"How wonderfully marvelous!"
********************
(THIS MOVIE IS TO PLAY OUT LIKE
A
MIX
OF HISTORICAL FACT & FICTION BECAUSE
HE ACTUALLY DID TOUR
AMERICA ON
THE
LECTURE CIRCUIT IN 1882!)
Opening screen, 19th century smokestacks belching pollution rudely
Cut to shot of laborers
working in a foundry, swinging sledge-hammers as molten steel glows with
incandescence. Blousy Irishmen covered with filth, hollering and laughing with
the clink of metal on metal in the hell and the heat-- truly a rough and
insensitive bunch!
Cut to knee-level shot of hogs being driven through the crowded city street, snorfling along. A coach with a team of horses gets interrupted, the animals rearing up on their hind legs, and the driver starts screaming at the porcine traffic with curses
Cut to shot of surly policeman leaning up against a post, swinging around his nightstick with idleness-- not seeming to notice or care. In the air is the whiff of rotting garbage piled knee-high along the side of the streets. . . . . dregs of the city, laws of the world!
THIS IS SUDDENLY CONTRASTED BY--
A 19th century magazine illustration, woman laying out by a spring with a langorous air, practically in a death agony with trilling sound of piano, dwelling on the melancholy of it all. Perhaps there is even the sound of a harp, like man has fallen from "The Garden" and the apple of knowledge lays out of his dead hand with a bite taken out of it. Oh, the exquisite pathos of life!
Narration: In the course of every high civilization, dear viewer, there are the decadent movements-- a throb of plushy romantic stirrings that lounges on so many cushions smelling of perfume, that it falls in on itself and can't get back up. A fatal affliction, a laughable affliction to so many milling around in the slime of the streets. To hear the social Darwnists tell it, the upward evolution of society is always brought about by struggle. However, when one doesn't struggle and goes "soft", they quickly degenerate into a lower state. . . . ."
Cut to shot of hoary old 19th century professor lecturing before a college about the reigning ideas of the day:
"Gentleman, if this present course of behavior continues, eventually we shall swing from the trees by the tail like ring-tailed baboons!"
Cut to shot of 19th century caricature of a romantic young monkey staring lovingly at a sunflower
Voice of professor overlays upon the picture: "Truly it is the decline of the race!"
Narration Continues: "So it was with the fads and representative fancies of the well-born and well-heeled to spend their days seeking refinement away from the remorseless clank of the modern industrial age, to seek some kind of answer away from the spade of earth shoveled sadly into their cold graves beyond this vale of fashion, fretting, and too much free time"
"Out of this scene came Oscar Wilde, a Dubliner who found a patron among the rich young women who were taken by his flowing long hair and poetry of depthful sensitivity"
Cut to shot of Oscar Wilde in drawing room with women fawning around him
Oscar Wilde utters on about the virtues of light pewter colors, and china tea cups sitting on the mantel, and oh-don't-you-know that beauty and socialism is needed in this age of heavy industry, and that we should always be surrounded with flowers
Cut to shot of woman writing in a journal late at night: "His voice was languid, soft, and pleasant like the sea-- and holding his hand was rather like the clinging of a vine"
Cut to shot of production of H.M.S. Pinafore, the famous musical by Gilbert & Sullivan when characters are going "Never? What never!" with bloated English pomposity. The proper audience is laughing. Children out in the street are repeating that line as newspaper men laugh in their offices. Why, it is the newest thing!
Cut to shot of steamship and underheader that reads, "Meanwhile, across the ocean in America. . . . ."
This time, the musical is played in a cheap Vaudville house, vulgar people in the audience laughing raucously at the bastardized "Never? What Never!" number-- demanding that the second-rate actors come out and do it all over again. As the song rolls up again, a family up on the second-floor balcony eats chicken and throws the bones down into the pit below, where it bounces off the bowler hats of the audience
Cut to shot of door that reads Gilbert & Sullivan
A fat man wearing an eyeshade rushes in and worries that "They're stealing our work and cutting into our royalties!"
The authors look to the clerk and then look to each other and utter, "Oh America, what has become of thou? It is to be expected. Let us hope that they don't get their grubby hands onto our new play!"
Cut to shot of English stage where they're mildly parodying the Oscar Wilde's of the world, a comedy of good manners as the audience politely laughs
Cut to shot of steamship and underheader that reads, "Meanwhile, across the ocean in America. . . . ."
This time in the same Vaudeville house they're vulgarly playing a burlesque of the act as the audience laughs and drinks beer from their mugs
Cut to shot of man reading newspaper, and laughing at the caricature of aesthete-as-monkey
"Why, they eat their own flowers over there in England! Give me a good porterhouse steak!"
A fat man wearing an eyeshade rushes in and worries that "They're stealing our work and cutting into our royalties again!"
The authors look to the clerk and then look to each other and utter, "Oh, dear God!" What can possibly stop this?"
They pause and think
The clerk figures that when they brought "THE AUTHORIZED VERSION" over to America with advertising and promotion, they were able to make the best out of a bad situation.
They ask themselves, "What if we could send Oscar Wilde on a lecture tour through America 'to prime the pump'?"
Cut to shot of Oscar Wilde in
the court of Lily Langtry, an English beauty and society lady. He fawns over
her, and reads a poem as she sits there like a charming queen:
Lily of Love, pure and inviolate,In a languid voice he tells her that she is the most beautiful woman in Europe, and how he slept in her doorway so she might step over him like a sleeping mastiff. Why, he even wears a lily in the buttonhole of his coat as an expression of his love. In turn, she tells him that he has the ideal face of Hamlet
Tower of Ivory, red rose of fire
As she walks down the street people gaze at her and follow. She wraps a piece of black velvet around a hat, puts a quill on it and shows up at a society function. In short order, all the stores are selling "The Langtry hat" in the shop window
In a drawing room, admirers talk about how Oscar Wilde and the aesthetes are bringing on "an English Renaissance"
Oscar Wilde raves about "the intensity" of Romeo and Juliet as pulled off by actors of the day. He says:
"Irving's legs are limpid and utter. Both are delicately intellectual, but his left leg is a poem"
Cut to shot of English bourgeois scratching their heads over the newspaper account. Is he serious, or is he speaking in jest? They smirk and go back to their business, a man sitting in a smoking chair as his wife reads out-loud.
"They and their vapid vegetable loves!" the husband remarks.
Back to Gilbert & Sullivan snapping their fingers in unison
"It's capitalism, pure & simple!"
Cut to shot of boat sailing across the ocean to America
The ship lays at port, the gangplank lowered as passengers walk down onto the American shores. Reporters are swarming at the dock, waiting for Oscar Wilde to emerge. They remark that this is bigger than Jumbo the elephant that Barnum was trying to bring over, newer than Colonel Tom Thumb. Eventually Oscar walks across the railing, and he's quite unmistakable-- tall, wide, with a bottle-green fur-lined overcoat with a fur collar, yellow kid gloves, and a round sealskin cap from which his long hair flows. Down the gangplank he goes.
"Mr. Wilde! Mr. Wilde!"
"Greetings and Salutations" the poet utters generously, with a languid air
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-Eight"
"What did you come to America for, Mr. Wilde?"
"To lecture at Chickering Hall, and elsewhere if the public approves of my philosophy. Also to produce a play on Nihilism"
"And what are Aesthetics?" demands a reporter
Oscar responds with a big British "Haw-Haw", slightly uncomfortable, before going into a mini-lecture:
"Aesthetics, you know, are the science of the beautiful. In this modern movement there is search after the true, you know. Aestheticism is sort of a correlation of all the arts, trying to discover the inner secret of life. Man is hungry for beauty and the need must be filled"
The reporters ask him about that grain elevator in the distance, but Oscar explains that he's too nearsighted to make it out and will investigate later. The reporters get bored and then start asking him flippant questions
"Do you like eggs fried on both sides or only on one side?"
"Do you trim your finger-nails in the style of the Empress of Japan?"
"When do you get up in the morning?"
Cut to shot of Oscar Wilde writing a letter, his exasperated voice-over:
"The Americans are not uncivilized, as they are so often said to be, they are decivilized. And remember: bad manners make a journalist. One impudently interrogated me as to the temperature preferred for my tub and said that he had been told that I always had the water slightly colored with triple essence of roses"
The reporters eventually left Oscar to be by himself and go off to interview other passengers how the poet had behaved on the way over. One mentions how Oscar had talked of how much he admired a Roumanian gypsy girl among the immigrants below. He said sometimes wished he were a gypsy. He had used expressions like "superlatively aesthetic" and "consummately soulful". The passengers snicker at this. They ask the captain what he thinks of the ship's exalted guest. He replies gruffly that "I wish I had that man lashed to the bowspirit on the windward side". There was another passenger who said that Oscar had complained because "the roaring ocean does not roar" and "I care not for this tame, monotonous trip". The reporters grin widely and scribble it down. That's the stuff!
Cut to shot of Oscar stopped at customs, people are looking on. They whisper that he must surely sleep in lace nightgowns. The luggage is opened, and there are no lace nightgowns. The customs inspector with a wax handle-bar mustache asks if he has anything to declare.
"Nothing, except for my genius"
(End of Demo)
*******************
© 2008 by Insufferable Industries
Drop "The Bard" a line at
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