Monday, October 29, 2012

From The Idea Hole: Untitled Peter Pan Project

Actually need your guys' help with this one. I started writing an outline for a movie a while back, but gave up on it because I thought the whole concept was a little too pretentious and self indulgent. I'm considering coming back to it, but I'd like to know if anyone else thinks its worth pursuing. Any comments would be appreciated.

The idea is for a modern retelling of Peter Pan set amid teenage drug users. There would be a clear demarcation between the boring suburbs and the almost surreal excitement of the nearby city night life, as though two different worlds, one the real world and one the proverbial Neverland. A young girl meets a mysterious drug dealing neardowell who leaps into her window one night, in this case to hide out from some gang chasing him. She becomes fascinated by him, and insists she take her with him when he goes to see the city, and she does, with her younger siblings reluctantly going along for the ride. They have a bizarre one night adventure where more elements of the fantasy source material would seep in. The high of some new designer party drug is likened to flying (maybe called Fairy Dust), and when you're on it you see little bursts of flying light (analogous to Tinkerbell) that lead them around and astray.


Eventually they would encounter the biggest name in the local drug trade, simply called The Captain. He has a prosthetic hand that conceals a knife. He lost the real one when our hero Peter dosed him with some powerful hallucinogenic drug and handcuffed him to a radiator, after which he woke up disoriented hours later, having cut his own hand off in a panic while fleeing an imaginary, giant bipedal Crocodile. In this case, he'd be obsessed with time not because of the ticking inside his enemy's stomach, but because losing time was the first symptom, so he's constantly checking a fob watch to make sure he's still grounded. He's been hunting Peter down ever since, and becomes the primary antagonist. Eventually, his main lacky, the Smee equivalent, would betray him and dose him with the same drug, leaving him cuffed by his ankle and dropping a bone saw in front of him before running away.


The film would end with Peter high, running from more of The Captain's men, and leaping across a rooftop, as he'd done many times successfully before in the movie, but this time, even though he appears for a brief moment as if he's flying, he misses the ledge and falls to his death. Then, many years later, an older version of the girl would look back on a photo of him, still young, never being able to grow old. I think the fantasy elements would be depicted as almost real but not, like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie.


I also had this thing written down where at one point they would find different groups doing different drugs, each one referencing a different fantasy story involving parallel worlds. One group would be doing a drug called White Rabbit that makes things appear bigger or smaller at random, and the other is taking something called Toto that makes things appear to be in more vivid colors.



So, what do think? Is it too much? I'm currently collaborating on another script right now, but that's almost done, and I'm trying to figure out what I want to do next.

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