THE CLEVELAND FLATS
On a business trip from Wisconsin to DC, sometime in the late eighties, two friends make a quick stop in Cleveland for beer, at a working man’s bar hub known as the Cleveland Flats. Barry wants to get back on the road, since he is driving and wants to stick to his schedule, but Walter picks-up a trashy white girl at the bar and wants to spend more time with her; they head to her apartment to hang-out and fuck, but immediately come upon a couch wedged in the stairway, blocking the only route up to her apartment; she says for them to climb over it (as if she’s accustomed to it being here) so they do, managing just barely. Barry goes to use the toilet but it's clogged, and she says for him to go outside, to relieve himself off of the fire escape and into the alley below. Barry pulls Walter aside and says he doesn't want to stick around—this is clearly a shithole and his “date” is a scum-sucker who probably has STDs and will steal the money from his wallet after he falls asleep; Walter says he wants to play it out anyway, because Barry’s making assumptions and the “boning” is imminent. However, the boning is not imminent, as this girl needs to go visit her mother. They descend the blocked stairwell and pile back into Barry’s car, with Walter driving them out of Cleveland Proper and into the boonies, to her mom's shitty trailer home. (This girl’s parents are divorced; her dad is a sheriff who’s shot-up the trailer and numerous cars that have visited, due to his anger at the divorce and the correct presumption that “other suitors” come by her trailer frequently; he is subsequently now very protective of his daughter.) Walter promised they’d be there for only 30 minutes, but it goes on for five hours, until 7 am. Barry asks how often the terrifying father/sheriff visits, and the girl says “just about every time I visit mom, to make sure I’m safe”; Barry asks for clarification and the mom says she phones her ex-husband every time their daughter visits, and every time she brings men with her—so the dad is probably aware they’re there and chomping at the bit to come by and shoot them. Walter finally agrees to leave and they drive-off with haste, on toward DC—although they brought the girl with them, because she climbed into the car and wouldn’t get out. Both Barry and Walter are suffering from a hangover, and the girl yammers in the backseat the whole way to DC. Once they arrive at their hotel, Walter steps out for a second to go buy cigarettes and dinner—and Barry makes him promise that he’s coming back, that he’s not dumping the girl on him; Walter promises. Thirty minutes later there’s a call on the room phone: it’s Walter; he got a train ticket and is heading back to Wisconsin right now, because he can’t deal with the girl anymore. Barry is upset.
(Based on a true story told to me by the pasty cashier of a Chinese restaurant in a rural small town.)
THE WARDEN
In the early 1920s, the wardens of US state prisons were like the ruthless kings of their own little countries, with hundreds of incarcerated men who could make for the perfect victims to numerous torture techniques done by malicious and sadistic guards.
In this story, a warden—our villainous main antagonist—meets his match in a man who can take all that gets doled-out to him: our protagonist, an antihero brute based on the serial killer Carl Panzram. (So we may hate this killer—a horrible man in his own right—but we sympathize with him in comparison to the particular [and, most importantly, the witnessed] cruelties of the warden.) The prison is a fictional one, based on aspects of Alcatraz, Angola, Sing Sing, and Leavenworth. One secondary character is based on the “Bird Man of Alcatraz” and is actually sympathetic, as opposed to the real Bird Man.
The framing story is a man reading letters addressed to his grandfather (a former prison guard) that he found in the attic, in 1962, after the grandfather’s funeral; the letters were from a serial killer (the Panzram character) who the grandfather inexplicably befriended early into the killer's prison years. (The letters allow the killer to narrate throughout the movie, to breeze-over passages of time.) We begin with the killer's brutal life in an orphanage, abused by nuns and the older boys; then on the road, where he gets gang-raped by hobos while riding a boxcar west; he exercises his rage by killing and raping other men, until finally being caught. He is confined to multiple prisons over the next few years, causing mayhem before being moved from one to another; interacting with various characters, good and bad alike (and based on other historical criminals), along the way. The mayhem is his killing and raping other inmates, and an attempt at escape that ultimately lands him at this prison. He is never able to trump the malicious warden here, and his desire for revenge increases as the torture continues. He almost gets his chance, once, when the warden gets too comfortable and the guards slip-up, but he’s restrained again and put through the worst of it.
At the end, the serial killer's final note says he will be hanged tomorrow. (We see his hanging while his foreboding narration plays over.) He writes how he wants the world to remember him (as hate personified) and how society’s institutions ought to care for children while they’re young to avoid creating more monsters like him — "signed, [his name]." The man reading the letters sits back. Cut to black; credits.
LOVE IN THE RUINS OF THE REICH
In the aftermath of World War II, the citizens of Allied-occupied Germany were without food and shelter, whereas the American soldiers had rations and resources—so German women would try to enter relationships with these soldiers (who wanted their accompaniment, and sex) so both parties formed a symbiotic relationship wherein the German women could feed their children and obtain a home for their family and the soldiers could get their bones jumped and be held while they cried. Many soldiers were looking for anything to enjoy, and would opt for whichever woman first let them in—but one soldier (our protagonist) remains a picky romantic, and he wants to fall in love as opposed to find comfort and satisfy his lust. One German woman sees him as a potential easy target, and feigns attraction to him in order to get his affection—playing the long game without having to give-up sex in the process; a win-win so long as the ruse maintains.
He falls in love with her (believing it a mutual ‘love at first sight’ scenario) and he swoons over her and tries his hardest to provide for her; meanwhile she’s merely using him for his access to resources and sees him as a sucker. When they finally do ‘make love’, she fakes the passion and the rapture. However, when he sells his loot to provide her children with gifts, she actually is thankful; and when he defends her from the advances of other soldiers, she actually is grateful. As the American occupation and reconstruction continues, she begins to see that he truly loves her and her kids, and he truly wants to improve her life. She realizes he was more than an easy target—he is a great man who loves her unconditionally, and she herself has unintentionally fallen in love.
She confesses to him; he is taken aback and thinks himself a rube, saying he can't bear to see her or her kids any further because of the shame and humiliation and anger he feels; she apologizes further but he leaves. Knowing his enlistment was ending soon, and not having seen him for two weeks, she assumes he has shipped-out to go home—but he shows up at her temporary home, in civilian clothes, and asks if he can stay with them in Germany for a little while (and possibly return to America with him); she and the kids are delighted. They marry soon after, and do move to the States, to begin a new life in “suburbia” as a prototypical American Nuclear Family.
SHE WAS NEVER REALLY THERE
A man is about to kill himself by jumping off the roof of a skyscraper; behind him, unexpectedly, appears a woman, come to take a smoke break. They talk, and he tells her of how he's engaged but unsure about going forward because his fiancée seems to not actually love him, only wanting him for his income (“She was never really there for me; I think she’s just using me…”) and, to make matters worse, he just found out she cheated on him—recently, at least once, if not many times before. The woman talks him down from the roof’s edge and she tells him to confront his fiancée about his concerns. He says he will.
Sometime later, the man bumps into the woman at a coffee shop, and they discuss the result of his confrontation (wherein the fiancée apologized, cried, and promised never again); as their conversation continues, they become friends. This friendship continues (montage of hanging-out at various times throughout the next month) until, at another of their meet-ups, the woman says she saw his fiancée—recognizing her from photos—and she was with another man, cheating on the man again. The man gets emotional, the woman consoles him, one thing leads to another and they end-up making-out and then having sex. (Whoops—now it seems both halves of the engagement are cheating on the other.) Except the man doesn’t feel bad: he realizes he loves the woman, and she loves him. The woman says he should leave his fiancée for her, and he agrees. While lying in bed, he tells her about a remote lake house his parents have, in the absolute boonies—an old rock and log structure—and his parents are thinking of putting it on the market; he always loved it there as a kid, but he hasn’t been in ages because his fiancée hates the outdoors (the isolation, the bugs, the lack of Wi-Fi); but, if she were interested, maybe he could buy it off his parents and they could live there together… The woman says that would be lovely.
The man goes sever his engagement, but the fiancée—in a psychotic episode—threatens herself with a knife if he leaves her, so he says “nevermind” and she tells him they're going to get married and will live happily ever after. The man finds his backbone and asserts that, even if they go through with her proposed “married happily ever after”, it won’t be a fairytale and they’ll resent each other forever. The fiancée doesn't like his attitude and turns the knife toward him—however, the woman had snuck into the room behind her and, at this moment, pounces on the fiancée and fights to pull the knife from her hand; the woman succeeds, and—in panicked desperation—plunges the knife into the fiancée’s chest, killing her. The man tells the woman to flee to the lake house; she is hesitant but leaves; the man cleans-up the crime scene and drives to the lake with the body in the trunk; he weighs the body down and dumps it in the water on his way to the house. When he arrives at the lake house, there’s no car waiting for him; inside, he doesn’t find her. Looking around, though, he spots her outside, on the dock in the back…
He rushes to her: she's wearing all white and tells him he's free to be happy now. He's confused, until she reveals that she's been a figment of his imagination this whole time—invented to stop him from killing himself, since he couldn't rationally figure out a reason to live. She wasn't on the rooftop, or at the coffee shop, or at any of the places they hung-out during that montage, or ever at his house, or ever in his bed, and certainly not in the kitchen, struggling with the knife—that was all him: he killed his fiancée because it was the only way out that he could figure, and this woman was the means for his mind to process his unfathomable actions… but he's free now and he doesn't need her, so she must leave: she falls backwards, into the lake, and sinks to the bottom. He dives-in after her but comes up empty-handed; he is free from his fiancée, but he’s also going to have to spend the rest of his life hiding from the law, and without the love of his life (who was never really there) by his side.
THE ONE-TRICK PONY
Someone who wasn't “supposed” to become famous—think JD Salinger meets Bret Easton Ellis. An author with a singular trait ("writing from the point-of-view of a rich person disillusioned and hateful of his own lifestyle and the vanity of his social circle", which he recycles through different scenarios for his different books). He wrote a book in college, which blew up, so he finished his degree and went on to write different books that all seemed to be the same qualities, despite different protagonists and scenarios—and his earlier books were adapted into films that always outperformed the books, because the film versions expanded on them by adding actual substance—turning them from straight, superficial plots focused on rants and musings into actual heartfelt, twisting, and suspenseful narratives. And the author hates these changes, but the mainstream audiences prefer them, since they liven-up the stories. The author is pumping-out a new book—something similar to all that came before—and his fan base is excited, devoted, but much smaller than it was at its peak… and, when this one comes out, it gets less attention than the one before it—the same fate that befell that one, and the one before that… He’s a one-trick pony.
OUT OF A COMA AND INTO THE WORLD
A single mother is driving her 5yo daughter and 3yo son when they get into a car accident; head-on, the mother is killed; the son gets a severe traumatic brain injury and subsequent ischemic stroke resulting in permanent impairment of cognitive function, memory, speech, coordination, and walking; the daughter, on the other hand, suffers enough internal damage that she’s put into a medically-induced coma, but she doesn’t awaken when expected… and the insurance payout from the mother’s death is enough to keep the daughter on life support for the next two decades.
The son, during this time, goes through the full gamut of public school (special education) and surmounts the massive, everyday struggles of his physical and mental handicaps, all while living with his grandparents. About eighteen years in, both grandparents are dead, and the son is taking care of himself… But then, twenty-three years since the accident, the daughter miraculously wakes up: she's 28 and in her physical prime—deficient of muscle mass, sure, but inherently gorgeous; someone who, if you saw them strutting down a street in NYC, you’d think they were a magazine cover model. However, although physically mature and attractive, she has the actual intelligence of a five-year-old: no education, little common sense, and a laughable grasp of language.
The majority of this narrative sees her recuperating from stasis and adjusting not only to life itself but what she has become, what the world has become, and what the world expects from her. She’s adapting to life with a menstrual cycle and sexual impulses; learning to detect sexual advances and rebuff them; not only having to finish school but having to start it, and get her GED; and getting a job, and maturing enough to handle having a job…and etcetera. (She has to grow-up essentially as soon as she wakes up, because her brother needs help paying the rent and other bills.) Her brother is by her side throughout everything, and happy to be with her again, and they lean on each other as caretakers: she helps him fare in the day-to-day, and he helps her discover the world and learn and mature into the adult she technically already is.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GREY MEETS THE TWILIGHT ZONE
Guy meets girl on college campus. On an early date they are getting generic questions out of the way (dog or cat, religious, how many kids do you foresee, political leaning, biggest fear...) she says her biggest fear is spiders, but also French accents; he says he fears death (not knowing what's at the end, and an obsession with wanting to do as much as he can while alive and leaving a legacy). On another date, down the road, he proposes to her, saying she's the light of his life and the person he wants to grow old together with. They get married, have two kids. Later, his dad dies; the four of them go to the funeral. The ceremony makes him even more nervous for death now that “he's next”, given that his mom was already dead. His wife suggests getting a family portrait so that no matter how old they get there will still be his memory somewhere—a snapshot of them at the moment their family began.
They get a portrait done of the four of them, but he thinks his depiction seems more vivid than the others—a saturation or aura that he can’t explain, but nobody else sees it. As time goes on, wife starts showing signs of aging, while he doesn't; she starts menopause at 45, yet doctor says he is still as fit as a man in his early thirties. She half-jokingly doesn't think it's fair that he isn't hit as hard as she is by age. At home, he sees the portrait and realizes that his depiction has the crow’s feet and greyed sideburns that he expected to have by now. Wife has to dye her hair to keep the grey away and, to make her feel better, he starts pretending to need to dye his hair by letting her "catch him dying it brown"; when she does he says he’s embarrassed and she says it's okay, and for now he feels it's alright. However, by the time she's in her fifties and wrinkling, he still has clean skin, with dyed-grey streaks of lies in his hair. His kids are growing up and leaving the house for college; his depiction in the portrait is wrinkled and older, alongside his wife's 30-year-old depiction and their young kids. He realizes, without a doubt, that the picture is aging instead of him, and he can't tell his wife because he doesn't know how to broach the subject—that some voodoo shit is happening as much as that he’ll outlive her and won’t know how or why.
So, instead of bringing it up, he hides the portrait in the attic and hangs a new painting (a ship at sea) in its place. The wife asks why and he says it had hung in his parents' living room and reminds him of when he was young, so she [perceiving he is going through a midlife crisis] allows it. In reality he is now afraid of not-dying and watching his wife grow old without him, and then die, and then he’d have to watch his kids surpass him in age and die, too. He gets nervous, and asks a doctor if it's possible for someone to not age; doctor says lobsters don't, but not humans; lobsters only die if they get killed by us or some other animal. That gives him an idea: he can keep his wife from the unfathomable supernatural sorrow of knowing he’ll outlive her without a wrinkle so long as he kills himself—but it has to look like an accident or there’ll be repercussions, like the possibility she’d blame herself for it.
When he gets home he says he's going to clean the leaves out of the gutters. She's sitting at the table, reading; he says he loves her, and she replies the same. With a tape measurer, he measures out the length from the base of the ladder to a wrought iron fence that surrounds their garden; he climbs up the ladder on the side of the house to where the tape measurer length ends, calculating that his torso is in the apt location... and he exhales slowly, then pushes away from the house; the wife is in the kitchen, unknowingly with her back to the window that faces the ladder, which falls back and drops him onto the wrought iron fence (ladder hitting him as he is impaled on the fenceposts, for a very quiet landing) and he silently flails a bit before going limp; she keeps reading until eventually she turns around and sees him. She freaks out and runs out to the yard, sobbing. His wake is open casket and—while setting up—the wife unveils their old family portrait, behind his casket (his depiction now as a 32-year-old man, rather than an old man); she leans in and kisses his forehead—his corpse is old (late-fifties) as it should have been, and how it had appeared in the portrait not too long ago.
The wife goes and sits down with her kids, devastated. But here’s the question: Was the man actually aging in the portrait, and remaining young in reality? Or was that all in his head the whole time?
THE TELEVANGELIST
Film (fictional biopic) about a boy in the 1960s who lives with his poor, religious family; he goes with them to church and watches their dad donate $20 to their Baptist pastor. With that, he realizes that poor people will give-up lifesaving money to the church because of FAITH, and he realizes he should become a preacher in order to make the big bucks. In the late 1970s he goes to theological school, and in the early 1980s he quickly becomes a [phony] fiery Baptist preacher with a strong following, and he realizes he could tap a bigger market through the use of television—and he leads the pioneering world of televangelism, to earn tax-exempt "non-profit" money in order to get super rich and have a mansion and a jet and whatnot. He has no conscience. When protestors in the mid-1990s start shaming him and demonstrating at the church he broadcasts from, he has to fight back with increased godliness and asking for more "seed money" from his followers, for them to "harvest later in faith" (see: prosperity gospel).
He's visiting his dad in hospice when he meets an old woman with cancer who is so pleased to meet him because she sends him thousands of dollars "in seed money" so that her impending harvest can be a cure through God. He realizes she is refusing cancer treatment because she thinks giving him all her money will cure her—and this doesn't give him a conscience but it does give him a moral twang that momentarily irks him; eventually he calls the hospice center (a month or two later) to check on her, but she's dead; that's another morality bullet he takes.
In the aftermath of 9/11 he asks for ‘seed money’ to have God hear their prayers louder, to pray for God to find lost people (even though it's been a week) in the wreckage, and he gets a lot of backlash from actual 9/11 fundraisers and, in full, the media. The IRS then investigates him because he's made his sliminess well known, and they try and nail him for something fraudulent (which is tough since he's a nonprofit and doesn't pay taxes). Eventually they get him, and arrest him, and sentence him heavily, and he goes to prison where he looks like a morsel, but he trumps the threats by finding devout prisoners and promising them better judgment in the eyes of God [and maybe earlier release—re: ‘planting seeds’] if they protect him (God's dedicated servant) from the heathens around him who threaten to harm him. Having learned nothing, and now with an army of soft-bellied neo-Nazi bodyguards, the movie ends.
MY NEIGHBOR KNOWS ME WELL
A couple moves into a new apartment and, over the course of the first two months, they settle in at work and meet a dozen of their new neighbors. Several of those become good friends, who they hang out with regularly—and all come from different backgrounds and have different family structures, yet all are completely normal. Half of what we experience is their normality with neighbors. The other half of our time is in the apartment, with just the couple, who are getting accustomed to their apartment: creaks are explained as people above and below them; doors shuddering are explained as air flow; tapping is explained, their dog barking is explained, everything has an explanation… But things start getting concerning when they look for certain symptoms and yet the disturbances don’t match their expectations. They’re a little more paranoid, and feeling uneasy; they close the patio blinds, having felt like they were being watched. Paranoia continues as disturbances continue.
Then, one night, someone sneaks into their apartment and drugs them; they wake up and have hoods pulled off – they’re in an apartment that looks just like theirs, but it’s not. So it’s in the same complex, and same layout, but it’s not their apartment… It’s furnished normally; the TV propped up in front of them is playing recorded footage of themselves out and about: mingling with neighbors, getting the mail, going to work… Then there are a bunch of shots from across the street, looking at various windows while the couple are inside. There’s one clear and obvious shot—when they close the patio blinds—and, as they both recognize this, they turn, and their eyes look directly through the camera…
Turns out, one of their friends (a neighbor across the street) had been stalking them; the noises they heard were the neighbor outside, testing his limits on breaking in, and just toying with them for the thrill of it. Some shots are of the couple sleeping, because he had snuck in while they were asleep, or he had snuck in while they were out and hid in the apartment until they went to bed, at which point he emerged. — The couple are bound and gagged together in the living room, terrified as they watch all of this, and then the neighbor appears in the hallway, staring at them and smiling.
BEN CASEY VS JAMES KILDARE
Inspired by the feud between Vince Edwards (Ben Casey) and Richard Chamberlain (Dr. Kildare) who were rivals of the soundstage, having been the starring leads on opposing networks’ medical dramas from 1961 to 1966. Quote: “Edwards referred to rival actor [Richard Chamberlain], who also played a television role as a medical doctor, as ‘a hack’ and said that he ‘couldn't act his way out of a paper bag.’ During a heated confrontation between the two actors in Central Park in New York City in 1964, Edwards threw his ice cream cone onto Chamberlain's suit. The two never spoke again.” — The focus is on Edwards, who is the half-hero, half-villain (even though Chamberlain is also half-hero, half-villain).
NOTE: This is being recycled as an episode of my podcast.
MY PARENTS’ LOVE STORY
A screenplay set in the 1980s with a Billy Joel soundtrack, as a story about my own mom and dad: how they met while both attending colleges in Boston, one night at dad’s MIT frat house, and the party spilled from the rooftop to the Common (including mom’s drunken climbing of the Washington-on-a-horse statue). It would be a coming-of-age romcom.
ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
An alternate dimension of Earth is being invaded by an interdimensional imperial alien nation that is harvesting and pillaging “Earth”, intending to not only seize that version of Earth but to enter alternate versions of every planet and destroy them entirely for their resources, multiple times over. And next on their docket is our timeline’s Earth.
A woman who has connections with the gov’t, the press, and the science community (just a regular person in our timeline, but who is some kind of “official intermediary between factions” in this other timeline) assembles a manifest of documented proof—an FBI report with pictures and descriptions of the destruction and the aliens; a scientific evaluation of the aliens' interdimensional capabilities and their weaponry and their destructive swath; a few press releases/articles and headlines chronicling their arrival and their attack until now, when they're in a fight for the lives of all humanity and the planet—and she uses a juiced fax machine hooked-up to the interdimensional power drive of a downed alien exo-craft, and she faxes this manifest to herself in our dimension, with a speedily handwritten note as a cover page, warning her[self] that her dimension’s Earth is next and they need to prepare themselves, and that all nations need to team-up before it's too late, and that this manifest should have most of the relevant information…
This woman, in our dimension, (again, just some normal person) receives the manifest and recognizes her own handwriting as well as a distinct phrase/symbol in the message (something only she would know) and thus she believes it. She sets about tracking down the specific FBI agent, journalist, and scientist (respectively) who contributed their pieces to the manifest in the other dimension, and CONVINCING them that it's real, based on the word choice and themes and writing style of each document (which is tough considering the rigid, formulaic writing of the feds, scientists, and press) but, eventually, she succeeds… and then the four of them have to convince the leaders of the world, the people of every nation, and the entire scientific community. (And maybe the ending has them nearing the suspected invasion timeframe, after the other Earth has surely been completely destroyed fully, and they're tense and afraid because there's very little time left, but the scientists are committed to “proving it”, and the leaders are leveraging this as propaganda to assert old rivalries and new hierarchies [which will soon be irrelevant, little do they know], and the people are largely too dense, too naïve, and influenced by cautionary herd mentality to believe any of it—and, then, the portal opens… and in come the aliens, just as prophesized...
(The manifest's description of interdimensional travel proved it in mathematical form, and the scientist recognized this and tried assuring the world's brainiacs of its faultlessness, but they all wanted to proof it before accepting it as fact.)
(In the other dimension, she had inadvertently become the rebellious vocal leader of geographical faction, owed to her brief military training and the passion that drove her after her husband and son were killed in the dawn of the war. But, of course, resistance was futile since the nations organized too late, and so in a last ditch effort she assembled the manifest and faxed it through the jerry-rigged machine.)
(Maybe manifest included proof of the dimensions they had pillaged before the other (even giving monikers to each one, based on what was so starkly different about its timeline—which does prove that history only makes waves on the actions of great men and great events?) and charting the pattern in these differences helps her suggest with near-certainty which dimension is next (and she’s right) and which ones will follow thereafter—so, as soon as they're too late and the portal opens, the foursome intend to build their own interdimensional fax machine and send the same manifest onwards to other dimensions, instead of wasting their time fighting what they know will be a futile war (even though the rest of the world will courageously duke it out) and they'll include somewhat more proof of their identities to speed the credibility along, and they'll send it out to multiple dimensions—and, if they succeed, then there will be one or a few dimensions who receive the fax [and subsequently RUIN the lives of their alternate selves, first by making them into believers who try and convince the world that these aliens will arrive on a certain day, but the aliens don't arrive because they've been stopped by some previous dimension, so these four will all just look like crackpots in their own dimensions—but the sacrifice is worth it, isn’t it?, if the manuscript helps save an entire, eternal chain of Earths and the human species?
SANCTUARY
Court drama film about an aunt and a girl: the girl has fled to her aunt's to escape her mother's house because her mother is allowing three powerful men (politician, judge, and businessman) to molest and rape her regularly. She vies for custody; fails. Heat is brought; tries to hide to no avail. Climax has aunt holding girl close while backed into a corner, knife in hand and waving it at the cops who encircle her, with orders to return the child to the mother (an order sent down by a different judge, with political and split-journalist backing); a protest rages on outside and the girl is carried away while the aunt fights the cops off futilely... No happy ending. – Based on the Lithuanian case.
SELF-AWARE RFK BIOPIC, DARK COMEDY
Title Card: "Los Angeles / June 5, 1968"
Superimposition holds on black as RFK expresses gratitude for the Democratic nomination. Crowd cheers as superimposition fades away.
Black swings aside with the opening of a kitchen door, and RFK walks toward us, with a throng of aides behind him. Words are being said.
Tall cabinet door swings open suddenly as Sirhan Sirhan—slapdash bellboy uniform—leaps out, shoving a pistol to RFK's head.
RFK winces, ugly and astonished, as video freezes, paused; VHS 'tracking' issues apparent on the vertical edges of the frame.
RFK (V.O.)You're probably wondering how I got here...Video hastily rewinds, faster and faster, flashing shots of scenes never seen before, all the way to: stop, with VHS 'tracking' issues, on a shot of a younger RFK seated [with his father Joe Sr., in the parlor of Hyannis Port?] on a northbound train, bundled in a coat and scarf—aaand play.
Fade-in superimposition: "Boston / Spring, 1946"
(cont.)
Original document created 08/06/2014.