Nurse the Hate: My New Hollywood Franchise Idea

 

I was speaking with my associate Robert Lanphier yesterday about the huge market potential of a series of novels we need to write this weekend.  The basic idea is rock solid.  They are about a crime solving pair of detectives named Pennington and Chadwick that spend 100% of their time solving crimes on “The Moors”.  While many will suggest that the modern world has little interest in tedious, yet predictable crime novels written in an 19^th Century style, I would suggest to you that these critics have little grasp of the potential of a “Pennington and Chadwick” franchise.  I see novels, then films, action figures, and a rock solid Hollywood franchise.  I think that this idea is a monster, and as such will result in financial independence beyond our wildest dreams.

For those of you somehow not well versed in “the moors”, Moorland, generally means uncultivated English hill land, but also includes low-lying wetlands such as Sedgemoor, home of the best meat pies on the whole damn island.  (I made that up.  I have no idea of the quality or lack thereof of a typical Sedgemoor meat pie.)  In every mention I have ever seen of The Moors in literature or film, terrible things happen to anyone that wanders out alone.  American Werewolf In London, the Moors Murders of children in the 1960s, or even the writing of Emily Bronte focus on the overall bleak aspect of the topography.  Not once has anyone ever said, “Let’s stay safe tonight and camp on The Moors!”.  I believe, as does my associate, both of us without any firsthand knowledge, that a night spent on the Moors will result in a 100% guarantee of either a hatchet to the head or being ripped apart by mythic beasts. 

It’s sort of like the woods in America in the 1980s.  All slasher films have taught us that any time spent alone in the woods can only result in being chased by a maniac.  Also, if one is foolish enough to attempt intercourse in the woods, that will result in certain grisly death.  As far as I know, all sex in the woods involving teenagers has ended in the male’s bloody corpse on top of the screaming female for one final look at her exposed breasts before her own gruesome death at the hand of a deranged murderer.  I can’t recall for certain, but I believe the entire homecoming court from my high school was chopped into bits near a lake on prom night, though admittedly that might have been a film I watched and have now confused with reality.  Regardless, the woods are America’s version of The Moors but with much less superstition.

The Moors is all about small villages set in bleak landscapes that have one pub where the skittish townspeople gather.  The pub must have a name like “The Bleeding Lamb” or “The One-Eyed Raven”.  The residents gather in the pub, sip pints, play darts, and patiently wait for a stranger to enter.  Even though this pub is the only open business in the little village, everyone in the pub is shocked when a traveler sets foot inside.  As soon as the traveler comes inside to an icy welcome, the townspeople will refuse to warn the traveler of the dangers of The Moors until pushed to the brink when the traveler announces something like “Think I’ll grab a picnic basket and have a nice snack out on the Moors!”.  At this point the eldest patron of the pub will angrily shout a warning.  “You go out to The Moors, what’s left of ye will come back in a box!”  This will be the setting of every single Pennington and Chadwick novel.     

The Pennington and Chadwick books will be wildly successful, likely much more successful than the Harry Potter series, because we will tap into this primal fear of the moors.  The real joy will be from the predictability.  Like a Scooby Doo mystery, each lengthy novel will set up a terrible crime seeped in savage intrigue.  “My God Pennington!  Have you read the papers?  There has been murder!  A man has been torn limb from limb in The Moors not a half day’s walk from Thornton-le-Dale.”  Chadwick.  Fetch Timmons to ready the horses.  Only the Devil himself could have done such a deed.  To Thorton-le-Dale!  Let us make haste!

Of course, when Pennington and Chadwick get there, they discover that small creepy village pub where all future character interaction takes place.  It will be the same basic cast every time in the same exact setting.  We will just change out a detail or two.  There is a strong working-class woman that runs the pub.  There is a wise old retired man that seems to know all, but offers nothing but riddles to Pennington.  An angry laborer seems suspicious, but of course he is hiding a heart of gold.  A young teenage girl that helps in the kitchen promises a clue, but is horribly killed in The Moors right before her rendezvous with Pennington.  Chadwick gives his usual line.  “My God, what kind of monster could do such a thing?”  Pennington surveys the body, stares off in the distance and says what he always says.  “Not monster Chadwick.  Not monster… but a man!  What man could do such a thing?” 

The clues all lead nowhere.  When all seems lost, an old drunk will pull Pennington aside and offer up the tip that the local handyman was seen leaving the pub moments before the girl’s murder.  The local policeman tries to shut the drunk up.  This bungling yet confrontational constable will offer no help to our outsider detectives until the moment of truth in the final act.  All the principal parties find themselves on The Moors at night in the fog.  Chadwick holds the flickering lantern.  There is movement just out of reach from the glow of the light.  The Beast moves to attack our helpless heroes in the fog.  “Steady Chadwick!  Steady!” says the ever-cool Pennington.  In the moment of truth, the constable shoots The Beast.  Pennington moves in to study the corpse of this horrible creature.  Only then is it revealed that The Beast is nothing more than the handyman in an elaborate costume.  “Chadwick!  This was no beast from hell’s very depths!  This is a man!  The handyman in fact!”  Chadwick, stunned from his near death yet still speaks up.  “Pennington!  How did you know?”   For no apparent reason whatsoever, the woman at the pub appears and confesses to everything in detail, how she designed the costume and conceived a convoluted plan to swindle property from the prominent local widow.   The plan won’t make a lot of sense but we’ll hope that the reader is so confused by our prose that they won’t notice.  “Constable, lead this woman away!”  Pennington and Chadwick return to their comfortable London home to sip brandy and wrap up the case.

In an effort to appeal to today’s marketplace, we will “drop” all 12 volumes of the novels at once so The Kids can “binge” them.  Sure, there might be some hesitancy in providing my associate and I the $5 million advance to write 12 impenetrable novels written in a flowery antiquated style, each story being an almost exact duplicate of the last.  (Hey, how does this sound?  “Pennington, how did you know that The Goat Man was not a beast from Hades itself but only a chimney sweep?”  Yeah, that’s good enough.)  Yet, I am certain that someone right now at Warner Brothers or Disney is ready to green-light this franchise that is all but guaranteed to make Star Wars and Harry Potter look like fucking jokes.  The future of entertainment is here.  What is old has become new again.  Welcome back to laborious reading.  Welcome back to The Moors.       

Nurse the Hate: My Mortals Scheme

 

Well, we finally have a show in a couple of weeks.  It has been so long since I have played a show, 13 months and counting, that I am not 100% sure how to do it.  My fear is that I will come off like some guy at a wedding that had a high school band with the wedding party two decades ago.  “C’mon!  You guys play one!”  I awkwardly climb on stage in an ill-fitting plaid suit coat and try to sing as the band struggles through “Brown Eyed Girl”.  The assembled crowd feels embarrassed for me as I die a hundred deaths as I sing that “tra-al-la-la-la” part off-key.  Later a drunk comes up to me and puts his arm on my shoulder in unearned intimacy.  “You guys didn’t suck as bad as people are saying.  You guys think about getting back together?”  He stares at me expectedly slurping on his Coors Light.   

I wince as I think about not remembering how to handle the time on stage when I am not singing.  That’s the hardest part of being a singer, much harder than hitting the actual notes.  What do you do with your hands when the guitar player decides to take a second solo?  You ever see those rap shows?  None of those guys knows what the fuck to do when they aren’t yelling in the mic.  It’s been over a year since I tried to come up with stupid shit to do when I’m not required to do anything.  I can practice I suppose, but it would be very embarrassing to get spotted doing exaggerated Elvis moves in front of a mirror.  I am going to have to rely on muscle memory.

I was thinking about this gig coming up with The Mortals.  We haven’t played with those guys since probably 1996.  I have seen photos circulating around a manuscript being written about Estrus Records and The Great Garage Rock Gold Rush of the mid 90s-early 2000s.  See above.  That's me in 1994 watching Jack O Fire.  I seem to recall being an established adult male in the mid 1990s, but photos are presenting a group of very young guys that maybe weren’t as cool as they thought they were at the time.  It is very odd to be on the fringes of a scene that is having a book written about it.  It must be how members of the Voidoids feel about the CBGBs days.  A book about the 1990s underground garage rock scene.  Huh.  We were just excited that some other dipshits had the same ideas about what cool music sounded like as we did.  It was a fun time to play music with an honest to God scene that swirled around it.  We were always a bit on the outside looking in, but we knew the guys at “the cool lunch table” and were invited to the same parties.    

Here we are today.  It’s all the same guys in The Mortals as in the mid 90s.  It’s incredible that so much time has passed and we are all still doing the same stupid shit to essentially amuse ourselves and a small group of enthusiastic believers.  The Mortals are without one key member though, Steve the Tongue, their lead singer.  Steve was a wonderfully eccentric guy in a band of other sweet eccentric guys.  He came back to do a reunion gig but spun out again after the rest of the guys decided to keep at it.  Steve had some 1971 Elvis in his presentation.  If you steal, steal from the best.  I do the same thing.  It will be odd to see the band onstage without Steve, but early online reports are that it is working.

It hit me that there is a real opportunity here.  Much like Van Halen and their ill-advised venture with singer Gary Cherone, we should purposely make an awful record with me fronting The Mortals called “Mortals III”.  Sure, it’s a tough break for those guys to have missed a big cash cow like touring with a Sammie Hagar type singer, in our low budget rock world, perhaps someone like Evan Dando or the guy from Reigning Sound.  Let’s just agree that they missed their sports arena touring days strictly because of bad timing on their lengthy break.  Now, they’re back!  And what do they need?  A terrible record with a shitty new lead singer (ME!) to remind people how much they loved the old band.   Stay with me here.  I changed only a few key details from a Van Halen 3 review I found online, and as you can see it fits like a glove.

The "III" in the title of Mortals III refers to the unveiling of the third incarnation of The Mortals, the post-Steve the Tongue lineup featuring former Whiskey Daredevils vocalist Greg Miller as lead singer. According to the party line, The Mortals ditched Steve the Tongue because they wanted to try new musical and lyrical approaches that The Tongue was reluctant to pursue. And it is true that Mortals III makes a slight break from The Mortals dunderheaded party rock, but that's a difference that only hardcore fans will be able to hear. Less tired but no more inspired than Bulletproof, Mortals III suffers from the same problems as Miller-era Whiskey Daredevils -- limp riffs, weak melodies, and plodding, colorless rhythms. On top of that, there are layers of pretensions, from portentous lyrics to segmented song structures that don't sound all that different from "Trucker Bomb".  That would be a shame if Bill Grapes had a clear idea of where he wanted to take the band, but he seems content to wallow in the big arena rock he has long since exhausted, churning out faceless riffs and technically proficient guitar solos that never expand the vocabulary he established 20 years ago. Mortals III may showcase a new version of The Mortals, but that doesn't make it a new beginning.

This, of course, creates a scenario where they have to go crawling back to Steve, cave into some absurd demands he makes up on the spot because HE CAN, and unhappily go back out on the road not wanting to be there in the first place.  I like the idea of those guys traveling in two separate vans, everyone pissed off and no one excited about playing songs from 1992s “Ritual of Sound”.  It’s how all rock and roll stories end anyway.  Guys that were thrown together by circumstance and chance while in their 20s are shackled together in their 50s to play soulless sets at Street Fairs and Package Tours.  Fuck yes!  It’s like Weezer without the hits.  All I have to do is help write 10 shitty songs (which I can do in my sleep) and go on a painful Mortals III tour where everyone hates me.  After being mercifully cast off, I can enjoy watching footage on my iPad of a sullen Mortals performance on a socially distant side stage at Bonaroo 2023. 

We all need dreams.

Nurse the Hate: New Unprecedented Times

 

I was standing in line at the bank.  Two customers were ahead of me.  I normally avoid going in the bank at all costs, but I had foolishly entered into a relationship with this bank to save .15% on a mortgage refinance.  They offer no digital options, apps, or technology that began after 1971.  There is a particular smell to the bank, one I equate with childhood, a combination of industrial cleaners, dust, and old carpet.  It smells like every institutional building I dutifully walked into with my mother from age 3-12.  A sinus headache begins to develop after 30 seconds after entry.  My eye sockets have a slight ache.  A broken wall clock mocks the workers, trapped in a perpetual 1:10pm forever. 

A small sign, held up by scotch tape, reads “During this unprecedented time, we ask you to please wear a mask when in this building”.  I shifted my weight to my other foot.  There is no indication either teller will be free soon.  The phrase “unprecedented time” is the default out-clause for the last 15 months to excuse anything.  Things have been shut down to varying degrees for a year.  There is clearly a “precedent” for what is going on.  I think of bringing this to the attention of one of the tellers when I finally get to the counter.

“Excuse me.  This sign which you have thoughtfully printed out and taped to the wall notes that we are in an unprecedented time.  I ask you, as we have been doing this for over a year, isn’t that precedent enough?  I would have to think that after a couple of months we all had the swing of things regarding these fabric masks and “clean” pens which you have thoughtfully placed in this plastic Cleveland Indians cup for customer’s use.   I also think that the 2009 H1N1 epidemic, the H3N2 epidemic of 1968 when this office was last decorated, or maybe even the Spanish Flu of 1918 was a “precedent”, don’t you think?  Well?  Don’t you?  It’s not like a fucking spaceship landed.  There is a “precedent” here!  Do we really need that sign up?  Can you change it to say “During this PRECEDENTED TIME”???”

I’ll be honest.  I don’t think that would go well.  Most of the worker drones at this bank have dead eyes like a sand shark.  Their spirits died a decade ago and now they are waiting for the empty husks of their bodies to catch up.  The last thing they want is an existential argument with some unshaven kook waving a deposit check around like Neville Chamberlain.  “Unprecedented times” is a way to say “I’m tired of trying so don’t even try to call me out”.  I spied a calendar in the cubicle of one of the masked worker drones.  The calendar is cruel.  Time moves on but nothing changes.  A small postcard is held to her cubicle wall with a thumb tack.  A kitten clings to a tree branch.  Hang in there, baby. 

I deposit my check.  I have no faith that the woman handling the transaction has accomplished the task.  I expect to receive a threatening letter weeks from now which I will ignore.  I carefully place my “clean” pen into the “dirty” bucket.  I walk out to my car and remove my mask.  A teenage girl parks a Jeep Wrangler next to me.  All Jeep Wranglers in my area are driven by young girls that want to express their freedom and individualism by driving the exact same car, all of which their Daddies bought them.  I make the short drive back to my home to return to my basement office where I will type into my machine.  The sun is out, bravely trying to cut through the cloud cover.  It will have set by the time I walk back from my windowless office, just like it has each day for the last seven months during These Unprecedented Times.