GRADUATION PARTY BOOGIE
(a.k.a. Darlings & Monsters)
By Michael Roloff
By the mid-80s I had a huge Fellinesque
screenplay outline for a novel that is still a few years off completion. Friend
and professional screen writer George Malko pointed out that the monstrosity
had one scene, a birthday party for the 18 year old love of one of the main
characters, on a loft and its roof in downtown Manhattan worked as a kind of
microcosm of the whole - and a few years later I took George up on the
challenge and it turned out well, George caught on to the fact that the one day
party is seen through an all-hearing ear. As usual I came up with the wrong
producer, spent a few years in Mexico, wrote other things, treated the
screenplay far too nonchalantly and then all my friends, among them Paul
Sylbert who was meant to direct it, said I ought to have dropped everything to
get it made, and after the WTC went down and the changes in Tribeca I thought
it could never be made. However, I no longer think that that is so. After al,
what is required is a bohemian environment, with admixtures, and a high rise
sky-scraper whence the “ear”, the Owl of Minerva, the ancient Austro-American
psycho-analyst Habsburg descends in the very early morning for the 24 hour
event in one place, the classical unities to proceed in through hour increments
divided by the eight variations of a song that starts off as an early morning
field holler and ends as a moon, with the boogie at its high point evening
party time. That all purpose base song must be imagined for these purposes as
being of the GREEH ONION kind, Leiber/ Stoller’s KANSAS CITY, a solid blues
which allows the aforemnentioned kind of variations.
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