Sophomoric.
That’s how one studio head described it.
Moronic.
Asinine.
Unfilmable.
I’ve heard it all.
Everyone had vehemently advised against it from the start.

“A political movie?” said my former agent, incredulous.  “Why don’t you just put a bullet in your head and spare us all?”

I’ll admit, my screenplays have hardly been Oscar worthy, and I’ll certainly man-up and take at least partial responsibility for resurrecting Chevy Chase’s career, which has cost me my fair share of Polo Lounge reservations.  But this one is a darling.  This baby will set the table for me, and while I’m eating Citizen Kane for breakfast at one end, they will be eating their prematurely hatched words at the other.

Disarming.
Seminal.
Cerebral.
Commercial.

That’s how they will describe it.

And it goes like this.

Imagine the United States of America in the 21st Century.  Crimes are committed not in vivo but rather via personal computers.  Virtuoso criminals manipulate computer keyboards like Mozart reborn and create a symphony of destruction, ultimately robbing our very identities and utilizing them for sordid acts of infiltration.  Even sexual crimes snake their way through electronic traffic, prompting police forces nationwide to increasingly move from street beat to computer terminal.

More alarming still, sitcoms like the “The Cosby Show” and “Bosom Buddies” are considered blasé relics of an inconsequential era.  Instead, trained actors are replaced by average joes who willingly participate in virtually anything promised to be televised nationally.  Paranoid spouses sneak up on their cheating partners, a large camera crew in tow to document the invariable explosive confrontations.  Studio audiences gasp as polygraph devises expose shameless liars on a quest for small taxable sums of game show money.  What’s more, the participants on these shows become celebrities in their own right, many of whom secure agent contracts and command lofty appearance fees.  The whole idea of celebrity is indeed turned on its ear, and anyone who happens to be rich and young and good-looking becomes bona fide by a single click.

But that’s just background noise.

Imagine our 21st Century United States President.  His only prior work experience was as owner of a professional baseball team, which he quickly ran into the ground.  It was during this time that he was hit in the head by a wild fastball and nearly died.  He sustained some serious damage to his left temporal lobe, activating a series of spontaneous seizures during which God spoke commandingly about birthright and destiny.  Originating from a large East Coast WASP nest, he transplanted himself into the deep fried heart of Texas and convinced America that he was just as homespun as the next guy, and he proudly hung this on his brand name to win the hearts of Americans for two Presidential terms.

Yet something much darker roiled beneath and more comprehensively explained his large-margin election to a second term.  During his first term, nearly half of Manhattan was destroyed in a fiery blaze of Middle Eastern terrorism.  Shortly thereafter, a mysterious white powder was mailed to some top US officials and dropped them dead on their Silver Springs doorsteps.

Utter mayhem ensued.
Public fear was at a profound zenith.

A trail of flour from a torn bag of all-purpose caused a Piggly Wiggly in South Dakota to be evacuated and subsequently canvassed by SWAT and chemical terrorism specialists.  The President was suddenly paralyzed by confusion and indecision and all decisions were henceforth made by the Vice President, a rather boorish man 20 years the President’s senior who appeared to have been crudely chipped into existence from some unwieldy slab of Paleolithic rock.

The Vice President swiftly grabbed the President by his quivering arm and shoved him in front of a script-cradling podium to put the world on notice that we were about to engage in all-out war with the Middle East.  Largely out of a now monumental viral fear, the President was easily elected to a second term.

The war eventually shook our economy to its apparently fragile core, which continued a torrent of public resentment to the spartan desk of the President, whose approval rating had melted away to just a single digit.  The Vice President was nowhere to be seen, had vanished down a palm tree lined escape hatch to recover from a fifth heart attack, the result of what many illustrious minds in the field have traced to a congenital condition described in the literature as pathological lying.

The public was inconsolable, disenchanted, angry—not because the bodies of American soldiers continued to gruesomely mount, but because the resulting economic crash had rendered it nearly impossible to continue living a dizzyingly amplified Jazz Age.  The average credit line withered from fifty thousand to five-hundred.  Gas prices soared to over six dollars a gallon.  Detroit automotive factories slashed thousands of workers and many slammed their doors shut permanently.  And countries around the world—entire continents in fact—deeply despised our cork-popping nation and made schaedenfraude a fashionable and familiar buzz word that blew violently across the Great Oceans with cruel resounding cheers.

Relief washed over the country in robust waves indeed as the President’s second term finally limped to a close and the new Presidential race commenced.

Now, imagine our 21st Century Democratic Presidential contender.  He is an Afro-American male, a descendent of the Luo ethnic group of Kenya.  He is Ivy League educated—elitist, allege many, as if this is somehow a dubious quality for the leader of a nation—and one of the finest orators the world has seen.

Neo-Nazi groups across the globe are pacing their boot soles bare and scratching their white-hot shaved heads.  Celebrities gush superlatives and endorsements and dispense obscene and well-publicized contributions.  The Democratic running mate matters not, for this Presidential hopeful is charismatic enough for two, and he expertly traps and exploits celebrity moth-effect, marketing himself in a way that destroys any lingering skepticism and fear, engendering instead a magnetic fascination and a fierce allegiance fast approaching idolatry.

He has become a preternatural rock star, a curious political entity that transcends the seemingly ingrained political conceptions of yore, his face etched handsomely on a pop culture loop, an addictive publicly consumed ticker tape: magazine covers; television shows; movies; pop songs; action figures; even a limited edition Life cereal box cover.
But his race to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is hardly an unencumbered sprint, and the Republican contenders have prepared for war.  Quite fittingly, the Republican nominee is a curmudgeonly war hero who describes himself and his running mate as mavericks in order to assuage the stench left by the backed-up toilet of a Republican administration he had wholeheartedly supported nonetheless.  He tempers trite primordial swagger with a female running mate, a former beauty pageant queen who then became Alaska’s sweetheart governor in a landslide election.  She is often referred to as Caribou Barbie and her supporters are particularly impressed by her fashion-forward wardrobe and quaint Nordic affect when she frequently expresses her deep empathic regard for Joe Six Pack.

Still, even despite such attributes, that smarting black eye left by the current Republican administration is nearly insurmountable even for a couple of self-described mavericks.

When the polls wrap and the votes are tallied, it is determined by an impressively vast margin that America has chosen to elect the first Afro-American President of the United States.  The war hero and his running mate simply could not capture the President elect’s jenesaisquoi for which the majority is insatiable.  It marks an historic sea change celebrated both at home and abroad, even by many of our former political enemies.  And it continues to stir up a zeitgeist intoxicant more potent and exciting than anything the world has yet witnessed.

The ending, then, is hopeful.  The ending is, in fact, only the beginning.  It is a bright shining dawn with momentous force that relegates fractured legacies and questionable ideologies deeper into the recesses of an historical chapter whose once gilded pages are now exposed and tarnished beyond repair, to be revisited only as a cautionary tale for the sake of future generations.

So again I ask myself, is this not Hollywood enough?

Maybe it’s because it’s 1985.  Maybe it’s because Michael J. Fox won’t read any of my scripts.  Maybe it’s because I drive a neon-orange Lamborghini Countach and the studio heads think my modest success has inflated my ego quite enough.  Maybe they’re right.  Maybe I’ve deluded myself beyond any reasonable parameters of creative judgment.  But as I rework the dialogue for Porky’s V for the one-hundred and sixtieth time, and as I flip through this multi-channel Reagan-Bush broadcast about Star Wars and trickling down and all the other rigmarole, I choose to think not, and I have to believe that the American public wants something greater.