GYPSY: Prologue

-- I've thought about an Elvis movie since I was a kid.  Here's the only viable half an idea I've come up with:


-- It can't be about the man called Elvis Presley; this would be fiction based on the idea of that man.  A version of that man.
-- Second, biography movies are lame: like a mile long bridge where eleven segments of the bridge have been stood, just not in order, you drive a hundred yards of bridge, then nothing, air, you'll drive into the river; but you can see the next segment of bridge stood a half mile away.
-- So it must be a movie about an Elvis character freed from the bonds of his recorded biography; it must be in a moment, a pocket of time, and not a mix-tape of events over twenty years or more.  Not just a moment, but THE moment.  The precipice.  The proverbial fork in the road, when the kid who becomes the superstar will choose one kind of life or another.  Simple stuff.  Let's call him The Star.
-- The Star is back from that military service.  The Star is a few years on from his rise.  The Star is living in the beginnings of what will become his lifestyle of perverse indulgence.  Here be greedy hangers-on, here be women, here be pharmaceuticals; he's a puffy slob taking breaks from sleeping with groupies to eat ice cream sundaes; taking breaks from ice cream to fire hand guns -- he's in the middle of what later could be classified as lost time -- he's waiting on the call for another movie, when he will have to leave again for California, but for now it's sex, speed, ice cream, and revolvers..
-- We open with him leaving his bedroom in the middle of the night, two girls in the bed, and stumbling down the halls looking for something.. He probably doesn't remember what it is he's looking for.. but he'll look until he finds something to have been looking for.
-- And what he finds is strange.  A painting.  A tacky painting the kind poor folk who come into money might like; a religious painting: the scene of Christ's birth had it been done by the local amateur artist.. But there's something strange in this painting.. There seems to be twin Christ children at it's center..
-- Spooky.  The Star rouses his flunkies to find out where the hell this painting came from, and why he doesn't remember having seen it before.  It comes to this: it was his mother who brought the painting into the house.
-- It becomes now double painful, this painting in the house, as a reminder of his mother's recent death, and as some kind of sentry on the wall, recording all the activities hidden up here in the house -- it's as if her ghost is there, and what poor God-fearing country boy wants his Ma to see him like this.
-- He's resolved: they, all of them, must rid the house of this painting, and he means right now, middle of the night -- a quest to find the painting a new home, (after all, they can't rightly throw it away).
-- Here's the film's takeoff: into the night they go, the painting wrapped up in the car trunk like a corpse needing safe disposal.. 


-- Now ninety minutes of strange people, places, and moments.  A Mystery Train of new Cadillacs on old roads -- into the country, as you like it -- a two-day Tennessee black magic pastoral.
-- The question, conflict, and resolution of this simple piece is whether he gives the painting away, and returns to the purgatory of his mansion, or does he keep it, and with that, step out of this night world, and back to an honest life.
-- Though this Star is not technically that EP, reading the stories of how that man conducted business in his final days, it should be clue what I think his decision will be.  But where to leave the painting?  Who give it to?
-- No music in this movie -- a mockery should be made of music bios -- no more easy lines between a hit song and a biographical plot point: sometimes a man can be handsome and have a nice voice, and that's all -- his dark places don't connect to vocal recordings he was paid to perform. 


(Above is the pitch I wrote last year.  Script or prose is the question.)