A to Z 2015 - Hollywood Minute "Genesis"

Something-something-something Zola makes a movie called Genesis, which is about Eve.  It's animated and Zola sings and as such it's everything Tim loves about her.  And it's a good movie, too, which deconstructs the idea of the princess while at the same time telling a biblical story without being particularly biblical about it.  Except, of course, because it is biblical without being biblical, it has a hard time finding any appreciation, from either audiences or critics.

Then again, you should know that Tim has an overly active imagination.  Zola did not actually make Genesis.  It's in fact a version of a story Tim himself would writer later, after seeing Hollywood Minute.  This is part of the fantasy.  The only movies in this whole sequence that make any difference at all are Hollywood Minute, Fall of Troy, and maybe Little Green Men (just because).  

...The truth is, Tony Laplume (the author) realized he was no longer interested in doing this year's challenge the way he originally conceived it, and this was before the month actually began.  As you may or may not know, his mother passed away at the end of March.

So here's what the idea was, pulling back the curtain:

Joe and Zola and Hollywood Minute are analogues for (500) Days of Summer.  Which is to say, Joe is Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zola is Zooey Deschanel.  At various points in this would-be chronicle of their careers, the actors Heath Ledger and Kirsten Dunst (the latter usually in tandem with Sofia Coppola, who was the model for the director Penner) were also to be substituted where appropriate. 

Which is to also correlate (to date):

• Albatross = The Patriot (making it a Heath Ledger movie)
• Bounty = Ned Kelly (making it another Heath Ledger movie)
• Child's Play = Our Idiot Brother (making it a Zooey Deschanel movie)
• The Dauphin = Marie Antoinette (making it a Kirsten Dunst/Sofia Coppola movie)
• Equinox = Looper (making it a Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie)
• Genesis = Noah (making it an Emma Watson movie)

And later movies already referenced:

• Heroes and Demons = The Virgin Suicides (making it a Kirsten Dunst/Sofia Coppola movie)
• Impulse = Candy (making it a Heath Ledger movie)
• Little Green Men = Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and/or Mars Attacks! (making it a Zooey Deschanel movie and/or a Natalie Portman movie)
• The Savage Curtain = The Dark Knight (making it a Heath Ledger movie, although the idea was to also mix in The Phantom of the Opera)

I also sketched in:

• Rascals = Elf (making it a Zooey Deschanel movie)

Now, I didn't make Fall of Troy synonymous with anything, mostly because I hadn't really been thinking about what the reunion project might be until I'd actually begun writing posts last week.  As it is, I love the Trojan War as a story.  If I were more clever, I would have done the whole challenge with that as my topic.  

Tim, by the way, is my fictional alter ego.  This was much more obvious from my perspective, as I've been writing Tim stories for the past few years now.  The bit about Tim killing Stephen King is actually a riff on a story I wrote recently, which references the incident King experienced in 1999 when a passing motorist struck him, which I crossed with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (making it a Zooey Deschanel reference).  Hollywood Minute, this future relationship with Zola, and explaining away killing Stephen King as described in the original story, is the first time Tim has branched into his own life, which is to say, the whole thing became a fantasy concerning not Joe and Zola, but Tim and Zola, which is to say, Tony Laplume and Zooey Deschanel.

Which will clearly never happen in real life.

Going forward, I'm really just going to deconstruct yet further, because there is another layer that I had hinted at previously:

• "Albatross" (an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series)
• "Bounty" (an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise)
• "Child's Play" (an episode of Star Trek: Voyager)
• "The Dauphin" (an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation)
• "Equinox" (a two-part episode of Star Trek: Voyager)
• "Favor the Bold" (an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
• "Genesis" (an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation)

And so on.  I think going forward I'm just going to talk about Star Trek episodes.  Coming up with an episode for every letter of the alphabet and have the titles sound somewhat plausible as movies was itself a tricky task.  I learned "xindi," for instance, is not necessarily a name coined by the writers of Star Trek: Enterprise, but also the name of a Chinese flute.

One final piece of trivia concerning what this was originally intended to be: The characters were supposed to have first and last names.  Zola's was Zola Beck.  Which, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I more or less knew it from somewhere else.  Jolene Blalock (Star Trek: Enterprise) plays a character named Lola Beck in Starship Troopers 3: Marauder.  It only figures.

I like to talk Star Trek.  Half my first year doing A to Z was spent talking Star Trek.  So coming back to it will not, for me, be much of a problem.  And I suspect no one will much care my abandoning what I clearly was approaching tepidly at best, ultimately being completely uninterested in doing much more than I had settled into already.  The Fall of Troy bit was actually the most useful thing I've done this month, because I have been planning on writing a version of Troilus and Cressida for years, and this is the first time I've made any real headway on how to approach it.  (Not necessarily set in space, though, or in stop-motion animation.)

All of which is to say, tomorrow will be completely different.