Daily Briefs: My screenplay is coming along nicely
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Basically, I’ll do just about anything for money, up to and including dressing up in pleated khakis and working in your call center. I don’t have much in the way of conscience about that. On “Office Food Day,” I’ll even set up a mini Crock Pot in the break room and fill it up with Li’l Smokies. I have no soul. So it goes without saying that if you dangle a few thousand dollars in front of me, yes, I’ll do some script doctoring on the screenplay for your remake of the 1982 Kenny Rogers NASCAR comedy Six Pack which you are developing as a vehicle for Blue Collar Comedy Tour headliner Bill Engvall. A lot of people say you shouldn’t tamper with a classic, but my feeling on that whole thing is that if a frightening angular sculpture of Kenny Rogers can be made out of Kenny Rogers’ actual head by plastic surgeons, I can write a remake of the family classic Six Pack.
WHAT? You DON’T REMEMBER SIX PACK? Actually, there are a lot of people who don’t remember Six Pack (which includes the singing and acting debut of a young Anthony Michael Hall), giving me a lot of creative wiggle-room where the reinterpretation is concerned. Whenever anyone mentions Kenny Rogers, you probably think of The Gambler, The Gambler Part II: The Adventure Continues, The Gambler Part III: The Legend Continues, The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw and Gambler V: Playing For Keeps. I know, right? Me, too. But in fact, Kenny fell so naturally into the role of a bland, stiffly acted avuncular NASCAR racer with no comedic timing, it was like he was born to play it. Here’s the plot synopsis from the Internet Movie Database:
Stopping briefly in a small Texas town, an itinerant race car driver finds that his stock car, on a trailer behind his motor home, has just been quickly and expertly stripped. He chases down the miscreants, who turn out to be six orphan children. He has no recourse to the law, for the corrupt local sheriff takes most of the proceeds of their thievery in exchange for not putting them in an orphanage. They are charming rogues who are in turn charmed by him. Disliking their arrangement with the sheriff, they stow away with him, and he finds himself becoming a reluctant stepfather. Thanks to their enthusiasm and incredible mechanical know-how, he begins to make a name for himself on the racing circuit. But the sheriff doesn’t take kindly to losing his extra income…
Did you read all that? If so, you’re qualified for a drawing; leave your name and email address in comments. One lucky winner gets Matrix shampoo and conditioner.
Anyway, once the producers signed loathsome racist ventriloquist Jeff Dunham to play the evil sheriff, they decided they needed a top-to-bottom rewrite to beef up the role and incorporate more filthy racist puppets. So basically, they called me in to punch up all the racism. Oh, they know the film won’t play well in major metropolitan regions, but it will totally clean up across Waffle House country — do you have any idea how much money Delta Farce made? They actually don’t know, because that possum turd is still generating so much revenue that Larry the Cable Guy bought his own Research Triangle for the development of life-enhancing technologies for racist white people who don’t know shit about anything and hate anybody who does. So anyway, the sheriff’s adorable puppet deputy is exactly the sort of African-American racist stereotype that Jeff Dunham can really sink his bigoted teeth into.
One of the challenges has been incorporating all the great, memorable lines of dialogue from the original film. If you go to the IMDB entry and click on “Memorable Quotes,” there are two of them:
I don’t want to tip my hand, but in my script, the racist sheriff says, “GET YOUR ASSES OUT HERE ON THE DOUBLE” at the most surprising moment of the film (when he wants everyone to get their asses out here on the double). Seriously, you don’t fuck around with great, totally memorable lines of dialogue. To the IMDB user who considered that to be a memorable quote: I tip my Bass Pro baseball cap to you, sir.
Anyway, all of this is a long way of explaining why I only had time for one news link this morning, which is that satisfied Hair Club For Men client Emanuel Cleaver is touting a $200 million Green Zone project in Kansas City, totally go read about that, because I’m a busy man and these horrible racist jokes about Mexican immigrants, Hindus and Muslims aren’t going to write themselves! As a special bonus, here is the most amazing commercial for douche I’ve ever seen, via Everything Is Terrible:
