Rebecca's Game

I am having a bit of fun on text message tonight playing a game with my beautiful and glorious friend Rebecca (I sort of worship her, though she doesn't know) and I almost think the game I am playing with her via text could make a good interactive novel (or of course a video game of some type). The way it works is this: I am pretending that I am Rebecca's agent, because i have turned her into an actress suddenly, and I give her three options to  choose from, when it comes to the next film role that she has to take , or else her career will be all but sacrificed. I came up with the game out of no where as we were conversing on text; and I am actually kind of surprised with some of the novelistic ideas I have gotten from it. I think Becca is too...because they actually seem like pretty good film ideas (at least in theory).

Here are the first three ideas I gave her:

1. She is to play an emotionally distraught wife in America's Deep South whose husband was killed in the Gulf War and who then, as a result of his unfortunate death and her newfound widowhood, begiins to dabble in drugs. The addiction, of course, for the sake of Hollywood, quickly spirals completely out of control, and the movie ends very badly, and very tragically (i.e. our poor lead, whom I suppose we will call Claire McKennan, overdoses and dies).

2. She takes on a fantasy movie where she plays a younger type, biker looking chick who hunts vampiures but who - what else?- must be scantily clad throughout the film (Rebecca doesn't like to dress scantily) and who also must have various sex scenes with various rather ... wild and vicious men. "This movie," I said, "will probably be a hit with the LGBT crowd...interpreted as powerful1"

3. Rebecca will play a Sarah Jessica Parker type woman in some major US city or other, like Sex & the City, but she will be a bit more like Samantha Jones than anything (fans will know) and ... the plot will revolve round something a little disgusting: Becca, who in the film will be known as Jenny, will be going for broke and feel forced into chasing an old millinaire Donald Trump type character, in order to get back a ritzy ditzy life.

Which one do you think Becca chose? Which one do you think I was hoping she would choose? Personally, I was hoping she was going to choose the second, "because I would be interested in seeing you dressed in the sexy leather biker outfits for once, plus I would want to see you use a GUN!" (I also wouldn't complain to see her get some good looking men!).

Alas, Becca wound up going with choice number one here ... saying (hold on, let me give you what she actually texted me) .. hmm yes she said "I choose number one , the distraught wife in the Deep South, because that most reminds me of me where I am now and also I think, if I were an actress, that this film would be the one to most showcase my talent. It kind of reminds me of something Cate Blanchett would do, maybe. The second choice.. yuck,, sillly, I wuld never do that. That is that Kate Beckinsale shit, I never watched shit like that you know. And definitely never the third neither, though I'm sure you already knew that, too."

Then she of course asked the age old question to me .."What's it say about me? You think the first one was a good choice? To play the emotionally distraught widow of the Gulf War vet?"

I had to give Rebecca's choice love of course, so I did: "Absolutely!" I said, "It's a good choice and I'll admit I figured it would be the one you would choose. It... I think that film would probably cement for you a fan base with older women who have faced real challenges in, I dunno, the hardest hit  parts of the country. I can imaine the wardrobe might be just the sort you dig in reality anyways too.. also the soundtrack could probably be very good.. country western ..."

"I think I'd take it because it seems to me it would be the most likely to win an Oscar, no? It is the only serious choice, lol."

"Maybe. Depends. The third one with the Sex and the City spin would probably be the best seller... but the first one (lets call it McKennan's Fall) would have a chance at an Oscar, if it were acted right. It would hang on a ledge, you see. If you didn't act it right, it would faulter. It depends on a lot of variables, a serious drama like that, I think. And the other thing that is crazy about the movie game is the way each choice effects future choices: if you got big with the first sad drama film, you might wind up never being able to really play an empowering femme char.... "

"A risk I'll have to take." she said.

"Indeed."

I wasn't done with the game of course ; I needed another round! So I took a few minutes, as I sat on the subway home , and typed up some notes in my iPhone feeling around for another set of three roles I could imagine Rebecca Jane in. Keep in mind that ever since I have met the Glorious Rebecca Jane I have often envisioned her in films as I write (and I have tried to write the opening of a rather weird novel dedicated to her though I'd never let *her* see it). I came up with my next three ideas for Rebeccas fictional film career  as the subway hit Fulton Street ... and they were as follows :

1. She will play a mother of four, in Wisconsin, and she is working as a waitress at some ratty little diner she hates, her ex-husband is a criminal of some type (we'll make him a member of a White Nationalist gang), and of course, being a criminal, the guy winds up going away to prison for 100 years, leaving Becca, who will now be Janet, all alone with four kids in that ... oddball state. She will think she is at the end of her rope , a bunch of scenes will happen where she breaks down crying, makeup running down her face, sad Barbara Streisand songs playing (or maybe Shania Twain would be better for Wisconsin?) and then, boom! Hollywood magic will occur, a rich hot man will walk into the Diner, and he will sweep Janet off of her feet and tell her he wants to marry her and take her away with him to ...where..San Pedro, California, where he runs a bunch of software companies. But! Just when you think it's going to be good, what happens? That lunatic husband doing 100 years hears abut the matrimony , hears that some coastal rat is about to steal his girl and his four kids, and he somehow manages to break out of the prison and.....  (I purposely left the rest up to Rebecca's imagination).

2. A role that will start out splendid, but end up Hellish, something sort of like that Liam Neeson Taken movie everyone loved: Becca will play a wealthy young American woman (not a girl like in Taken) who is vacationing alone overseas somewhere. Let's say Tokyo (though I told Becca Berlin). And of course what will hapen but that she will be taken...and kidnapped.. by some vicious criminal syndicate. The rest of the movie will then descend into that typical action film territrory : she will have to learn how to shoot a pistol ,use a blade, she might get raped (in fact, no, she *will* be, I told her, sadly) but she will ultimately make it out alive in the end, back home to the USA, and she will get to slaughter a bunch of vicious misogynistc men in the process. "This one will also be good for the LGBT crowd." I said.

3. She plays a gorgeous but down & out sister of a very successful and arrogant woman who has been outdoing her ever since the Beginning, and the plot of the movie will revolve around how Rebecca goes about getting revenge fo r all the wrongs this sister ever did to her. "You will steal her husband, who will be like Brad Pitt or whoever you want him to be, and thennnnn you will get a glorious and violent climax scene where,yes, you get to finally kick the living hell out of her!"

I actually preferred the idea I came up with for the third movie the most, Becca seemed to ultimately interpret that one as something that would have to be a "romcom", and I told her I had not imagined it that way. If anything, the way that I imagined La Vendetta Della Donna (an Italian name, why not?) was that I imagined it as an extra serious movie all about revenge in much the same way that the Christian Bale film Out of the Furnace dealt with the topic of revenge and was also dead serious.

 I imagined a number of scenes in fact, in regards to it: "You'll be seen as a child, crying, the sister beating you up and punching you in the head...it'll show how she oftne sabotaged you in key moments of your life...like, the night before an important assignment was due at school, she ripped it up and burned it the moment you finished it, or maybe she, I dunno, she would take gifts you got for holidays and stomp on them and break them ...all sorts of shit... and no one ever believed you. Your parnts always loved the little bitch way more than you, get it? And so..in the beginning of the movie, right, you'll be shown as this modest woman, and you live far from the city, cause the sister, she's gonna live in New York City, naturally, and it will show, in the beginning, how you go through this huge transformation process...all the lipstick, buying some cheap but extravagant Ivanka Trump type dresses, putting on fuckin' wigs...earrings...pearl necklaces...everything. It will be a tale of both intense transformation and also empowerment... and of course after you get the hot husband from her and ruin her life you will dump him pronto.... could even be a sequel, LOL!"

See? I really got into that third one for whatever reason, maybe because I was imagining it as a sort of Madonna/Monica Bellucci role (I had been showing her Monica Belluci pictures all yest. evening) but Rebecca... she didn't seem too hot for it. Rebecca was more focused and asking questions about the first one, dealing with the mother of four kids, which is not too surprising of course...considering, in reality, yes, Rebecca is a 28 year old mother of three kids (from three different and equally troubled men, one of whom is about to head back to prison as we speak, towards summers end). Anyways....she wanted to know what happened at the end of the first one, since, if you'll recall, I had left that open ended and up to her imagination.  So I came up with a bit of a spin on it and gave her an ending that she quite enjoyed:

The new man is going to be turned into a successful black man, just to add more fuel to the dramatic fire, and the ending is going to be that the White Nationalist ex husband dude, once he breaks outta prison (as you'll remember he does)...he is going to come after him, of course, and unfortunately, he *is* going to succeed in killing him, and taking him away from Rebecca. But! Then, what will happen next is that Rebecca will do a revenge killing of the ex (let's say she knifes him through the throat or blows his head off with a pistol or both) and..... what? Well, from there, I guess, she will escape with her four  kids to the Caribbean, unscathed. Or, of course, we could leave it all open to a sequel , and that sequel could be some sort of examination of the Criminal justice system (especially the Wisconsin criminal justice system) and we could turn the second film into some sort of thing where the racist white jury - surprise surprise - won't want to let Rebecca off the hook since, you know, she killed a white boy *for* a black man. This of course would take us into a whole other sphere of wacky and wild and controversial territory that I am not sure anyone would be able to accurately walk....

There you have it, though. A pretty fun game no? I'll have to see if Rebecca will play it again with me some day. And to think do you know what the entire conversation starter was originaly? You won't believe me; but it was the fact that I had woken up th other morning and I had remembered having a dream about Rebecca where I saw her in what seemed like a pornography film..... she was sitting on some guys lap kissing him and .....

My eyes roll in the back of my head as I imagine the bliss .......

SIGNING OFF -