As the following risible charade bears not even the crudest resemblance to a properly formatted screenplay, which we know is so important to the hundreds of highly talented professionals dedicated to making a feature film and whose very livelihoods directly depend on the proper formatting of screenplays, which is something the title of the piece, shamefully, shamelessly, and shamfully, claims it to be, The Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board (KUSEB) wishes to apologize for this cringingly amateurish pretense to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Screen Writers Guild, the New York Film Academy, all of Hollywood, and Clint Eastwood
Fade in.
The effervescent shimmer of twilight settles on Kyiv like stardust.
With summer approaching, the hot day is long-long here in this ancient East Slavic capital and night falls but reluctantly – up against 10 p.m. or so.
It is precisely this hour we find Welsh Losser sitting with The Ferret in a hipster café in Kyiv’s bohemian and quickly gentrifying district of Podil – the capital’s Hipster Capital, so to speak.
Except for the two, the place is empty. Even the barmaid-proprietress is nowhere to be seen – and there may not even have been one to begin with.
It is the high unlikelihood of these two being in a place they don’t belong that makes the paradox so intriguing, as is so often true of life’s ironies, big and small.
Welsh Losser: (further, WL) Hey, boy am I glad you’re here, nyug. Where were you so long? What were you doing?
The Ferret: (further, TF) Heh, I don’t know what you’re talking about, dude. You must be paranoid, or really immature. I just got Saint Stephan fired from his job as Chief Editor of the Kyiv Poster. But you didn’t hear it from me. Heh-heh…
WL: Fired Saint Stephan, nyegets? Hurrumph-er… well, that’s good. I never trusted him anyway.
Except for TF scraping and clinking his retractable claws infuriatingly against his tumbler of whisky soda in trying to lift it to his rat lips for a drink, a few seconds of silence pass as a semi-drunk and slow-thinking WL knits his pigskin brows and another reality begins to dawn.
WL: Say, wait a second, nyugah, didn’t you do that already?
TF: Do what, dude – heh…?
WL: Fire him – Saint Stephan. That is, get him fired. You know, stabbing him in the back and leaving him to die on the left bank of Kyiv, et cetera, as the story goes…?
TF: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
WL: How don’t you, now?
TF: Everything repeats endlessly.
TF finally manages to have his drink. His beady, shifty eyes immediately grow bright green surrounded by red. He begins to get visibly abusive and aggressive, swinging out his little arms from his no-neck and hunched turtle-shell back and kicking up his bowed little tadpole legs, his wide parachute puppet pants swishing the air under the table.
Meanwhile, WL is stunned – TF had never been this deep and philosophical before. WL wonders where TF suddenly got that kind of worldly wisdom from. He panics, worrying that the change may mean TF will start getting increasingly distant and inaccessible, but WL is also masochistically excited by the prospect of pursuing an object he may no longer be able to have.
WL: Where did you get that from?
TF: Get what from?
WL: That everything repeats endlessly.
Now mocking and irreverent, TF avoids the subject, as WL grows visibly desperate.
TF: Hey, your brother tried putting some moves on me – heh-heh…
WL: M-my b-b-b-bro-bro-bro…
TF: Yeah, heh. But I didn’t like it.
But TF’s shifting, flitting eyes betray this sentiment.
Nevertheless, WL blows a smelly sigh of relief…
WL: … Phew…!
… strongly preferring to believe TF’s words rather than his deeds, which for WL remain palpable but hidden. Perhaps his walleyes don’t want to see the truth, which is now staring him brazenly in the face.
However, all of this becomes irrelevant, as the action that next unfolds in the scene is about to change their lives forever.
Straight on, from where WL and TF are sitting, we see the moonlit Podil night through the large glass of the hipster café.
Behind the seated two is a door that leads to a covered and brick-wall-encased terrace with another table or two, and a concealed but easily findable back way out of the place if for some reason one prefers not to use the front.
Again, looking at the café entrance from where the two sit, the bar is on the left, and where the bar ends around the joint’s midway point, begins a steep and narrow staircase to the second floor, where there is nothing but empty space and the toilet.
WL and TF stop what they’re saying and doing, and a single shudder passes through both of them simultaneously as they notice the unsteady legs and geriatric back of a doddering weak figure – an old man – slowly and carefully making his way down the stairs; his right hand gripping the banister, while some object suspended from his left hands clunks and thumps heavily against every stair.
The old man makes it to the bottom of the stairs. He turns slowly, tottering from side to side to gain and maintain his balance. He looks like a puff of wind could blow him over; or like the little yapping schnauzer he whimsically decided to have as a pet before death, suddenly jerking at the leash, could slam him facedown into the pavement, skinning his forehead as he drags him into the traffic. A wrinkled smile spreads across his face as the two make the recognition – it’s Josh Davies! The object hanging from his left hand is suddenly revealed to be… an axe!
Josh Davies: (further, JD) Well, you two lovebirds. May I interest you in some iced tea on this sultry Podil night?
He theatrically sweeps a shaking right arm in the direction of the bar, as if it were his, and the two were in his home on Red Army Street enjoying his genteel Southern hospitality.
JD: Or perhaps you’d prefer some lemonade instead. That may be just the thing to cool two passionate heads on a hot, almost sweltering, night such as this…
With his red gum-filled smile cracked wide open, JD begins an unsteady and enfeebled hobbling-limping old man’s movement, step by excruciating step, toward them, as though life had exhausted him and he was living out his final moments, dragging the axe, which he seems barely able to clutch, behind him. The two are fear-paralyzed in their places, although WL somehow manages to get up, turning the table over, though out of panic more than conscious intent, which lands on top of TF, trapping him writhing and kicking beneath.
Just then, we hear the screams of a panicked crowd from the even more hipster café next door, and in the ensuing seconds a huge clown crashes through the front glass of the present scene’s café, a man’s tattooed arm in one plantain-fingered hand, a woman’s tattooed leg in the other, and crushing the skull of a transgender individual between his enormous jaws. ‘Nya-nya-nya-nyaaaaa…!!!’ he mocks and laughs, waddling and rolling from side to side toward JD, making it clear that the latter is next.
Enraged, JD turns away from the two and, his body shaking, moves painfully and unsteadily toward the clown. He places the axe atop the bar, struggling as though hardly able to lift it, and then he is suddenly on top of the clown, shoving his fingers into his eyes and tearing them out of their sockets. With the clown down and screaming, JD takes the axe from the bar top and swings it deftly and powerfully into the clown’s face. With his right hand, he quickly lifts and turns the clown over, the eyes bleeding out the skull onto the floor, the face hacked in half. Singing in a chipper crackling voice, ‘This old man, he played nine, he played knick-knack on my spine…’ JD delivers furious but precise chops to the clown’s lower back, almost severing the massive body in two within but a few swings.
With axe in hand, he now turns again toward WL and TF, both of whom are sort of holding onto each other, TF screeching like a cornered rat and WL blubbering in a senseless hysterical panic and fumbling for the handle of the back door.
They finally manage to open and then close the door behind them, but once out on the walled-in terrace, they are too panicked and disoriented to find the way out and believe themselves trapped. In a futile last-ditch effort to keep JD out, they manage to move and brace some object, or number of objects, immediately at hand against the door.
Back inside, we hear the measured footsteps of JD coming toward the door, axe clunking with each hobbled move against the floor.
From the terrace, we see the closed door, and then the handle turning and jiggling, with JD trying to push open the door, but can’t because of the object(s) on the other side braced and/or stacked against it.
There is a moment of stillness – the moment seems interminable – and then suddenly there is the first mighty crash of the axe through the door.
Fade out.
Fade in again.
The next scene is the same café around midnight. Up by the destroyed café entrance, Jack Step and Dirk Dickerson are checking out the nearly severed-in-two body of the giant clown.
The phone rings, and the two agents both reach into their jackets to answer their cells.
On the other end, against a black backdrop, is Mack, the still well-built older man who is their boss.
Mack: Once again, you two blockheads are missing the point. Forget about the clown and go to the back door. Open it and see what’s on the terrace.
The agents hang up, replace the phones in their jackets and follow Mack’s instructions.
They push open what’s left of a smashed back door and see the walled-in terrace strewn, pasta and tomato sauce-like, with the mutilated remains and body parts of whom they think were WL and TF, although they can’t be one hundred percent sure.
Jack Step: Josh Davies?
Dirk Dickerson. I don’t know, Jack. It could’ve been the clown.
But turning from the terrace to look back through the doorway, they see that, on the floor covered in shattered glass at the front of the café… there is no clown…
Filed by JS, June 27, 2015