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A department store assistant is diagnosed with a rare brain condition and only has weeks to live, so she takes off on a luxury holiday to Europe.
Starring Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton, Gérard Depardieu, Alicia Witt, Giancarlo Esposito
Written by Jeffrey Price, Peter S Seaman
Produced by Laurence Mark, Jack Rapke
Duration 112 minutes
Dear Mom,
Greetings from sunny Hollywood! Yes, I made it here in one piece! Sorry for not writing sooner, but I wanted to be able to put a return address – the Studio City YMCA just wasn’t gonna cut it!
But now I’m sitting here writing to you on my own desk (second hand) in my own room, in my own apartment! Well, I got the living room anyway, the sofa bed. It’s a one-bedroom, see, and I’m rooming with this British guy I met in the Y, who also wants to be a screenwriter. He’s got the bedroom, I got the living room, but don’t worry ma, he pays more of the rent.
And you’ll be pleased to hear that this letter isn’t the only thing I’m writing. Yes, I’ve started working on my first screenplay!
Okay, so here it goes. It’s about this woman, like an everywoman – like ‘everyman’, but a lady! She’s kind of like… not a loser, exactly, but definitely not happy. She buys her food with a big pile of coupons, her only social activity is singing in the church choir, she lives in a rundown neighbourhood near a bridge (alone, of course), with a shitty car that barely runs.
And, you know, she works in a department store in a real crappy job and her boss is a total jerk – like, his cell phone rings and he actually answers it in front of her, and all he cares about is money, whereas she wants to make the customers happy, that kind of thing. So yeah, like, overall, she’s real good natured and everybody loves her and all of that.
And those food coupons, they’re not just some random detail, Mom! You see, what she really wants to be is a chef. When she gets home every day, she watches TV cooking shows, and prepares all the food along with the TV chef. And she takes photos of the dishes she cooks and puts them in a scrapbook. It’s like a dream book for her, her aspiration book or something. Maybe that’s what I’ll call it in the screenplay!
But for sure she definitely also has this other book called ‘Possibilities’, where she’s cut and pasted the head of a guy she’s in love with onto photos next to herself. He’s her dream man, and he’s also her colleague! No, Mom, I know what you’re thinking. It’s not going to be creepy. It’s going to be real sweet and charming!
Anyways, so here’s where it gets real interesting. This is the best part. Now, I gotta admit up front, I didn’t exactly come up with this idea totally from my own little mind. My roomie, he was reading this book named Last Holiday, by this old English writer who goes by JB Priestley. And Mom, I didn’t actually read the book or anything (you know me!), but I did read the back of it. And I don’t know anything about getting rights or permission or whatever, but I’ll worry about that later – this is the kind of idea that is too good to ignore.
You see, I was looking for a way to set the woman in my movie free, but how? What would make it so she can burst out of her funk and finally make the most of her life?
Well, this is it, here goes: she finds out she only has three weeks to live!
Isn’t that genius? Isn’t that original?
So she marches into her boss’s office and not only does she quit, she grabs his cell phone and smashes it on the floor! Wham! ‘That was a $200 phone!” he yells. I might even put the dialogue in capital letters!
So what next? She decides she’s gonna live her dream of being a chef in, now get this Mom, tell me this is not totally awesome: Europe! Can you believe that?
Now, when I told this to my British roomie, he said something really weird. He said that Europe is not, like, just this one place that’s kinda all of the same. He claims it’s actually a continent full of many different countries, all with unique cultures and that we Americans should stop lumping an entire continent together like we do. He said that was totally ignorant!
Well, boo to him. This is gonna be an American movie for Americans. And in this American movie, my American leading lady goes to Europe and does European things with all those quirky, cute little European people. And snooty, right? Those Europeans are kinda snooty, everyone knows that. Of course, we'll make her spend most of the movie with other Americans who have also gone abroad, because we can't have too many Europeans around, that would be crazy.
I guess she can fly to France? In first class, of course. France is in Europe, right? That’s the one with Paris, I think. I think I heard once that they have, like, a lot of food in France. So that could be where she goes to learn how to cook. I'm not sure yet. Hey, remember that movie GREEN CARD, where they had that guy who was French (or was he English?) who had to pretend to be married to Andie MacDowell to stay in the US of A? Imagine if they ended up casting him as a celebrity chef who trains her! That would be super sweet.
Heck, maybe I just won’t even say which one of those cute little European countries she’s gone to, what difference does it make? That way, we can have all kinds of accents and languages and whatever all together, to be extra quirky and hilarious.
So anyways, you know, she goes to this European spa hotel place, and flies a helicopter, and goes skiing, and base-jumping, and has a PRETTY WOMAN-style shopping montage in a fancy department store, and does a load of other kinds of awesome things (all in a super cute and quirky European style).
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Three weeks to live? Major downer! But no, Mom, and this is where you’re really gonna see how all the money to send me to UCLA was totally worth it. Because, okay, get this: it turns out she actually isn’t about to die! Maybe the brain scanning machine or whatever was actually broken! Or maybe the doctor made a mistake, like he looked at her chart upside down or something! I’d probably have to make him European, too, or at least some kind of foreigner, if he's gonna be one of these real quirky, campy, useless doctors.
So that’s gonna mean I can write an awesome happy ending, where she’s had the time of her life, and realised that life is all worth living after all, and got her man, and opened her own restaurant, all of that. The audience is gonna walk out of theatres with a smile as wide as the Hollywood sign!
Right, gotta go. Just thinking about this awesome screenplay makes me wanna get back to it! Love to Dad and little Billy-Joe and Susie-Anne.
Sincerely,
Your loving son
Two stars out of five.
Valid use of the
word ‘last’? Since she is not, in fact, about to die, it
would be extremely unlikely for her to never go on another holiday.
What would a movie called FIRST HOLIDAY be about? Personally, I spent a lot of my youth in the Yorkshire coastal towns of Scarborough
and Bridlington (both in Europe, for the record).
Previously: X-MEN: THE LAST STAND
Next time: THE LAST SEVEN
Check out my books: Jonathanlastauthor.com
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