Venice: Meantime, already we’re on to the follow-up. We’re going theory to application. Next sequence, domestication of the zombie. Put ’em to work.
Silver Lake: Remember, our Rappaccini’s Daughter, she stopped her attacker with an herbal goofer. An antidote like that, you understand, we don’t have to mess with needles? To get up close and pin them down and then inoculate?
Venice: We don’t need some ex-wrestler pinning the zombies down. Our concept, it’s wrestler-free. We’re about a spray. A spray, and just listen to our visual.
Silver Lake: Yes, listen, we begin in an alley perhaps. A confined area, anyway—you picking up on how much room we leave for the director? You getting how much discretion he has, the backdrops, the choreography?
Venice: Could be an alley, or it could be, think about this, a movie theater. Think about going meta here.
Silver Lake: You picking up on the possibilities, the director could even go meta, screen a commentary on the folks before the screen…
Venice: Anyway it’s a small space, confined area, and in there we’ve got our inoculation crew. Them, they’ve got the food set up. Crayfish, hot dogs, melon balls, cheese and crackers…. Actually, there’s an argument to be made for pizza.
Silver Lake: Isn’t there an opportunity in pizza? It’s an eye-catcher to begin with, maybe a visual pun—all that red sauce? But additionally one thinks of Italy. Couldn’t Southern Italy work as well as, say, Old New Orleans? Places like that, don’t they share the interracial conflation, the trans-oceanic interpenetration? Plus we like the possibility of going huge in Europe.
Venice: Your call, of course. Unions, distribution, the price of a limo round-trip, you know better than we do. What we know is, if we do Italy and pizza, then for the fight in the girl’s greenhouse, before she hits him with the dose, we have to figure out something. We have to figure out how she ordered pizza in the middle of the zombie apocalypse.
Silver Lake: But isn’t that our true calling? Isn’t that why you invited us, to think of something, to rub these antiques till a genie pops out? Don’t we want to be the first living-dead movie to break huge in Europe?
Venice: It’s weird how zombies never took off in Europe. I mean, they went for Avatar. In Avatar, you’ve got a crip who marries a cartoon. You ask us, that’s not so different from a zombie who marries a brainiac.
Silver Lake: Isn’t there a certain interpenetration? And wouldn’t it just eat the screen, no less, if for the next sequence we went to a medieval hill town? Cobblestones, crooked alley, and there’s our inoculation crew.
Venice: The pizzas are delivered, the boxes are opened. Picnic tables, maybe.
Silver Lake: Then there’s the human bait, a track star, a lot of skin showing. And isn’t she making a spectacle of herself? The way she keeps jogging around the piazza, chanting and sweating and spitting on the cobblestones, what self-respecting zombie could fail to notice?
Venice: They notice. They start coming. There’s a wailing and a gnashing of teeth. But the jogger toddles calmly into the alley.
Silver Lake: When has anyone seen a sequence like this? A horde of the undead clamber into the alley, ravenous, merciless, and why don’t the living in their path get a move on, why are they just standing there, fresh-faced, perhaps with a hint of a sneer—and what, what is that they’re swinging up into action before them? What, bottles of spray, really?
Venice: They spray the baddies. The baddies fall on the pizza.
Silver Lake: When’ve you seen anything like it? When’s the last time anyone came into your office and actually took you by surprise? But our metamorphoses, they’re barely past the so-called first reel, and we’ve got tame zombies.
Venice: We’ve got Ghouls Gone Mild.
Silver Lake: And aren’t the ambulatories still in one piece? Can’t they still hoist and carry and put away? We’ve created a new labor force!
Venice: We domesticate ’em and put ’em to work.
Silver Lake: Can you see it, no exposition necessary, just one slow pan after another? Provocative color saturation? The zombies tote baskets down the rows of a vineyard. They truck carts along the aisles of the Amazon.com warehouse. They yank the levers on the molds for hard-rubber dog toys. Then there’s children’s toys—you wonder about those, perhaps?
Venice: Children’s toys would need living workers. Quality control.
Silver Lake: See how our inspiration brings up one promising fillip after another? See how it keeps opening, unfolding, showing fresh colors? Let a hundred flowers bloom!
Venice: Our zombies need training too, basic training. A young woman with placards and the uglies in rows before her, groaning in unison.
Silver Lake: You wouldn’t have much of a workforce without language, some rudiments of language, would you? Words of single syllables, gestures no one could confuse, doesn’t our brainstorm have room for them all? And yet it never leaves the arc. Have you forgotten we’ve got a dynamic in place? The girl saves the guy, girl of color, guy in mortician’s makeup. And, as a person of color, can’t you imagine her conflicts?
Venice: She’s got a hairball of conflicts. Grody dimensions, and it doesn’t matter if she’s Sicilian or Creole.
Silver Lake: Imagine, the camera pans across the zombie in her greenhouse, he’s harmless now, he’s a worker bee who can’t even fly…
Venice: He can’t fly, certainly can’t sting, and the camera pans over him, sprinkling the manure or something, and then moves up to that photo over the desk of our Supergirl, or better yet a set of photos. Others of the family, all in sepia. Sepia photo stock, sepia subjects. Her ancestors look whipped, as if without that hoe in their hands they couldn’t even stand upright.
Silver Lake: But mostly there’s the grandmother—some sort of leader, isn’t she? Every shot she’s in, isn’t there some sign of deference, the eyes lowered or the cap pulled off? Photos like these, that’s the fun part, a fun project for the people in design.
Venice: Grandma’s some sort of leader, yeah. But she’s just a pair of arms like the rest of ’em, toting a kettle and wearing burlap.
Silver Lake: And is that a brand on the old woman’s wrist? Our heroine, our girl with all the degrees, could she come of slave stock? She’s a regular Georgina Washington Carver, on a fast track for the Nobel, that’s in both Chemistry and Peace—and my God, what has she done, if not create another slave race?
Venice: A hairball of ferocious dimensions. She’d never have saved the world if she’d known it meant tearing out her roots.
Silver Lake: See how our vision can modulate? See how we take time for character? The pace has been breakneck and everyone can use a sequence in a lower gear, while our girl perhaps poles a raft into the bayou, Cajun country…
Venice: Or maybe she’ll head for one of those Italian waddyacall’m. The elf-huts they’ve got there, the turrets with a beanie hat.