[HARRISON FORD is dressed in an expensive suit. It is crumpled from his being forced to sit on the floor, tied to a pipe in a stainless steel room full of hi-tech equipment. POOTERGEEK enters. He is wearing a collarless grey jacket and matching trousers and carrying a fluffy white CAT. He is not sure why. He does not like CATS.]
POOTERGEEK: Ah, Mr Ford. I hope my associates were not too rough with you.
FORD: Screw the smalltalk, baldy. What the hell is going on here?!
POOTERGEEK: Goodness. Someone got out of the wrong side of his Winnebago this morning.
FORD: And who are you?
POOTERGEEK: My name is of no consequence, Mr Ford. I am a thirtysomething Englishman—just like Sean Bean and Gary Oldman before me.
[FORD frowns]
POOTERGEEK: Ah, I see that their names are familiar, Mr Ford. [to IGOR, his deformed assistant] Start the projector!
IGOR: Yesssch, Maahschter.
[The trailer for Ford’s latest movie, Firewall begins to roll.]
POOTERGEEK: And now it seems Paul Bettany is to join the list of your victims.
FORD: So you’re just some kind of crazy stalker. You’ve kidnapped me because of a bunch of movies?
POOTERGEEK: Not “movies”, Mr Ford, but “movie”. Surely I am not the only person in the world who has noticed that you have been making the same film over and over again? Patriot Games: your family is placed in mortal danger, and through your rugged defiance you rescue them all and defeat a younger English actor. Air Force One: your family is placed in mortal danger, and through your rugged defiance you rescue them all and defeat a younger English actor. And now Firewall. Let me see: you play a bank employee told by a gang of thieves that you must help them to break through your bank’s security systems or else they will kill your imprisoned family. And who is the leader of this gang? Paul Bettany, a young English actor. What, I wonder, will his fate be before the final credits roll, Mr You-Can-Type-This-Stuff-But-You-Can’t-Say-It?
FORD: C’mon. A man’s got to make living. I was in Bladerunner.
POOTERGEEK: Dare I mention Frantic: “They’ve taken his wife, now he’s taking action”?
FORD: So I’ve got a franchise going. It’s entertainment. Everyone leaves the theatre happy. What’s it to you?
POOTERGEEK: I do not leave the “theater” happy, Mr I-Have-Had-Enough-Of-You. The time has come to strike a blow for the pride of England, to put a stop to the perennial sacrifice of our finest to your American cowboy arrogance. The time has come for you to lose, Mr Solo Handjob. That is why I have taken you from your cosseted world of superstardom and brought you here where you can learn who should really be running the World.
FORD: And where exactly is “here”?
POOTERGEEK: My secret base of course, far beyond the reach of your bodyguards or the all-seeing CIA.
[POOTERGEEK presses a button on a remote control and a steel blast shield draws back from an enormous curved viewing window.]
POOTERGEEK: [gesturing out of the window] A sub-tropical Pacific paradise, nestling in the convenient radar shelter of an extinct volcano.
FORD: That’s just a big green wall.
POOTERGEEK: Ah. Well. They’ll put the mountain and the rainforest in later with CGI. But rest assured that you cannot possibly hope to escape…
[He pauses and raises a curved little finger to his lips.]
POOTERGEEK: …ALIVE, that is.
Muhaha. Muhaha-ha-ha-ha. Muhaha-ha-ha-ha-ha Hah-ha-ha-ha!
Igor! The time has come to reveal our other celebrity guest and open the tank!
[A tarpaulin falls from above to expose CALISTA FLOCKHART chained to a metal pillar. She is bound and gagged and standing on a platform suspended above the centre of the room. A huge circular trapdoor slides aside to reveal a tank full of sharks. As the tarpaulin falls into the water it is shredded by the frenzied tearing of the sharks’ jaws.]
FORD: Cally!
POOTERGEEK: Yes, your nibbled Twiglet of a girlfriend, Mr Ford, suspended over a pool of hungry sharks with head-mounted lasers.
FORD: Let her go, you bastard. You’re insane!
[At that point NIGELLA LAWSON enters, carried shoulder-high on a litter by THE PUSSYCAT DOLLS. They are dressed in bikinis and have harpoon guns strapped to their backs.]
FORD: What the fuck?!
POOTERGEEK: Quiet, carpentry boy. What did you expect? I write the scripts around here.
NIGELLA: Pooter, darling, when will you be finished? The girls and I are getting impatient.
POOTERGEEK: I’ll be through in a moment, dear. And I doubt our guest Mr Ford will be joining us. Heh heh heh.
[THE PUSSYCAT DOLLS sashay out with their burden. One of them winks back over her shoulder as she passes out through the doorway.]
POOTERGEEK: That’s right, Mr Ford: first, Calista will be turning into a shark snack—and even your rugged defiance can’t save her. Never again will her emaciated form grace the cover of the infinitely hateful Heat magazine as some paparazzo snaps her pushing a trolley out of her local supermarket, looking for all the world like a slaveworker emerging from a Siberian saltmine.
FORD: [struggling to get up from the floor.] You’re talking about the woman I love!
POOTERGEEK: And that is usually the sort of line that would precede your finding a handy sharp edge on the pipe you are handcuffed to and beginning to use it to scratch through your rope bindings. But not this time, Mr Ford. Every piece of plumbing in this entire complex meets European health and safety standards. Our ventilation shafts are barely wide enough for a greased ferret to crawl through. My guards are paid far above the Amalgamated Union Of Evil Henchmen’s standard hourly rate. Anyone who even so much as glances down from his CCTV monitors to play a sneaky game of Su Dooku whilst the likes of you are scuttling around the confusingly similar looking corridors is summarily shot. I run a tight ship.
Face it, fly-boy, your missus is fish food. And I’m not pausing for a big speech either. Igor! Lower the skinny chick into the pool!
[IGOR does as he is instructed and CALISTA slowly disappears into a froth of thrashing fins.]
FORD: Cally! Nooo!
POOTERGEEK: Muhaha-ha-ha-ha-ha Hah-ha-ha-ha!
[Eventually the thrashing dies down. FORD sits with his head bowed, sobbing.]
POOTERGEEK: Raise the platform, Igor!
[The winch moves upwards. CALISTA is still tethered and miraculously untouched.]
POOTERGEEK: Wha?
IGOR: Maschter, schee hassh no meat on her bonesch for the ssscharksss to eat!
POOTERGEEK: Oh, sod this for a game of soldiers.
[He tosses FORD a penknife and walks out.]
POOTERGEEK: When I die, right, I’m not going to be wrestled over the edge of a suspended walkway into the still-hot bubbling heart of the volcano. Shooting will do just fine, okay?
Nigella!
I like that movie.
A better idea would be for Nigella to force-feed Calista some of her nice cakes, until she is a 230 lb ball of wobbly flesh. Then we’ll see if Harrison can break a sweat bothering to save her!
I refer the right honourable gentleman to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
Or indeed Alan Rickman’s Hollywood career in general – let’s face it, even if he’d been offered the choice, do you really think he’d have preferred the Bruce Willis (Die Hard) and Kevin Costner (Robin Hood) parts to the ones he actually played?
I read a wonderfully candid interview with Malcolm McDowell in which the interviewer put it to him that his career had been a miserable failure for the past thirty years or so, since he’d almost exclusively spent it playing villains in dodgy American films, a far cry from the early triumphs of If… and A Clockwork Orange. McDowell pointed out that as a direct result of this, he’d never been unemployed for any significant length of time, which for an actor is a quite extraordinary achievement – though it does require a certain willingness to take whatever his agent offers rather than hang around waiting for Artistically Significant parts.
He was in Gangster No1 as well, although that’s a poor rate of decent films in thirty-odd years. Chances are he would only have made that many decent ones anyway though.
Great stuff. Perhaps you could do a script for our post-modern soaps such as Constipation Street, Slagenders of Bummerdale?
Frantic is a superb film, as it is directed by Roman Polanski. No ifs, no buts, it is superb.
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