GrantSanders YACK on:
Film Treatment

This week, the Nantucket Film Festival comes to the island and our famous person quotient rises well above the normal summer seven-nobodies-to-one-somebody ratio. In this case, it’s the one week all year when a VIP upset that he can’t get a table at the Pearl says “Do you know who I am?” and the hostess can actually say, “Hey, yeah, I do know you, you’re that guy who played the drug addicted male prostitute in that grainy indy film directed by Corey Feldman with lousy pacing and a really awful musical score. Roger Ebert gave you a thumbs down. So does the Pearl, unless you have a reservation. Can I help the next person in line, please?”

I personally love the Film Festival. It’s one of the opportunities I have during the year to recharge my creative batteries and see what’s going on in one of the few media for which I don’t write. Plus one year I got a big, fat goodie bag with a really nice Roots sweatshirt with an Audi logo on it, and a coffee mug that goes well with the other 32 mismatched coffee mugs I own, and a nice, big beach towel that says “Showtime” on it (when I drag my large and less-than-fit frame to the beach, “showtime” takes on a whole new meaning, if you catch my drift).

Interestingly, though, I’ve found that most Nantucketers don’t actually pay to get into the Film Festival events. I conducted a poll on YACK (The Nantucket online community at www.yackon.com) last year and found that over 65% of those who responded stayed away from the Film festival altogether. 25 percent scored free passes from work, or through some kind of special arrangement. And only 10 percentpaid to attend.

This may have something to do with the fact that we are all just starting to hit our summer strides, working hard trying to coax a few more dollars out of tourist’s wallets. Or maybe because the Film Festival seems a little too glitzy for many of our well-grounded neighbors. The flash. The stars. The long lines at the beauty salon to get done up. It’s a bit much for some.

But look at it from another perspective. Ours is a relatively low-key island. For the famous Hollywood types, I’m sure a trip to Nantucket for this event feels decidedly un-glitzy and quaint compared to what they deal with back in the real world. It all depends on where you’re coming from, I guess.

Seeing as there are probably more than a few filmmaker types at this week’s events, and seeing as I could always use a little extra dough, I thought I would take this opportunity to pitch a film project here in these pages on the off-chance that this paper gets purchased at the Hub by some powerful studio executive along with this week’s issue of Variety.

Okay.

This is kind of a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of thing. Ready?

The scene opens on a planning board meeting. Our hero, a young, strapping guy named Nat, is new to the proceedings. He’s well liked, mostly because he comes to people’s houses when their furnaces die and he fixes them. And he’s no stranger to speaking at town meeting, or writing well-thought-out letters to the local paper. At the planning board meeting in this local seaside town, Nat makes a motion for the board to consider bike lanes instead of bike paths.

And then something happens. Everyone on the board agrees with him.

“Strange…This has never happened before,” thinks Nat. “People actually…agree…with everything I say… hmmm… something’s not right.”

Nat launches into his own private, hush-hush investigation and finds that everyone who has ever disagreed with the planning board have been systematically replaced with strange potted plants. Plants that produce funny-shaped pods emitting a low hum and a faint smell of spoiled goat’s milk. The fumes from the plants have a hypnotic effect on the remaining board, as if they are controlled by some unseen malevolent force and are compelled to approve coffee drive-thrus and roundabouts. Only Nat, our hero, is immune.

It appears that all those years breathing propane fumes in people’s basements have allowed him to build up a resistance to funky smells that effect your judgment.

Nat sets out to destroy the plants and restore a sense of rancor and division on the planning board—it’s only natural after all.

But Nat’s plan is discovered by the board and the plants order them to take him up into their spaceship and experiment on him. Nat goes up in the spaceship, but they let him go free when he increases the efficiency on their flux-capacitor drive by 37 percent. And only charges them for parts.

In the end, Nat is revered by the space aliens and is made King of Nantucket.

So what do you think?

If it sells, I will give the editor & publisher of this newspaper 40 percent of the proceeds and 20 percent of the McDonald’s Happy Meal action figures, Saturday morning cartoon and coloring book licensing.

YACK on.

Grant Sanders is the host at www.yackon.com He hopes to see you there.