Monday, November 15, 2010

They Would Like Me If They Really Got to Know Me

A tangent from a Big Hollywood article by some dope:

It’s been tried before, though the project never got off the ground. In 2004, screenwriters Mark Legan and Mark Wilding collaborated on a spec sitcom pilot called The Cell, about a band of inept Muslim terrorists sent to America to blend in with the culture and ultimately blow up a power plant. The comic twist is, the jihadists are unable to resist being seduced by American pop culture – Domino’s pizzas, big-screen TVs, talk shows and bowling leagues* – and have to conceal their unwillingness to carry out violent jihad from a ruthless superior who shows up to check on their progress. Legan and Wilding wrote it for themselves with absolutely no expectation that any studio would run with it – and they were right, no one would touch it. But the unproduced script (you can download it here) was an “underground” hit with enough executives throughout Hollywood that the writers were offered other work.

Although the concept is funnier than their execution of it, those writers found humor in a subject of the most tragic gravity through sympathetic characters whose totalitarian ideology is defused safely by American freedom and abundance. Toothless? Perhaps, but it would have been a start had not political correctness buried it.
I'm not sure how far this guy is going in the advocacy of the script which I am unlikely to read - does he mean he is a Free Speech Advocate of the highest order or does he think the premise is somehow true? In either case the thing that undercuts the comedy somewhat is that the guys who took down the World Trade Center managed to both experience America and devastate it.

*Such delights or reasonable facsimiles thereof are available in other countries I swear.

7 comments:

Smut Clyde said...

Although the concept is funnier than their execution of it,

So it was (a) a crap script, and (b) left unproduced entirely because of concerns about Political Correctness. OK.

Fortunately the British film industry is less worried about such sensitivities, and can get away with making "Four Lions".

Substance McGravitas said...

The article's a review of Four Lions: somehow the author has a hard time laughing because of the subject matter.

Smut Clyde said...

OK, I've followed the link and read the review now. The author did not like "Four Lions" because it was full of badthink.

Substance McGravitas said...

A smarter blogger might have noted that the article was a Four Lions review, but you got me instead.

Smut Clyde said...

Excerpt from the comments thread from one of Flying Rodent's posts:

Justin
There's a story I read not long ago about a comedy script that's apparently been circulating with absolutely no chance of getting produced even though it's very good. It's supposed to involve an al-Qaeda cell whose members don't actually want to die any more so most of the comedy involves their ever more ingenious attempts to avoid receiving, understanding or carrying out the instructions of their controllers to go and blow themselves up somewhere. Personally I suspect this is just an urban myth based on certain episodes of Blackadder Goes Forth but it does have a certain appeal to it.
Thursday, May 10, 2007, 9:15:45 PM

Substance McGravitas said...

Bowling in Saudi Arabia.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

The author did not like "Four Lions" because it was full of badthink.

So you're saying that they didn't like it because it wasn't politically correct.

These numbnuts put the "cog" in cognitive dissonance.