Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens
By Max Landis
First 13 pages of a 30 years later sequel to Return of The Jedi, written for fun as a warm up.
Click To Download The Script or Read On The Site By Clicking This Post
I’m staring at the four hundred dollar pair of pants I just bought, shocked and offended at their presence in my hotel room.
In my head, I tried to do the math, tried to find the exact origin point of these pants presence in my life. They’d snuck in, that much was certain. I didn’t wake up this morning thinking “what I really need is some exorbitantly expensive but otherwise unremarkable pants.” But the fact of the matter is that I didn’t wake up today at all.
I had been in dubai roughly three hours when the pants came into my life. I had wanted to get a belt. Flying into Dubai is psychedelic experience i’ve written about before, wherein the cocaine dream the city was built on suddenly seems remarkably obvious, and the absurdity of its existence is spelled out in five hundred foot tall letters for the world to see.
HEY, YOU KNOW HOW THERES NOTHING BUT DESERT FOR HUNDREDS OF MILES? WE PUT A HUGE FUCK OFF CITY HERE LOL WANNA RIDE A MONORAIL
Universal Studios Hollywood is not an exciting theme park.
It isn’t. It’s an admirable attempt; certainly, its recent leaning into “motion control rides” has made it cutting edge for whatever that’s worth, but it, as a place, is simply not a very exciting proposition. A tremendous amount of this has to do with the awkwardness of its construction and lay out; the park is actually separated into two areas, joined only by an incredibly long stretch of escalators, which carry you literally up and down the side of a mountain.
Especially compared to its big brother, Universal Studios Florida, a glorious explosion of fun set in the theme park capitol of the world in direct, surprisingly open warfare with the juggernaut of Disneyworld, Universal Studios Hollywood seems rinky dink and half-cocked.
Nonetheless, the park has always held a special place in my hear. See, something people unfamiliar with the park might not know is that it’s actually built very literally INTO Universal Studios. Like, there is a functioning film-lot not just adjacent to the park, but entangled with it. Executives in meetings will occasionally boast they can go down and ride a ride during lunch, though I can’t imagine why they’d want to; most of the rides aren’t very good.
For me, it’s a little different; my father had his office on the Universal Lot in the early nineties, in a bungalow decked out to look like the refuge of some jungle explorer; I relished my visits to the backlot, where I’d get brief glimpses into how movies were actually made, and in some ways, these visits were a deciding factor in my career and greatest passion. So the place is steeped in nostalgia.
But it’s not very exciting.
And tonight, the park was ESPECIALLY not exciting.
Macklemore is the white Eminem.
I say this not necessarily in terms of skin color, but more in the sense of classical dualism, yin and yang. He has set himself up, intentionally or otherwise, as the dualistic companion piece of Eminem, a bizarro version that is still a perfect reflection, a mirror that flips things backwards. We’ll start superficially here, and then dig deeper.