Venice: For zombies everywhere.
Silver Lake: She’s the center of our dynamic, the one who saves the guy and saves the world and does the explaining—at least until our big Reveal. You realize she’s got to be some kind of scientist? A rare interdisciplinary specialist?
Venice: She’s got chemistry, she’s got botany, and, this is important, she’s the only person in the world with a doctorate in the undead.
Silver Lake: With a woman like that, don’t you see, it’s best if we go darker? Latino, mixed race, always tossing her hair? It’s best to add that layer.
Venice: Dead or alive, her and her guy come from different tribes. And then, You may kiss the bride! It’s almost an art film. It’s Juliet, wherefore art…?
Silver Lake: Because isn’t she the fresh-faced Creole kid, or something, the one who saves the world? The one with, so to speak, a head on her shoulders? Hehhehhehhehhehheh.
Venice: Ha-ha, ha-ha. We know what it’s like for you, listening all day to this stuff. But listen to this. Next sequence, we take a big big bounce.
Silver Lake: When you open on a wedding, ask yourself, where’s the last place you’d expect to go next? How about the apocalypse? We flash back.
Venice: Flashback to the apocalypse! Zombies on the march!
Silver Lake: What’s the last thing you’d expect, just, just as he’s about to kiss the bride?
Venice: As for just how far we flash back, hm. Maybe a couple of years. We think a couple of years, but that’s your call. That’s you and the test audience.
Silver Lake: Any audience, they’ll never have seen anything like it, one moment he’s about to kiss the bride, and the next, what is this, the essence of Meet Angry? The very avatar of Meet Angry? We flash back, and he’s trying to eat her alive, she’s trying to chop his head off.
Venice: Certainly no more than a couple of years back. Come the wedding, she’s still got to be young and cute.
Silver Lake: She’s going for his head, maybe she’s got a hatchet, how’s that for Angry?
Venice: The visual, it’s eye-popping, ha-ha, ha-ha.
Silver Lake: Hehhehhehhehhehheh. But while these two are trying to kill each other, that’s a major challenge for the exposition, isn’t it? The backstory? Just imagine what our girl might have in her hand. Is it a hatchet, a pair of clippers, a letter opener? Whatever weapon she’s brandishing, plus the way she using it, these have tell us something.
Venice: Thing is, we’re in her greenhouse lab. Flashback to workspace, with ferns and Petri dishes. Degrees on the wall, chemistry and botany both. Plus this very weird doctorate in the undead. That’s important, and also we need an old photo or two. Sepia tones, a hut, a kettle, Grandma or Great-Grandma.
Silver Lake: Aren’t they both dark, the girl, the grandma? See how we cast the shadow of the exotic, even when we’ve got a scientist in her lab, working through lunch? Oh, and that’s important, she’s working through lunch.
Venice: It’s all important. It’s nothing you’d expect. Our girl’s exotic and educated. Nothing like you saw the last time you sat through zombie love.
Silver Lake: We know what it’s like for you, always remembering the last movie like the latest movie, putting the one up against the other.
Venice: But ours is nothing like the other. We sat through that last movie with zombie love too. Nice enough. Nice, but I already saw American Graffiti.
Silver Lake: We know what you need—there’s no dream unless it’s a new dream, and zombie love was last year. But when have you ever seen a lover like our Delta Lady? Exotic and educated and dedicated?
Venice: Working through lunch on her trial prescription.
Silver Lake: Working on a vaccine to save the world. It could be extract of Lil’ John the Conqueroo. It could be out of Grandma’s kettle.
Venice: Turbo-nutrients of Mojo Hand, could be, and then, once the zombie breaks in…. Oh, and don’t forget just which zombie. Don’t forget he’s the future groom. We’ll have an establishing shot.
Silver Lake: We’ll have a recording device too. She makes notes while she’s working, she does our explaining, because otherwise, honestly, who could keep up with the changes? How many times have you seen a sequence where, honestly, you don’t know what’s going to happen? Our girl doesn’t fail to notice he’s cute, either—she makes a note. But meanwhile he’s trying to sink his teeth into her jugular!
Venice: In one hand she brings up the hatchet or the blade, and in the other she’s got her lab-tested Eye of Newt.
Silver Lake: A visual dialectic, right there, psychedelic as well as dialectic. And did you forget she’s at lunch? When our boy broke in, we were thinking, she’d be working on a platter of crayfish.
Venice: They eat the screen, crayfish. Plus, think of the fight choreography. Nobody can fail to notice this guy’s cute. Trim, buff, and he’s had the undertaker’s facial besides, the kind of blush-on MJ used in “Thriller.”
Silver Lake: “Thriller” could be useful in the choreography. The music wouldn’t work, and not just because of the estate, what they’d ask for permissions. They’d ask the moon and the price of a limo round-trip—but artistically, aren’t we in a different place?
Venice: Our concept and arc, they line up better with piano and strings. Especially after the girl throws the dust in his face.
Silver Lake: You see the beauty of it, the Lady or the Tiger, one hand full of death and the other full of cure? See the hesitation? A hesitation, and then she heaves the dust right in his face, Krakatoa!
Venice: We can go more FX or less. That’s your call.
Silver Lake: Tea leaves, ashes, glints of mica.
Venice: She throws it, he snorts it, and boom, he falls on the crayfish.
Silver Lake: When’s the last time you saw such a sequence? When you really didn’t know? There’s the hesitation, the inoculation, and he falls on the crayfish.
Venice: He wants the fish. The dead fish, not the living flesh. A change of diet, think about it. Think about the consequences.
Silver Lake: A paradigm shift throughout the totality of the zombie narrative.
Venice: We domesticate ’em. Their diet changes and everything changes.
Silver Lake: Have you ever seen anything like it? A sequence that sets you asking—what, already? Already the world is saved?
Venice: I mean, it’s still only the first reel!
Silver Lake: Ah, “the first reel,” a lovely anachronism.
Venice: I mean, just look at us move. A zombie wedding and then a fight tooth and nail, then we save the world and set up a mystery.
Silver Lake: A brace of mysteries. One, up in the old brown photo, doesn’t that seem like someone we ought to know? And two, what was our world-saver thinking, when she went for that third Ph.D.?