It Took Me All Week To Become An Overnight Success [FICTOID]

Flying into JFK International, noted film director Nefelibata Jones leaned back in her luxurious first-class pod, swirling the champagne in her glass -- a real glass, none of that plastic crap they used in economy -- and pondered her next picture.

Fresh off the success of her megahit Soul With A View, the director of Possum Knocking and Gallstones And Bile among other well-known films, needed to come up with something before her meeting with the studio head in Brooklyn later that day.

They were converging on Nitehawk Cinema for a three-day retrospective of her earliest work, including The Screaming Spider, Apocalypse Clown, and Farm Flesh, her very first feature film.

///My very first official feature film///, she thought, remembering Pasquale's Stink and An Act Of Guido, two gay porn videos she directed under the nom du cinema “Ramh Guillotine” back in her film school days.

Soul With A View was a big-Big-BIG super-smash hit, an epic of the early days of disco, and the studio head wanted her to follow up with Soul With A View Part Two or even Soul With A View: The Early Years.

Nefelibata did not want to do that.  Throughout her career she tackled different challenges, from gender-bender sci-fi such as Brain Wreck to feminist body horror in With This Ring I See Thee Dead to neo-noir Western with A Tea Cup Full of Whiskey and even a Disney princess animated movie, The Getaway Cat.

No, I want something new, something different, something I never tried before.

Looking at the champagne in her glass, Nefelibata thought about her mother a hair stylist in Tacoma who scrimped and saved to get her into film school only to die in a tragic curling iron accident on the eve of her daughter’s graduation.

She never even got to see Farm Flesh, Nefelibata mused.  I sure as hell wasn’t going to show her Pasquale's Stink and An Act Of Guido!

(Ironically, Pasquale's Stink and An Act Of Guido were two of the studio head’s favorite porn videos, but he was unaware “Ramh Guillotine” was actually Nefelibata Jones.  If he did, he might have championed Pasquale's Stink:  A New Beginning or An Act Of Guido:  The Next Day since the original An Act Of Guido left so many unanswered questions.)

I could start the film with dad dumping mom to join a monastery – no, wait, can’t do that.  I used it in Fifteen Minute Boyfriend.

Okay, how about starting right after then, when she got arrested for drunk driving and crashing through the front doors of my grade school?

Nah, too similar to the plot of Barfly, Go Home.

Maybe pull a Tarantino, do the film in reverse, starting with her funeral – no, that’s how I opened Long After Tomorrow Is Over.  There’s my disastrous 6th birthday party -- too similar to the Esalen scene in Heart Like A Brick.  The weekend we painted the house?  Funny, but I did that in Wrestling Elephants.  The incident with the harmonica and the duck?  I got a trombone and a hippopotamus in High Heel Combat Boots, practically the same thing.

Nefelibata scowled, draining her champagne as the flight banked gently into JFK.

If I’m going to repeat myself, wouldn’t it be better to look like I sold out and am just doing it for the money instead of losing my mojo?

The head of the studio waited for her outside the terminal in his limo.  They did the standard show biz laugh / hug / air kiss then as they climbed into the backseat he asked, “So…what have you got for me?”

“Soul With A View:  Electric Bugaloo Two.”

“I like it!”

© Buzz Dixon