed themselves.  Congratulations!
I wish you could have been there, Bob.  Everyone had a great time.  Sadie, my fiancée, was completely impressed.
Dennis has a copy for you of the video of the reading and of the discussion after.  The response was overwhelmingly positive, with people saying they were caught up in the play and wouldn't change a thing.
The audience was genuinely delighted.  Congratulations again—I hope this script goes far and I've got to tell you that I hope that I get the chance to direct a full production of it someday.  This was my first directing gig in Los Angeles, and it was a total blast.  Thanks so much for everything.
Best,
Josh

(Dennis Safren was the manager and dramaturge at FirstStage, whose Board has included Ed Asner, Julie Harris, Syd Field, Paul Newman and Lily Tomlin.)

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His 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. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

“The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.”—Oscar Wilde

Film reviews

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

Charm

(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. Watch this space for the next one.)

It's not that you deny the horrors of life, it's that you want a world without them, and the act of faith that is charm gives it instantaneous birth—an innocent rather than a naive world. And innocence was born to be insulted.
Your charm, if you only knew it, is your seriousness, but you experience seriousness as danger. When it takes hold it replicates, draws other seriousnesses to it until it collapses under its own weight and makes a fool of you.
It is your defense against being a fool that you identify yourself as frivolous. Nothing can take you in. You work yourself into an ecstasy of confession but your positions are larks.
You affect, for example, a character (see SELF-IMAGE, YOUR). Character is always a comic device—people don't have characters—and your arch parody of your own holds at bay a screaming claustrophobia.
Do you want more? You might not be able to perform your service if you had more, not that it's available. Even this threatens to become a style.
(See also MANNERS.)