“Recut Madness”

I’ve made some teasing references in the past weeks to a book coming out in the near future. Well, that near future is finally almost here. The cover art was sent to me this week for my final approval (with the caveat as usual that it was too late to make any changes), and if I could figure out how to manage pdf files, I could try to post a copy of it. But that will probably come some time in the future.

“Recut Madness” is a book of vignettes from famous films that imagine what they might be like if they were written from a partisan point of view–if the Jews really ran Hollywood, say, or if Bill O’Reilly and Jerry Falwell did. Laptop technology exists now to re-edit films to a consumer’s own tastes , right? Well, if that consumer had a bias toward the extreme right or left, these are the scenes that would emerge. In a way, it’s like Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, but this time I’m rewriting familiar stories to make fun of both sides of the aisle. (Of course, many right wingers read my previous books and assume that they have found a compadre in arms who will share their screeds about feminists, liberals, vegans and everything else they hate. And they’re perfectly entitled to their reading of those stories, no matter how much of a caricature it makes them seem.)

“Recut Madness” emerged from a version of “The Wizard of OZ” I was working on last year, that imagined the story as a Republican dystopia–incompetent leader, terrorized populace, a scarecrow who wouldn’t come out of the closet, that sort of thing. After a few conversations with my agent, we decided it might be a good idea to expand the book to include other movies, just in case someone hated OZ or actually liked the president (I’m not sure I’ve ever met a whole lot of either one, but it’s good to listen to your agent if you want them to work hard for you). I was skeptical at first, but after three months’ work, I had a pretty big collection of recuts. It came out much better than I expected, and I’m damn glad to be back with a book to sell. It’s good to be back in the game again. Maybe this time I can spin the experience out as long or longer than last time.

One of the great things about working on the book is that I got to watch many great movies again to verify that scenes were as I remembered them. I didn’t have time to watch most of them in their entirety, but I have a nice list now of movies to put on my watch list. I did get to watch “Triumph of the Will” for the first time, but I didn’t have to take many notes, as I found numerous neo-nazi websites that transcribe the movie scene by loving scene. When time permits, “A League of Their Own” and “High Noon” are two I’ll be queuing up.

So if I’m lucky, during Sunday’s telecast of the Oscars, someone receiving an award will pipe up with some stupid remark about how Hollywood really reflects America’s values, and up yours George Bush, and movies really serve a positive role in society, or some other self-aggrandizing claptrap. Such preening self-importance can only serve to piss off a good portion of the audience, and that can only be good for sales.