Week #3-Patchwork Girl of OZ-Movie

I’ve always wanted to do a film adaptation of the book OZ book “Patchwork Girl of OZ” by L. Frank Baum. My idea would be to do the whole film using no CGI. We’d use puppets, models and real setting as well as costumes and make-up for the human shaped characters. I’d also like to keep the rather antiquated dialogue of the original script as much as possible.

I don’t want to describe the whole plot of this book, there’s a pretty good synopsis of it on Wikipedia. It’s got some great characters that, with the right people involved, we could make look awesome. It also takes place in the land of OZ we’re familiar with from the 1939 film version of Wizard of OZ we've all seen. Including the Tin Man, Dorothy and the Scarecrow (Who falls in love with the titular Patchwork Girl)

I want to shoot all the exteriors in the forests of Northern California. Get some real circus performers to play a bunch of the parts. Most importantly a gymnast for the Patchwork Girl

There have been a few film versions of this that have been done through the years mostly by super OZ fans. The most notable and the one I’ve actually seen is the silent version which is pretty awesome.

Not much else to say about it. This would be kind of a huge collaborative effort but with all the whining about how bad CGI looks I think there’s a whole generation of people who can build this kinda’ stuff out there.

I’ve written a couple of pages of the script already.

Week #2 The Missing Person- Play

This is an idea I had about a year ago for a play. I guess it could be a movie but I think it works best on stage.

The story follows Aaron Davidson, a young private detective living in San Francisco with his girlfriend. We begin with him being hired by an extremely wealthy woman to find her husband, a man I think I’m going to call Walter. The woman and her husband are members of the highest echelon of San Francisco Society. The woman makes it clear that she doesn’t want the police involved. She gives Aaron all of Walter’s diaries which she says he can read but she doesn’t want to know anything that’s in them.

Reading the diaries Aaron finds out that Walter is living a double and even to some degrees triple life. He is almost an entirely different person depending on where he is and who he’s with. As part of his other life he even has another house up north and a fairly serious drug problem.

Aaron sets about interviewing all the people in Walter’s life who each give him totally different images of the man. We also hear in Aaron’s voice read some excerpts from the diaries showing that Walter also has a very different image of himself than anyone else does.

During the play Aaron should also show a few different sides of himself. Mostly ones he doesn’t show to his girlfriend. I’m not sure what those will be or if I’ll just get rid of this idea and have him be totally blank a’ la Thompson from Citizen Kane.

The last scene in the play takes place a year or so later after Aaron has given up the case. He is up in Oregon on vacation and walks into a bar where he encounters Walter in person for the first time. It is a chance encounter and it’s also the first time we see Walter in person. With the right casting he should be physically very different than any of the impressions we’ve got of him from the people in his life. Aaron confronts him and they have a brief interlude where we learn that Walter simply took off believing he could lead some sort of life free from the constraints of society. I think I’ll have Walter sort of beg Aaron to help him move back and get his old life back. Aaron does not think it’s a good idea. Everyone is doing fine without him.

The idea is obviously very Citizen Kane in structure but the theme is slightly different. It’s about how we are so much more in the eyes of other people than we can ever be totally on our own.

I’ve written a few scenes and I have a basic outline but I really need some input and maybe even someone to help me write some of the dialogue since I’ve never actually written a play before.

Week #1 Cultures of Wonder-Book and Exhibit

This is one of my favorite ideas. I’ve been kicking it around for almost five years and some of you might have already heard about it. I think it’s a good one to start out with since it’s one I really can’t ever do entirely on my own but it would be a shame if it never got done.

The basic idea is this: To invent a series of whole new “undiscovered” cultures. First we’d make up everything we can think of about these cultures; traditions, history, diet, religion and whatever else we come up with.

Then we write a sort of pseudo-anthropological article about each of them complete with an account of how they stayed undiscovered for so long and how they then where discovered. Along with the account there will be sort of national geographic photographs of the cultures. I’d also like to build physical objects (tools, art, clothing) that where created by the cultures.

The eventual outcome as I see it would be both a book and hopefully a traveling exhibit. The book I picture is sort of like a Time/Life book with lots of pictures, drawings and diagrams. The exhibit would be like a natural history museum exhibit that we could move easily from gallery to gallery.

The stylistic idea would be to make all the cultures as believable as possible without sacrificing any of the fantastical elements of the project. I’ll need tons of collaborators to pull this off; Writers, sculptors, photographers, artists and really just anyone who can contribute to the idea. This is one of the ideas I feel very attached to so I’d like to remain sort of in charge of it but I would love it if someone else wanted to help me produce it as well.