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Based on the True Story of Steven Seagal

A few years back, I worked for a well-known tech company that I’ve taken, in writing, to calling Motorama. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist figure out the actual company, but it may take a rocket scientist to think of Googling “Motorama” in search of embittered ex-employees giving fake names to everyone and everything around them. I worked in their super-secret contracts department and, in fact, had to sign a non-disclosure agreement stating I would not discuss any of their state or federal contracts. Consequently, it’s difficult to discuss the screenplay idea it gave me.

I’ll only say this: thanks to loopholes in the contract provisions, I discovered an easy method of embezzling from the company. Well, not easy, but easy enough. With so little oversight, all you really had to do was falsify some invoices, and Motorama would pay out. Because you know what they did with invoices, for accountability purposes? Threw them away. I hope that doesn’t violate the agreement. There’s a more complicated part of the scheme that I won’t discuss, but needless to say it gave me a screenplay idea that never got off the ground. Why? Because there’s no story.

Actually, there is a story, but it was, like, half Normal Life (an exceptional and underrated movie if you haven’t seen it) and half Bananas: with the help of a custodian (who gets a cut), a disillusioned office worker starts embezzling to keep his wife happy; somebody discovers the scheme and has to be taken care of, and when too many people start asking questions about that, he ends up gunning down the whole office and fleeing the country with the help of a drug cartel the janitor’s brother runs. Yes, it’s a comedy full of embezzlement, murder, and drug cartels. Party! Anyway, he flees the U.S. and inadvertently becomes a propped-up dictator in a small Central American country and prevent a plot against his own life. (The idea came from something I read where a drug cartel in a small Mexican city staged a mayoral election, had him win on a landslide with a campaign promising benevolent leadership, then had him be the most incompetent, useless mayor in history — and so, when the cartel had him killed, citizens cheered and gladly elected one of the top lieutenants to run the town. It’s been so long, I honestly can’t remember if that came from a short story or a factual account. So I guess that means I would have been ripping off three things.)

Eventually, the idea changed to an Nigerian custodian and village. There is no global problem that’s funnier to me than Nigerian 419 scams. Both the instigators and the victims make me laugh endlessly; I even recorded an awful novelty song about them. As even more time passed, I dropped the office worker angle and thought it would be more fun to satirize the recent spate of “African issues” movies like Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond, and The Last King of Scotland.

Before people get accusatory, this couldn’t have less to do with race. Every time I hear stories coming out of Africa, I feel a little bit ill — and feel blinding lily-white guilt over the fact that European whites fucked up that continent to begin with. Fuck you, David Livingstone and Otto von Bismarck! This has more to do with my hatred of the inept Hollywood belief that making a movie, even a well-made one, will solve anything. Usually, the just reduce complex struggles to the simplest cause-and-effect patterns imaginable, leaving audiences wondering why it’s so difficult to solve the problems. If they made more movies about disenfranchised whites inflicted with the horrors of genocide, I’d gladly mock them. In fact, I’ve read a half-dozen scripts attempting to deal with the problems in Chechnya — if this becomes a genre of political film, it’s next on my list. To sum up: I just like to mock and offend; I don’t care about the target.

Also, wait until you see the revised character! As before, he’s the kind of guy who would willfully shoot up a largely innocent bunch of people to save his own ass. He comes to Nigeria after getting screwed over by a 419 scam — he’s after the man who stole his money and has no interest in anything else. He gets swept up in the social struggles and politics, but the entire time he’s mostly whining because he doesn’t have his money. I didn’t really have much more of a plot than that…

…until now.

As I mentioned yesterday, I binge-watched the following Seagal movies over the past couple of days: Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, Out for Justice, Under Siege, and On Deadly Ground. I have a half-dozen other Seagal movies lined up, and if you’re wondering what the fuck, I’ll let you know I have to review a book on Seagal coming out on May 20th, and it occurred to me that I haven’t seen any of his movies since they stopped being played every other day on HBO. On top of that, the only Seagal movie I’ve seen more than once is the first Under Siege. Since a great deal of the book involves first plot summary and then in-depth analysis, it occurred to me that I should refresh my memory so I can assess whether or not the half-assed Ain’t It Cool News writer who authored the book does them justice.

I was originally just going to watch a smattering of Seagal, but something amazing happened as I watched Hard to Kill: I started to love Steven Seagal. Back in the olden days, I didn’t think much of him as either an actor or an action hero, but time has passed, I’ve seen a shitload more action movies, and it’s pretty amazing how…different his movies are. What could be rote, indifferently made martial-arts schlock actually has artistic aims and a political conscience. Obviously, it’s problematic when Seagal’s characters solve every political problem by beating the shit out of people and, more often than not, murdering them with weapons they tried to kill him with. It’s an effective short-term solution, but not much more.

I can’t say enough about the surprise and enjoyment derived from these movies. He’s a better fighter than Van Damme, he has Stallone’s take-charge (uncredited) writer-producer-star attitude and a much more cynical political outlook, he wasn’t a comical ‘roid rage case like Stallone Schwarzenegger (in fact, his pudginess gives him a surprising “everyman” quality, even though he took potshots for it both then and now), he has the charm and wit of Bruce Willis, and — dare I say it? — by the time he hit Out for Justice…he could actually sorta act, which puts him above most of his action-movie contemporaries. I’m not saying he’s Oscar material (then again, maybe he is), but what impressed me is the evolution of his chops over the course of these movies, as well as surprising but rewarding choices (like his anguished delivery of the line “I’m taking you to the bank…the blood bank…” in Hard to Kill).

Seagal’s fixation on the Mafia, Catholicism, CIA corruption, and the late-’80s/early-’90s urban drug culture (and later, the environment) fills his movie with such vivid characters and labyrinthine plots, they barely qualify as action movies. Of course, the plots get thinner and the action gets more emphasis as the movies go on, but it’s very clear from the outset that Seagal — operating as a producer and a mostly uncredited writer — has a peculiar worldview that he’s expressing with these movies. I admire him for that.

You might be wondering why I’ve slipped into Seagal worshipping. The answer’s pretty simple: I found both the plot and the padding for this movie — the untapped goldmine of social-relevance action movies, combined with the “African issues” movies, made a storyline crystallize. I won’t divulge it, but let’s just say it won’t be terribly difficult to piece together if you watch a couple of classic Seagal movies and notice the similarities in story and theme.

The ultimate goal, when I finally start work on it, is to have something that operates both as satire and as a straight action movie — in true Seagal fashion, forcing the audience to contemplate the deep corruption in African politics and the desperation that leads to the exploitation of greedy Americans (who, elderly or not, kinda deserve what they get). To sum up, it’ll basically be the scene in The Gods Must Be Crazy where the militants chase the anthropologist in fast-motion, stretched out over two hours.

Posted by Stan on April 8, 2008 10:30 PM  | Permalink | Career-Based Rambling | Digg It