The Film Idea

After completing my first film folks started asking me, “So what will your next film be about?” At the time, I had some ideas but nothing that so snared my creative being that I would be willing to give up a year or more of my life in order to make it. Sure I had some thoughts, some films that sounded pretty cool when I screened bits of them in the theater of my mind. One such idea has had enough sticking power to stay in my brain for quite awhile. After having a conversation with a friend who is a sort of muse to me, I find that the idea has a bit more draw than before.

First off you need some back story, I have a great deal of admiration for Shakespeare. Yeah, yeah I know. Everybody is supposed to like the bard. What I admire is the ingenuity and creativity that takes place when plays written in the 1600’s are updated and transplanted into new times and worlds. I am sure you have seen films like Baz Luhrmann's “Romeo + Juliet”, but what about the under rated version of Othello called “O” or, my personal favorite, Richard III staring the amazing Sir Ian McKellen? Imagine the bard done in pre Nazi Germany, oh that film sizzles!

My favorite play of all his works would have to be King Lear. I remember seeing it when I as a very young drama student while on a tour to the great Ashland Shakespeare Festival. Let’s just say that it completely and utterly kicked my young ass.

The version I would like to tell is set in the sun dappled hills of southern California. The time is the late 1970’s and our good king is lord and master of a vast porn empire. I see him as a hybrid character, all the charm and manners of a Hugh Heffner with the spite and audaciousness of Larry Flynt. Ready to retire from the cocaine fueled life of excess he seeks to divide his empire of magazines, strip clubs, and grind houses amongst his 3 children and live the simple life. If you know the bard, then you know what happens next. Everything goes terribly, horribly wrong as the siblings fight for control and the arrogant, foolish king is reduced to a shell of man, striped of his grandeur and dignity.

The one scene that keeps playing over and over in my mind is of course the storm scene where Lear, now betrayed and blinded after having his eyes torn out by his own daughter stumbles out into a raging storm to cry out to the gods in anger and frustration. As the scene opens we see a long stretch of Malibu beach. The sea no longer blue, but a torrent of foam and spray as it is whipped into a frenzy be the on coming storm. Lear, still dressed in his signature silk pajamas now torn and stained, staggers out to accost the storm. Behind him his fool, a man who was once a stallion of a porn star ,now too bloated with age and excess who only gets work as a parody of his former self, tries to coax his friend and master back into shelter and sanity. The once proud man, now bent and worn thin, shakes his fist at the skies and screams.

KING LEAR
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
Fool
O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry
house is better than this rain-water out o' door.
Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters' blessing:
here's a night pities neither wise man nor fool.
KING LEAR
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!

Now until I finish the adaptation, secure the 13-15 million needed to film and convince Ron Jeremy to play the fool go watch "Ran" by film god Akira Kurosawa. This is his interpretation of Lear, set in feudal Japan. A masterwork, an astounding film.