Post by gabraham on Jun 3, 2006 14:29:05 GMT -5
I’ve got an idea for a film.
The film shall be called: “Bubblegum Decks.” It will star Richard Dreyfuss as Tom Presci, a forty-four year old man living in Boston, Massachusetts.
The film begins with footage of Tom as a child, running down Brooklyn streets and playing stickball willy nilly with his friends, spying on Mrs. Peterson, and drinking egg cremes at
ol’ Mr. McGillicuddys. This is done montage style with credits rolling over, and this montage will blend with “footage” of a 20-something Tom firing his m-16 in the jungles of Vietnam.
After the final “directed by” credit, a scene will roll in which Tom is shot in the gut, and he doubles over and starts puking blood.
The year is 1970, and Tom is laid up at Taylor Munson VA Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. “I want two questions answered,” Tom screams at the nurse, “when can I
go back to Brooklyn, and when are my wounds gonna heal?” The nurse explains that the wound on his belly will heal within a month, but the scars in his mind could last a lifetime.
She explains that recent legislation passed by Congress prevents wounded veterans from returning home until they have healed completely, and/or been in a hospital for at least a year and a half.
After leaving the hospital, Tom settles into Boston. Unemployable, he gets a job at a baseball card shop called “Triple Play.” There he meets two grizzled vets, Ernie (Morgan Freeman) and Derek (James Woods). Both are borderline mentally ill, but bind their lives together by collecting baseball cards, coins, and old Playboys.
In one scene, Ernie leads Tom back to his special vault, where he has over 3,000 pristine copies of 70's Playboys.
Derek is more strictly into cards, and after work one day he offers to give Tom a ride home and Tom agrees, not wanting to walk 17 blocks to his dingy basement apartment. In the car, Derek asks Tom if he’s ever been in love, and Tom replies that he’s only ever loved three things: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and egg cremes. “Well,” Derek replies, scratching his nipples,
“then we’re gonna have a lot to talk about.”
At Derek’s house Tom is thrust into a world of cardboard delights, literally hundreds of thousands of baseball cards, all delicately organized, and many still containing their old rotten bubblegum.
“Is this heaven?” Tom asks. “No,” Derek replies, “it’s my basement.”
The song “Doctor Doctor (Mister M.D.)” will play over a typical back-to-work montage showing Tom and Derek and Ernie fully immersed in the card shop, sharing stories with
customers, laughing over egg cremes behind the counter, and yelling out things like “Where should I put George Brett?” “Put him with the Mariners!” “The Mariners? He couldn’t carry the
weakest Mariner’s jock!”
One day, a frumpy woman named Crystal (Kathy Bates) walks into the shop while Tom is organizing cards into teams. She’s carrying a box of cards and puts it on the register table. She asks if the cards are worth anything, that she found them in the attic in the home of her dad who just died of a brain hemorrhage, and Tom (who is wearing a faded blue button down tucked into extremely light toned khakis, and white Pony sneakers. His face is shielded by thick glasses, and
the black pubic-esque hair on his head is mostly shielded by his Dodgers cap).
Tom says “Well, lemme take a look” in the old, creaky tone of a weary wizard. “These cards,” Tom says, “are invaluable.”
Sensing that her cards are ripe, Crystal asks if
they’re mint, not realizing that Tom is following a hidden line of logic, one far more obtuse and yet much stupider than Crystal’s...he finally spits out the inevitable: “they’re valuable because they belonged to your father, and he’s dead now. These cards are all that remain.”
Foregoing an opportunity to tell Tom that the cards were neither owned by her father nor valued by their true
owner (her brother), she just says: “You’re right.”
Crystal and Tom begin dating, reading comic books indoors with shades drawn and golden sun seeping in through the flaky brown paper-esque shades, drinking club sodas and
playing Hearts with giddy enthusiasm while the birds sing outdoors. Occasionally, the pair break down into tears, often while watching a children’s film or while looking at old pictures, or
spinning a record from the old days.
Film skips forward to 1982. Tom and Crystal are married and living in an apartment. Business at Triple Play is slow. One day at the shop, Ernie and Derek go over the month’s figures. “Looks like we didn’t make s*** all for money,” Ernie says.
The two come up with a plan to revamp Triple Play, by turning it into a full service card shop that sells not only
baseball cards, but also Marvel comics and wrestling cards, garbage pail kids merchandise and various other chazzari.
The store is transformed, but Tom feels it has lost its vital essence. Although more money comes rolling in, Tom is increasingly morose and paranoid. In one telling scene, he’s
working in the backroom of Triple Play, sniffing old decks of 1963 Topps, trying to catch a free whiff of the evil bubblegum still holding fast within, when Derek comes charging into the
backroom all high on capitalist fury. He asks: “Hey man where are those stacks of Garbage Pail Kid Semi-Laminates?”
“All you care about is money!" Tom screams. (A fistfight ensues that is of course quickly broken up by Ernie, but it establishes the store’s new atmosphere)
Tom’s life begins to crumble. Crystal has cancer of the breasts and Ernie sells his entire 1950's Mets collection for $30 to an adolescent with down syndrome.
Derek has become consumed by the promise of the All American Dream, keeping his money in a bill clip and wearing leathers and snorting blow. And although Derek is passionate now, and has successfully implemented the changes inspired by his vision of a “more diverse collector’s shop," the shop remains largely empty. Customers are either very young children or men in their 40s. That’s it.
And neither group is willing to flash much cash. Still, Derek imagines he’s sitting on a cash cow and becomes intoxicated with dreams of wealth and, strangely, stardom.
After Crystal dies, Tom experiences shell shock and starts drinking heavily. Flashback montages are optional at this point, but one scene which is absolutely mandatory is one where
Tom examines his bullet wound. He claws at his belly, almost looking for an answer in there and literally contemplating his navel, and then screaming: “The wounds! They never f******
heal!”
In the final scene, Tom runs into his expansive closet space, where thousands of baseball cards are neatly stacked, many in foil packs or laminated with Insta-Lam. There, sweating and nearly undergoing full Vietnam flashback complete with auditory hallucinations and a sense of urgency, Tom screams: “Where’s my bubblegum?!”
In a frenzied rush of misplaced adrenalin, Tom attacks his decks and tears the cards free from their foil and/or cheap wax paper holdings. Stale gum sticks drop to the closet floor, and Tom jumps giddy with the realization of a stupid dream. Gum piles up on the floor, stick after stick, and Tom throws the semi-valuable cards all over the room, bending their corners and dusting their faces.
His only concern is the sugary gum that has always provided a rush of “indulgence intoxication” for children obsessed with numbers and “chik-a-chik-a” bike wheels. And he chews a hundred pieces at once.
Fade to black.
