Hollywood is not fair. Anyone who tells you that Hollywood is like a giant engine and the fuel is ideas, and the best ideas are like premium gasoline and if you have a great idea you can charge $3.45 a gallon is lying to you. I know he’s lying to you on account of I’ve seen Hollywood’s dark, rotting underbelly. I’ve seen it, and it’s just revolting.

For one thing, if ideas are so important in Hollywood, then why do they keep making movies based on books? This year alone you’ve got Alice in Wonderland, Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Iron Man 2, and a bunch of others. Also, why do they keep making movies based on old TV shows? What — you think they’re not? Hello, there is a movie version of The A-Team coming out this summer, and there will soon be a movie of Gilligan’s Island. Also, they make movies based on old toys. Transformers and G.I. Joe were only the beginning. There’s also going to be a Stretch Armstrong movie. And if you think that’s bad, there will also be movies based on board games like Monopoly and Battleship. More like “Monotony” and “Battleshit,” if you ask me.

Original movies like Avatar are few and far between. That’s why it’s so hard for me to get my movie made. It is a wonderfully original film idea, about these aliens who live on a world where they wear suits, sort of like skin-tight space suits like they used to wear in old sci-fi magazine illustrations; that are made from a material that you can see through. So they’re basically invisible when they wear this stuff. There are two rival armies who are fighting each other, only they’ve been fighting so long that they’ve forgotten why (it’s metaphorical, because war is pointless). Well, a man from one army and a woman from the other fall in love with each other. It’s forbidden love. They use their invisibility suits — the suits they’re supposed to wear for fighting — so that they can hook up. Again, it’s a metaphor; they’re using their “war suits” to help them make love. And the way they make love on this planet is by pooing in each others’ mouths.

Everywhere I’ve submitted this idea it’s met with rejection. Nobody wants originality anymore; they want the same old comic book stuff that everyone’s already seen. One guy I submitted it to, a producer of some renown, was particularly insulting: “Ricky, this is a movie about invisible people shitting in each others’ mouths. No one would want to watch this — it’s literally a shitty idea.”

When a Hollywood producer says you have a “shitty” idea, what he really means is you have an original idea and he is afraid of it. My movie has a powerful message (love overcomes war), it has cool special effects (space ships, alien worlds, invisibility suits), and romance (pooing in mouths). This movie has it all. The fact that I can’t get it made is evidence of how far Hollywood has fallen.

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Ricky Sprague

Ricky Sprague occasionally writes and/or draws things. He sometimes animates things. He has a Twitter account and he has a blog. He scripted this graphic novel about Kolchak The Night Stalker. He is really, really good at putting links in bios.

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