'the illusion of illusion'

think:  ‘it's a wonderful life’ meets ‘the tenant’

harvey bumblege was the world's most powerful media mogul, but was he happy? after yet another day of throwing out the facts, reinforcing prejudices, and hammering another nail into the definition of 'information', he lost his grip on what was valuable in life... “is this all there is?” he implored his $2 million dollar granite desk.  once upon a time, he truly believed that preposterous wealth and influence would mean he could live up to his boyhood dreams, going into space, time travel but no... that night he threw himself from the top of his skyscraper and hit the ground, dying instantly and bruising the kerb as he did so.

but harvey was brought back ham dowager, his guardian angel."take my hand" he asked "and i'll show you the world without you".  through the grace of a loving god, harvey is given a unique perspective on the world we live in, a world in which he never existed.  his newspapers and channels didn't swallow up the money and influence that crushed lesser publications, where he did not systematically reduce every facet of life into the lowest common denominator, where his newspapers did not solely report on celebrity scandals, folk devils, and fake tits... as harvey looked over this world without him he cried with anguish... for this world was really no different to the one he thought he’d created.  there were still tits, there were still celebrity scandals, and there was still a huge corporate entity that dumbed the world down to the lowest common denominator... it just wasn't harvey's corporation.  harvey realized he made absolutely no difference to the world, even if he'd never existed there was always going to be another corporate, self-interested piece of shit who was going to do it.  he wept bitter tears as ham tried to console him by informing him that “at least they haven't switched to 3-d yet".

STUDIO VERDICT:

PASS

NOTES:

we’re not convinced we like the arc of the main character.  by showing someone a world where they do not exist and concluding that they never existed anyway does not quite have the ‘feel-good’ factor we want to convey right now.   we are far more interested in marrying the markets of ‘bruce almighty’ and ‘transformers’, where god is a robot (hmm this needs development).

we don’t like having a character named ‘ham’, its just wrong.

we like the fact that in the story-world they haven’t switched to 3-d… this means we could shoot the picture in 3-d and it would provide the audience with a sense of fulfilment that they live in a world with 3-d.

the title is confusing, and from repeated pronouncing of the title we have established that it confuses further and highlights political topics that are ‘sensitive’.  eg: fallujah. 

where is the love interest?  currently we are looking to re-launch the career of eva longoria and the only character we can see available for her is ham… none of us see eva longoria as ham.

[illustration: joel macpherson]

[dal whittaker and francisco silva]