The Ned and Daron Report:
We're Going To Make Money, Totally!

I don’t really drink, but I was having a two dollar ten ounce coca-cola there in the bar when it hit me: I’m totally plastered on fun! It’s fun being in the bar in the hotel, and it’s fun knowing you have a room upstairs, and it’s really fun knowing that the next day you’re going to have to wake up at around three in the afternoon and put on a tuxedo. Why don’t I do this everyday? I wondered. It probably has something to do with money.

Dave, the groom, owns one of the most powerful and successful video game enterprises in all of Utah, the Kil-Blast Arcade. That’s why he’s constantly rolling in tons of really good loot that he doesn’t even have to do any work for. He just goes in every couple of weeks and picks up the huge buckets of money, hoists them into his trunk, and brings them home where he probably puts them in a tub and bathes in his zillions of sweet smelling quarters. He explained things to me in terms of video games. Well, actually he explained something to me about video games, and I extended an analogy to my present situation. He said, “Ned, lots of video game manufacturers have tried to improve their products in various ways over the years. Some have found incredibly exotic methods for rendering polygons, some have used robot voices, some have created bigger bosses that require more hits with super-weapons to kill, and some have worked hard to put your spaceship in surprising geographical locations such as underwater. But there’s really only one key that you need to know to create the perfect video game, and it’s not that hard to figure out: more bullets. As many bullets as possible.”

I’m pretty sure what he was telling me is that if you ever want to find success in life, you have to forget about creativity and artistic expression, trade it in for cheap thrills. That is, you have to learn not to satisfy yourself, but give the masses exactly what they want. I guess I’ve always known that that’s what you have to do - to “sell out” so to speak. But it wasn’t until I was sitting up there in that posh resort hotel with my laughing and delighted sell-out executive friends, drinking tiny drinks that each cost as much as I spend on food in an entire day, that I realized it’s totally worth it. I’m gonna sell out, totally.

But, as discouraged as we are by our dreams turning to shit after so much invested time, I really think maybe that selling out might be a big mistake, even at this late date in our writing career. I’ll admit that at first when you brought it up I was all totally thinking “Hell right, lets kick it!” but then I had this total flashback or memory-remembrance, about earlier this year when I got my January issue of Alternative Press in the mail...as you probably remember, the January issue featured System of a Down on the cover and had a super-intense readers poll dealing with what “artists” or performers the readers of AP hoped wouldn’t sell out in 2002, and not surprisingly, topping the list were both Incubus and ICP. Can you imagine how hurt we would be if we found out that Incubus or ICP sold out just to make a little more money or to get some free popcorn?

However, despite this, I think your philosophy of “more bullets” is the smartest thing I’ve ever heard of in my entire life. And we should ask ourselves, as writers how can we use more bullets? Well, for one thing we could say things faster and a lot more frequently. Like, words could spew out of our mouths like bullets spewing out of a really fast spaceship. But I don’t think we should think of it as selling out. Instead, we should just expand our vision and start working on other projects that we are just as passionate about as we are the Ned and Daron report. Just today I have already started researching a few writing projects if you are interested in working with me on them, including a fictional story about Norman Reedus as an international basketball celebrity, another one which is a factual account of the band Styx and how before they formed a band, they were all scientists working for the U.S. government in top-secret underground laboratories, and one about how I think that the Utah Jazz’s Karl Malone might be a real big bigot.

For a second that made me worry quite a bit, but then I thought, “okay, if I go over to my window right now, right this second, and look outside there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll see Norman Reedus smoking a cigarette of doobage. But there’s no way in hell I’ll see him bouncing a little ball, being a professional NBA basketball star.” So, obviously your story can’t be set in this second. Present day basketball rules don’t have to apply.

So, how about this:

Norman pushed up the sleeve of his black leather jacket, looked at his watch for the third time in a minute, then stood and walked to the other side of Dr. DeYoung’s office where there was a reading rack. He leafed through the trashy women’s magazines and tabloids until he found a copy of Variety, which he sometimes liked looking at for nostalgic reasons. He pulled it out, straightened the cover and checked to see which issue it was. It was dated December 2009.

“Holy shit.” The highly trained, critically acclaimed former actor’s double take was flawless. He turned the magazine over in disbelief with his free hand while rubbing his cheek with his cigarette hand. Seeing a magazine a few years old in a doctor’s office wasn’t so surprising - Norman wasn’t even necessarily shocked by the fact that this one was coincidentally “his” issue, the one that proclaimed him the greatest actor of the first decade of the 21st century. What was shocking was that this magazine was actually over seven years old.

Norman quickly performed subtraction. Yes, his memory was correct. This magazine hit newsstands over a year and a half before the Zaxonian invasion in 2011, which meant it was printed well before the time Professor Gog had ordered all historical human communications destroyed. The Professor’s army of smokebots (assisted to a great degree by a space-bred strain of paper-eating bacteria that had more or less completely covered the earth’s surface for two weeks in 2012) had carried out his orders quite thoroughly, converting libraries, bookstores, newsstands, and every private bookshelf in the world into pools of recyclable gray paper slurry. Movies and video recordings hadn’t been spared from the attack either. In fact, this second prong of the decimation of human history had really affected Norman’s life.

The magazine Norman held in his hand brought it all rushing back: his gradual and difficult rise to prominence as Hollywood’s foremost weasly tough-guy/coolie; his struggle to break with typecasting and his eventual first role as a true romantic leading man in 2004; his first Oscar, his second, his third; and then, finally, the alien invasion that had tragically and violently slowed his career momentum. It was as if he’d been a powerful locomotive, racing forward at full throttle, and when his entire body of work -- his history as an actor -- was destroyed, it was like the tracks abruptly disappeared out from under him, leaving him without direction or any way to get from here to there. He resented the Zaxonians a great deal for what they’d done. The depression and hopelessness he’d felt on the realization that no soul could ever again witness the mighty accomplishment of films such as Deuces Wild had virtually destroyed him. He became disillusioned, weak, and felt painfully uncomfortable and purposeless acting in front of a camera. He eventually lost all interest in what had once been his greatest passion.

Ironically, it was the Zaxonians who saved his life just when it seemed over. In 2013 Professor Gog made several changes to the basketball rulebook so that the game would play just a bit more like his favorite Zaxonian sport, burnstick-nojump. Norman had always been pretty good at sports, but luckily the new basketball rules just happened to favor all his strengths and eliminate all of his weaknesses. That first season he managed to walk on with the LA Lakers and instantly become one of their key players.

Norman remembered those first few seasons fondly. Like his acting career, basketball had been a struggle at first. Many fans and sports commentators were slow to accept the new changes, but after the third season (and the Lakers’ first championship under the new rules, brought about largely be Norman’s own expert playing) it was becoming common knowledge that new basketball was two to three hundred times more exciting than the old kind. New basketball had very quickly come into its own.

Now, Norman Reedus, the normally cool and confident star of earth’s favorite and most privileged sport, stood in a simple, unassuming doctor’s office staring at a magazine, and feeling ill at ease. This magazine was completely illegal. Not only was it illegal, but as far as he knew its very existence was absolutely impossible. He’d already heard vague rumors from some of his teammates about the brilliant but mysterious and strangely sinister Dr. DeYoung, the Lakers’ official particle psychiatrist. Now he was even more nervous about this, his first visit to the doctor. He glanced at the empty waiting room behind him, then folded the magazine in half and shoved it into his inside jacket pocket. As he did so, he felt the cold steel butt of the other illegal item he carried there, a black-market multidirectional blaster. He closed his jacket tight, and the weight of the gun pressing against his chest was comforting. He congratulated himself for following his instincts and bringing it along to his appointment.

To be honest, Ned, I am not totally convinced that smoking isn’t allowed on the basketball field, so I think that, most likely, Reedus would be just letting his cigarette dangle out of his mouth when he is doing fancy ball bouncing or shooting with both his hands. When he is only using one hand to shoot or pass the ball, most likely he would be using his other hand to put on a leather jacket or something.

Maybe we could also say that the reason Reedus is such a great basketball player is because his mother would leave his cigarettes in the net of their basketball basket when he was younger since she couldn’t afford to buy him very many packs a week, and she didn’t want him to stunt his growth. Or, what about if he had super-bionic legs to carry him up to the basket, or maybe his legs could be made out of rubber and he will stretch around players and up to the basket to slam that ball right into their dunk.

I don’t know, though, maybe your idea is better, or at least a little more interesting. Whichever idea we go with, I think it would be smart to make it into a screenplay. I think that is where the real money is found. If we go with your idea, maybe we could get Sean Connery to play the older, basketball-playing Reedus. If not, maybe that guy who played Faceman from the A-Team...and if not him, maybe the guy who played Murdock.

I think it’s okay to have sporty characters in movies. I even think it’s okay to have an entire movie about people being good at sports. But I wondered if just sports were enough for our movie. Maybe it might be good to have the movie be about Norman Reedus, who happens to be a pro-basketball player, but the central conflict in the movie wasn’t specifically basketball related. I thought the thing that would be the most exciting of all would be to have a movie where an awesome sports character uses sports to save the entire world, maybe the entire universe, from destruction or fascist tyranny.

I’m sure you probably figured most of this out, but what was going to happen in my story was that Dr. DeYoung would turn out to be Dennis DeYoung of Styx. The reason his copy of Variety had survived the paper eating virus was obviously because it had been with him in a top-secret underground lab. In that lab they probably (among other things) were developing biological weapons, and so it had to be completely, hermetically sealed off from the outside world. Anyway, I was going to have it so that Dr. DeYoung had intentionally applied for the job as The Lakers’ chief particle psychiatrist so that he could recruit top basketball players for what would become earth’s first burnstick-nojump team. Norman would join the team, and they’d be so good (particularly with Norman’s stretchy rubber stunt legs) that they’d go on to beat all the other teams from all the planets in the quadrant. This would allow them to move on to the galaxy wide tournament on planet Zaxon. Once they were there, Dr. DeYoung (who would travel with the team to provide psychiatric emergency medicine) and Norman could work together to implement some kind of doomsday plan that would destroy Zaxon and free earth from tampering aliens forever.

Of course, along the way Norman and others would shoot out lots of bullets from multidirectional blasters that wouldn’t be very accurate, but would be extremely effective at killing many people (or aliens) at once. At the end of the movie, the Zaxonian king would be revealed. He’d be this giant CGI devil type creature that would require many many hits with the multidirectional blasters (and perhaps other guns and bombs that characters would pick up in the course of the film) before he would die.

Hey Ned, what if his blaster shot mini-basketballs instead of bullets? And what if the Zaxonian King’s only weakness was that he had a huge blowhole out of the top of his head, and at the end of the film, when a lot of people are distracting the King by shooting at him with lots of bullets (or basketball bullets if you think that sounds cool) from their multidirectional blasters, Reedus could totally slam dunk a basketball right into his body? That would be so awesome. I give that a 12/12.