PRECIS OF "GRADUATION BOOGIE" (SCREENPLAY)

 

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PRECIS  (in progress) 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.