A Tale of Triumph over Tragedy
The script had come a long way - long enough for us to get Jeff Bridges to spend a day of his own time in a Santa Monica sound studio with us, getting the voice track down.
But we felt the script needed even more. We wanted to streamline the story, to strengthen the narrative spine and make it funnier.
Screenwriter Adam Trunell was just out of the Disney screen writing fellowship and after playing weekly hands of Poker with him, I knew he wasn't just Poker smart, but had the right sensibility for the film.
Together, we did yet another draft of the script. And another.
We toiled over the tale of a character who sees poetry in the way he waters his plants, who on the one hand lives in a world of his own making, and on the other hand is perfectly in synch with his time and place. Be that place Cuba, during the pre-revolution diaspora, in Stan Lee's office at Timely comics in 1950s Manhattan, in the "Mad Men" scene of Madison Avenue during the mass media boom, in Stanley Kubrick's Strangelove set in London, in Pablo's "factory-like" loft on Second Avenue, or all the way across the country to Malibu in the Seventies, where he moved to make Harold & Maude with Hal Ashby.
Pablo soars from Madison Avenue to Hollywood, samples the best
champagne and the best grass, but one day finds himself at the wrong end of the barrel of a smoking gun. Pablo gets shot by a mysterious stranger who
shows up at his Second Avenue loft. He tries to close the metal door,
but half of the bullet splinters off and ricochets into three walls
before hitting him in the neck. Pablo falls down in a wet crunch. The Sixties escapism and utopia he embodied comes crushing down with
an injury that almost claims his life
Life punches Pablo's easy spirit hard and knocks him on his ass, and the movie takes a dramatic turn. But like all true heroes, Pablo gets back up, wraps a red scarf around the injury on his neck and keeps on swinging. Triumph over tragedy. And that's our story.
