September 7, 2006

Tao Jones

Before he took off for a colder climate down under, the talented Mr. Records shared with this great idea for a TV show. He said I could blog it, so here it is, with some suggestions and elaborations from me.

Title: Tao Jones

Pitch: Kung Fu meets Wall Street

or,

"A 21st Century Charlie Chan with a young white guy playing the lead."

Summary: A handsome, cynical, abrasive, hyperactive high-powered Wall Street businessman experiences a personal crisis of some kind which inspires him to turn to Eastern Philosophies and become a hero.

Maybe he takes a business trip to China to visit some of his sweatshops. While he's there, his wife and son die in a car crash back in the states which leads him to look on life -- and the children laboring in his factories -- differently. He studies long and hard with a bunch of monks or whatever people who study the Tao are called. I definitely see this part as a montage, ideally heavy on the martial arts -- are swords and stuff part of the Tao?

He comes back to the states a changed man, and a problem solver. Still fabulously wealthy, he now uses his money to help underprivileged children, his strength to defeat evil, and his wisdom to solve crimes. The while time he randomly quotes Lao Tzu, saying things like: "Ruling a nation is like frying a small fish" or "Once mature, a person prefers substance to appearance, fruit to flowers."

The rest of it would just write itself.

Brilliant, right??

Thanks, Shawn!

Posted by mary at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)

March 3, 2006

Snakes on a Plane!

Everyone is talking about the exciting new Samuel Jackson + snakes vehicle, Snakes on a Plane, and personally, I can't wait! (It looks like it comes out the day after my birthday.)

I think it's a great idea because:

1) The title, pitch and plot are exactly the same.

2) I can imagine awesome sequels combining two or more phobias, e.g.,:

I look forward to wonderful things from Sean Guttierez (perhaps, if we are lucky, a follow up to She Creature?)

Posted by mary at 10:00 AM | Comments (1)

October 31, 2005

Time Travel Commerce

I had this idea the other night when I was very sleepy -- maybe someone was channeling to me from the future in my vulnerable state.

In the future, everyone will have even more stuff than they do now. And some of it will be a lot nicer than the stuff we have now. Still, we will have stuff that they covet, just like us and the 19th century.

I predict that time travel on a regular basis will start with objects and trade, not people. People from the future will send us their used robots, ray guns, their off-brand elixirs of youth, and even though by their standards those things will be old, worn out, or close to the expiration date, for us, it will be great! We will welcome their gifts. But in exchange, they might ask us to send them the things that they no longer have, or think are cool in some kind of ironic or antiquarian sense, like our iPods or our Taco Bell wrappers. Hopefully it will be the Taco Bell wrappers they want, although an iPod for a ray gun would be a pretty fair exchange. Eventually this gifting will become a regular exchange, trade, and commerce.

Goodwill Industries might end up on the forefront of time travel. Maybe a time travel machine will be invented by one of their temp employees, thought to be mentally handicapped by everyone else, but actually a genius of such awesome powers that we don't even recognize his or her form of intelligence -- some kind of super- Aspergers. He or she will use old bits of computers, clothing, and Little Debbie Snackcakes to fashion a time travel device. And maybe it will only work for objects. And then Goodwill Industries will steal the idea from their employee, or insist that it’s their intellectual property because it was done while the Aspergers-time-travel genius was on the clock (Goodwill will definitely be a villain in the future).

And we will be able to go back in time to get things from the past, too. Collectors will love it. Ebay will install a time-travel plug in. But then the market for everything will collapse, and we will be stuck in some kind of timeless free-market dystopia.

This is sounding more like a screen play than an idea, so that's what I'll call it.

With respects to Online Time Travel Pharmacy.

Posted by mary at 1:57 PM | Comments (0)

July 31, 2003

Mary and Chris's Great Idea for a Porno: "Patent Porn"

The premise of the porno would be that an evil mega-corporation (a thinly disguised Microsoft) was patenting all the sexual positions so that people would have to pay them a royalty every time they used them. This nefarios plot would be resisted by a band of freedom loving revolutionaries, who would be attempting to document prior art to fight the power. The film would follow their efforts: Documenting prior art in video taped sessions; demonstrations and protests on the street; research in the evil corporations scary sex labs and clinics. The film would climax (unavoidable entendre) with an extended courtroom scene in which a stern, dominant judge would watch while witnesses for the defense and prosecution demonstrated what they meant. Videos would be shown. The jury would get into the action somehow. The attorneys for the defense (the mega corp) would be all evil and stern.

This is in response to the whole hullaballoo around rampant indiscriminate patent-issueing by the patent office.

Posted by mary at 10:34 AM | Comments (1)