8.14.2026 - Pitch

It’s a comedy about trauma. An alcoholic, a narcissist, a bully, and a nightmare walk into a bar. It’s about the woman upstairs who spends all night circling her coffee table and shouting ad slogans. It’s about that time your frontal lobe went missing and you wound up owning a casino. Sure it’s a tragedy but you’re not supposed to be able to tell. Think Schindler’s List but with Adam Sandler. The Muppets do Blood Meridian. We’re seeing Flula Borg in the role of Stalin. We’re thinking Pixar, we’re thinking mimes doing an elaborate stage presentation about the horrors of legalized abortion. That last thing actually exists, someone handed me a flyer for it and I looked it up online and holy living fuck. Think the worst place you know from your childhood, like the creek we used to play at until we learned it was the sewage outflow from the trailer park. That’s the setting. If the backers won’t pay for it we’ll find somewhere more affordable like Gary. Imagine you’re in session with your therapist, just saying normal things, like I had that dream about cross-dressing wolves again, and she throws up all over the rug. That’s the feeling. People will like that. It’s a twisted ankle and a popped kneecap all at once. It’s driving a subcompact through a blizzard in Wyoming and waiting in line for windshield wiper fluid behind a burly trucker asking the clerk at the counter how old she is. It’s a boxing match where both guys throw haymakers at the same time and connect with each other’s throats and die right there in the ring at the same time which is an outcome no one bet on except that one guy who everyone suspects is an illegal telepath. It’s where you’re about three years old and you fall down some stairs and in your memory and in your mind while it’s happening you’re rebounding off each one straight up and down like a pogo stick. Or a fish you thought was dead swimming back up into the toilet bowl after you flushed it. What a waste of a funeral. We had a wake for it and everything, what are we supposed to do with all this grief? So in act two there’s rising complications. Your landlord sends a guy to shake you down for the rent you’re late on and he has to address you through the hole where your doorknob fell off and the dog’s all growling at him and shit and you’re pretending to be on the phone with your lawyer. Meanwhile the city is pulsing and breathing out there; you don’t dare go outside. Now we add some infestations, maybe houseflies breeding in that strip on the windowsill you never thought to clean, raccoons building affordable housing out of your recycling, dustballs growing into tumbleweeds and exacerbating the whole business. The news of the world comes every direction and it’s all pretty bad but some of it is hilarious. I like how smart you are, someone says, and you never see her again on account of all the darkness. Damn this is a long elevator ride. We were thinking if we can’t get any equipment or crew the whole thing could just take place in a box anyway. It should feel like you’ve eaten nothing but psyllium husk for days. It should feel like you’re in a Scandinavian hole in the ice. Sure there’s a word for that but we don’t have a research budget. We’re seeing Rob Schneider’s corpse as the oracle. We want a cheese-soaked ending. We want the audience to leave with more questions than they had coming in. Why did the tumor have such an attitude. Did I have my phone when I came in. Who was the woman in that one scene who looked like that woman in that other scene and were we supposed to remember the name of the horse or was that a metaphor. That kind of shit. What if all your thoughts are unwanted thoughts. What is a wanted thought anyway. How much control does anyone have. Who is this for. In the hero cycle you're supposed to come back to where you started from having gained something at a great price. What if you just pay the price. We’re pretty sure you’re gonna love it.