DAY SHOT, CAPITOL: Long view of front door
CLOSE-UP: A group of Secret Service men, armed agents in blue blazers with FBI emblazoned on back, move into sunlight, pulling impeached Donald Trump, shackled head and wrists.
BEHIND THEM: Sean Spicer (Danny DeVito) stumbles out the door, his eyes full of tears, red-faced, with two agents holding him up.
LONG SHOT: Spicer is followed by Steve Bannon (John Goodman), Kellyanne Conway (Kate McKinnon) and Omarosa Manigault (Taraji P. Henson) all in leg and wrist shackles, frog walked over the wet grass.
CLOSE-UP: Kellyanne stumbles and falls; Steve Bannon rushes to help her up. She is in tears. Sean Spicer is tripped by an unknown reporter and falls into wet spring grass.
Steve Bannon throws Kellyanne over his shoulder in firefighter style and steps over Sean’s body, followed by agents and reporters, who also step over him without offering assistance.
Prisoners are helped into waiting black vans.
CUT.
If you think this scenario is far-fetched and something I just made up, you’ve spent too much time streaming “Downton Abbey.”
That piece of a script is only one example of the hundreds of similar scripts on the laptops of writers huddled over their writing desks, from the canyons of West Hollywood to the posh beach houses at Malibu.
What with subpoenas flying back and forth from Moscow to Mar-a-Lago, history is in the making, and Hollywood wants to get a jump on it.
My Hollywood agent daughter claims there is blood in the water at many prestige writing agencies, with top writers and beginners all hawking their own versions of what they’re seeing as the final hours of the Trump administration.
I have been getting tweets from some of my old writing colleagues, many now in retirement villages across the country. Two, now living in semi-retirement in Havana, Cuba, where they tell me knee replacements are cheaper than in Hollywood, asked me to come and join them and help write their Trump finale scripts. “J.P, the plantains and Gefilte fish are out of this world,” Bernie Goldman writes.
Morris Pearlman, with whom I used to write comedy scripts, and who I thought was dead, is actually alive and working part time as a busboy in a Jewish retirement village in Santa Monica.
Morris keeps calling my daughter and asking if she has an extra ribbon for his old Royal so he can write his own true story, citing that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner never actually had a bar mitzvah.
With 30 years in Hollywood, I still have direct contacts with aging and semi-cognitive buddies. They say that independent filmmakers like the Coen Brothers, Martin Scorsese, and David Fincher are canceling vacations, lunches with Russian diplomats, and even destination weddings in Belize to get in on the dust swirling around the fall of the House of Trump.
It’s whispered that independent star Tilda Swinton (”Doctor Strange,” “Hail Caesar”) is being considered by the Coens to play Kellyanne Conway. That’s still unconfirmed. Kellyanne is suing to play herself. The Coens say she’s not the right type. That’s Hollywood.
Woody Allen, for his project, is trying to bring ’40s star Betty Hutton out of retirement to play Kellyanne. When told that Betty died in 2007, Woody replied, “Is she still dead?”
Kellyanne replied, “I can play dead.”
Meanwhile, ’50s heart-throb Tab Hunter’s agent is in meetings to have Tab considered for the leading role of Donald Trump himself, but Ivanka wants Tom Hanks to play her father. “He plays all the heroes,” she said.
Trump himself can’t be located. It’s rumored that his bail was met by someone in the Russian embassy, and he’s purportedly tweeting from an unknown location in Ukraine. Air Force One is still missing.
STREET SCENE, END OF DAY: While Trump and Mike Pence and their entire Cabinet are in court waiting to be booked, 10 black SUVs idle in driveway at the South Gate to the White House, where Nancy Pelosi (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) and alt-left Supreme Court nominee-in-waiting Barack Obama (David Oywelo) are enjoying take-out Chinese and Cokes while waiting for a flashlight signal from a window in the West Wing before they start moving in files and furniture. Who has the flashlight?
CLOSE-UP on the next vice president-in-waiting holding flashlight.
OMG! Are they serious?
CUT. BLACK OUT. ROLL CREDITS.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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