<![CDATA[io9: drunken pitch master]]> http://tags.lifehacker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png <![CDATA[io9: drunken pitch master]]> http://io9.com/tag/drunkenpitchmaster http://io9.com/tag/drunkenpitchmaster <![CDATA[Rush Of Alien Will To The Head]]> Welcome to Drunken Pitch Master, where Meredith consumes many fruity drinks, and scrawls her latest Hollywood blockbuster ideas on cocktail napkins — then later carefully transcribes them into blog posts. This week's pitch: A Rush Of Alien Will To The Head, a story that follows a gaggle of groupies as they stumble upon an age-old secret alien plot to toy with human minds through pop music. Oh, and someone gets Bon Jovied. Here's my pitch...

Four twenty-something girls named Mandy, Tammy, Tina and Casey have been friends forever. They share everything from schoolbooks, clothes and boyfriends, to their one-person bedroom in Los Angeles. But most importantly they share (or it would appear that they did) a love of pop music. Ever since they could crawl they've been trying to get backstage to meet their favorite pop idols. Now in LA, they have access to it all and spend every waking minute, when they're not working backstage, living the glory as a groupie in 2008. Yet one of their members (Tammy) has been secretly hiding her better taste in music and slowly dreading their backstage trysts with terrible overpaid rockstars. She's forced to hide bootleg copies of Radiohead and the like under the one mattress in their apartment (but more on that later).

The girls live through their days drinking, dancing and fawning over rock stars, until Tammy starts to rebel against the sheepish trends of society. She no longer wants to wear what everyone else wants to, or buy what everyone else tells her to. Little does she know it's because she's stopped listening to the bad pop music. But Tammy is first tipped off to a higher power at work, when she's backstage at the Jonas Brothers concert and she sees one of the Brothers smash his own head into a wall until it bursts into little metal bits. But moments later he's on stage, performing and looking fine.

Tammy convinces the rest of the girls to investigate and they each share their own past experiences, where the rockstars they shack up with did something strange, like twitch out of control, make robot noises or shut down completely. The four girls use their powers of persuasion to uncover this mystery and even manage to add the band Coldplay to their Scooby gang to help solve some strange answers about other musicians in the biz.

They follow the story all the way to the top of the record companies, which they find are secretly operated by aliens. Pop music has been used to subdue and weaken the public masses for years, so that a superior alien race can toy with human will, Sims style. Which is why so many popular tracks from famous artists sound the same. Most of the rockstars of the past are actually brainwashed people forced to become pop rockers. In fact it's revealed that Aerosmith's entire Big Ones album was actually a desperate plea for sweet death. The gang plays "Love In An Elevator," and you can actually hear Steven Tyler beg for mercy. We later discover that the Aliens silenced him with a mind wiping procedure done to the singer's face, called "A Huge Mistake." The treatment has also been applied to many other musicians like Axel Rose, Cher and Liza Minelli. The reason the aliens wanted to have mind control over humans is simple: they were bored, and it was fun to watch us do whatever they told us no matter how ridiculous.

But the girls discover that the aliens are now experimenting with using robots instead of humans for pop stars, because humans were always so unpredictable. An unfortunate problem with the robot rock stars is all of their music tends to sound the same. Then in an unexpected turn, members of Coldplay then rip off their faces to reveal that they are actually robot slaves of the aliens as well. Also Chris Gaines was the first ever slave-robot-musician, but he defected and split into two equally awful personalities. The robots tie up our heroes and begin a long monolog that explains that moaning and groaning about love and clocks has made them hunger to experience the act of love as well, and they want to test it, right now.

Problem is these robots only know love through their wah-wah soft rock music. So after tying down the ladies to a big fluffy bed the robots climb on top and start to screech and cry about their feelings, believing that this is human love-making (and to be fair they're not totally wrong in some cases). After hours of mind numbing talk that we are all yellow and how they yearn for the speed of sound, the girls trick robot Coldplay into untying them, after the girls lie and claim that they've been moved by the robots "love making," and want to return the favor with a "fix you" happy ending. The robots obliged and our heroes turned and beat the robots over the head with their own instruments, in a moving poetic death.

The girls seem free and clear until the big-wigs are called in, and the girls are ensnared by an alien tractor beam. They get sent to a remote location in Delaware where the girls undergo the highest form of mind control, and get Bon Jovied, Clockwork Orange-style. The ladies are tied up again and forced to withstand horrific condition. After a month of the highest form of mind control (days of "Wanted" and "Living On A Prayer") the girl's minds buckle and they give in to their Alien captors wishes and become The Pussy Cat Dolls. I know what you're thinking: "But they like pop music!" True, but no sound mind can stand that much Jersey rock — you'd go mad.

The final scene shows all the girls on stage scantily clad and shaking their asses to the delight of a stadium packed with fans. Note everyone in the audience is covered in labels and dressed exactly like the PCD girls. At the end of "I Want To Be A Hooker," or some sort of number like that, you zoom in to the caked on make-uped face of Tammy. She's smiling like a lunatic and waving to the crowd, but when you look closer a single tear runs down the side of her face.

Fin

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<![CDATA[Drunken Pitch Master: Finding Glory]]> Welcome to Drunken Pitch Master, where Meredith consumes many fruity drinks, and scrawls her latest Hollywood blockbuster ideas on cocktail napkins — then later carefully transcribes them into blog posts. This week's pitch: Finding Glory, the time-traveling scifi prequel to the Academy Award winning movie Glory. Starring Julia Roberts as the time traveler, Denzel Washington as a cyborg, and Matthew Broderick as, well, another cyborg. Here's the idea: basically it's the Civil War with cyborg soldiers, plus scenes where Roberts goes bottomless for the first time on film! Here's my pitch . . .

Finding Glory:
This scifi epic explains the origins of the Union's 54th regiment from Massachusetts. Contrary to popular belief, the all-black troop was assembled by a time-traveling doctoral student, Mary 2669 (Julia Roberts), and her companion cyborgs from the future.

In the year 2126 there is no crime or hatred, so in order to understand these negative human emotions, students travel back in time and involve themselves minimally in many historical affairs. Mary 2669 is a doctoral student who teleports back to the Civil War era with two companion cyborgs #1 and #2 (Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington) to learn about war, hate, death and racism. At first they keep their distance from the primitives, but then something goes haywire with the teleportation device and the three are trapped in Civil War times.

New to these emotional displays, a passionate Mary vows to end hatred here and now and teach the world a lesson. She enlists the help of her cyborg companions and brazenly organizes the first all-black regiment, to demonstrate unity and anti-racism to the Union troops. Knowing she won't be able to command the regiment herself (being a woman), she puts her male cyborgs on it. She disguises Broderick as Major Cabot Forbes, and Denzel as Private Trip. Not wanting them to stand out, Mary makes sure they are in fact the most stereotypical characters they can be: the prissy, rich white guy trying to win the love of a struggling misunderstood black man. From behind the scenes Mary pulls the strings and uses her futuristic free-love attitude which coincidentally leads to her bottom half's big moment (we'll fill in the details on that once we have a script writer).

She takes on the last name Pitcher, and claims to be related to Molly Pitcher's family (stupid future person), but is still the brains of the 54th regiment. In order to unify the regiment Mary programs a back story of hate and mistrust into both #1 and #2, pitting them both against one another. Slowly they demonstrate to the rest of the regiment that by working together they can gain one another's trust. Unfortunately for #1 and #2 while acting out their programmed roles they both realize that they too are slaves, to the future human race. The cyborgs begin to "feel" and emote in new ways, and adopt the 54th's quest for freedom as their own.

But since Mary went quite wild with her past-meddling (i.e. building a regiment) by the time her teleportation device is fixed, cyborgs from the future (in Confederate Garb but more like the T2 terminator) come back to the 1800s with the intent to kill Mary. She flees and leaves her borg friends in the midst of the civil war and without any of their necessary re-charging equipment. #1 and #2 carry on, firmly committed to winning freedom both for the North and from Mary, until their batteries run out at the Battle Of Fort Wagner. In the original Glory, it looks like they're shot, but really they just powered off. Mary is then sent on a wild a desperate chase over river and mountain running for her life all the while trying to escape the Confederate cyborg death squads. Lots of carriage chasing and horse-back riding ensue. Including one robot that just turns into a centaur and chases her through most of Georgia and starts a big fire.

Finally she is saved by Sgt. Maj. John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) who reveals himself as a wise old cyborg from a future so far ahead, Mary cannot comprehend it. He takes her in and explains to her that they have been watching her and while her quest was noble, it was also reckless and aggressive. He then explains that most people who live in the the 1800s are actually cyborgs from the future and that everything is cyclical, or some sort of Life Lesson like that. OK, so this is sort of a prequel and sort of a sequel rolled into one, so maybe we can make it two movies that come out within months of each other because that worked really well with the Matrix sequels.

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