Practicalmadness

This past week one of my classes embarked on a time-honored pastime of the SAIC filmmaking program, the group shoot. My classmates were given the task of adapting the opening sequence of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon to our particular (or is that peculiar?) sensibilities, then filming it, trying to keep not only certain elements of the scene but also the camera angles fairly close to the source.

The original scene is a dialogue between Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), his latest client and, later, his partner. As adapted by my high school classmate Austin Meredith -- whose collegiate career has tended to favor surreal sci-fi videos featuring his various papier-mache alien creations and imagery of consumption, invasion and hunting -- Sam is now a nefarious doctor, his partner now a grapefruit-headed videographer and the client now a shaggy-haired gentleman infected by...the parasites.

MARY: "PARASITES?!"

SAM: The worms grow to be about six feet long. They...have a smooth, white and porous skin. This injection will slow them down for a few days.

(Sam injects Mary with a long needle. No, longer.)

MARY: What can I do?!

SAM: Nothing. When the worms reach maturation they will osmotically bore holes in your stomach. Send your children to stay at a relative's house because the worms will be very hungry when they escape. And do not eat anything because that will make the escape of the worms much more painful. Now I want you to go home and wait.

(Mary exits.)

SAM, to Kraniak: Have her followed. We can catch the worms and sell them on the black market.

I volunteered to capture our MiniDV footage onto a hard disk, then copy it back out to DVD-ROMs for the class to use in an editing exercise this week. With this access, not only have I already crafted my own director's cut of the epic saga of man-playing-woman versus osmotic worm, but also begun rewriting the script because I felt like playing with Final Draft for a while:

(Lazarus inserts the long, pointy instrument into Mary's rectum. She gasps.)

MARY: I was promised that there would be no anal probes!

LAZARUS: This is not an anal probe! It's a rectal explorer!

MARY: Oh, okay.

(He inserts the rectal explorer even deeper into her...)