You Will Never See These Movies

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All throughout college, I was obsessed with movies: indies, old film noir, underground and cult works, and whatever I could find from Japan, China, and Taiwan. For a long time, I wanted to make movies, too, and I co-directed one in college (“Mardi Gras Baltimore,” now thankfully lost to time) and partially directed another that failed due to camera issues. I maintained my obsession for a year or two after graduation, briefly interning on the set of Three Seasons in Ho Chi Minh City and nagging a visiting friend to import a 16mm Krasnogorsk-3 camera—the one that had failed during the college shoot—for a short film that obviously never materialized.

For a whole lot of reasons, I never went into the movie business, chief among them that I did not have the stamina to wake up early and work as a PA, or labor for peanuts as an assistant in Hollywood, or write specs scripts in my spare time. I just did not want it enough.

But that never stopped me from thinking about making movies. Over the years I’ve thought of dozens of movies that could be made—that should be made—and while I clearly don’t have the energy to turn them into reality, a few of them have stuck in my head. I may not make them, but I want to see them. They might not be great, but they’d be hella entertaining. Here’s three:

We open at the Oscars, and it’s the biggest anyone has ever seen: The movies this year have been phenomenal, and every star you can imagine has been nominated—Tom Cruise, Idris Elba, Daniel Craig, Denzel, Streep, Kidman, Mirren, Yeoh. Every writer and producer and director you’ve ever heard of is in the audience, spanning generations of Hollywood talent, from 90-something-year-old funny Jews to teenage up-and-comers. Musicians, costume designers, special effects artisans—this is the absolute crème de la crème. And at the end of the night, just as they’re about to announce the Oscar for Best Picture, tragedy strikes: Terrorists blow up the entire block, killing every single one of them, including dozens of media pros covering them, and wiping out Hollywood’s entire upper tier.

Our story follows Hollywood’s attempt to put itself back together—because the industry requires it—with the writers, directors, actors, and producers who just simply couldn’t hack it in the old world but who are all that’s left in the new. We home in on a group of half a dozen or so who’ve been handed the reins to a studio (whichever one is producing this), and we follow their calamitous attempts to create anything worth watching. Some are pretentiously arty, others hams, still others simply liars and fakers. They’re better than Ed Wood, certainly, but the big thing is: They just don’t know how to be stars.

As their plight becomes more dire—if they fail, Hollywood fails!—they receive sudden and unexpected guidance from a man in a hoodie and sunglasses, who seems, more than anyone they’ve encountered, to understand what it takes to create high-end entertainment for the masses. He trains them, dresses them, teaches them how the movie business really works, and they slowly improve, developing charisma, storytelling abilities, and the chutzpah necessary to rule Los Angeles. Eventually, he will be revealed to be Tom Cruise himself, and we’ll remember seeing him having sneaked out of the Oscars at a key moment; he’s stayed hidden so long because he’s hiding from fame and enjoying anonymity.

The movie ends, once again, at the Oscars two years later. (The first anniversary was just a three-hour “In Memoriam” montage.) It’s Best Picture time once again, and we see extended clips from the five movies our new crew of D-listers have created: a romcom, a serious drama, a sci-fi fantasy, an animated movie, and an art film. As host Jimmy Fallon—a born-and-bred D-lister—is just about to announce the winner, terrorists strike once again, killing all in attendance, and setting up the inevitable sequel.

Why it couldn’t be made: It’s not that the movie is predicated on killing everyone in Hollywood. (Honestly, Hollywood wants to see that happen!) It’s that the way movies are produced has changed so much since I conceived of this one that the A-list no longer has such power. If everyone there died, the actual YouTube and TikTok stars would just take over. It would suck, and wouldn’t be as funny, but that’s how it would go.

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One fine day in April, the U.S. Congress is going about its daily business—infighting, extortion, sexual assault, but also voting on a key piece of legislation that will either offer a path to citizenship for unauthorized migrants or end forever the possibility of legal migration to the United States. Naturally, this process is interrupted by terrorists, who seize the entire Capitol building and take hostage everyone inside—all 535 congresspeople plus the vice president.

Who will save Congress? Obviously, it’s the dry cleaner. An undocumented immigrant himself, he just happened to be delivering a load of clean suits to the sponsor of the bill (or maybe its antagonist?) when the terrorists attacked, and he’s stuck in the middle of it, aided only by the bill-sponsor’s deputy chief of staff, who needs to be a tough-talking but scaredy-cat blonde, and his own background: Before sneaking into the U.S. and taking a menial job, he was Special Forces in his home country—Colombia? Afghanistan? depends who we want to star!—and had been lined up to immigrate properly, with his family, before certain legislators and other nefarious elements intervened. Now he has to save those very legislators, and the country, relying solely on his wits and talents.

The movie—which, yes, is essentially Die Hard D.C.—ends with a helicopter crashing into the Capitol dome. That’s pretty much the whole reason to do it. There are worse reasons to make movies.

Why it will never get made: Like with The D-List, Washington just doesn’t work this way anymore. Congress is no longer the kind of thing you could interrupt, since it can’t really get anything done. If we’d made this in 1999 with Antonio Banderas as the star, it would’ve killed. Who could it be today? (Tell me in the comments!)

Frankly, I don’t know how this one doesn’t exist already. The conceit is so basic: Imagine that humanity’s two worst apocalypse scenarios come to pass at precisely the same time! Artificial intelligence has decided to exterminate its creators and a virus is reanimating their corpses. A year into this duopocalypse, a small band of humans has managed to survive, hiding from the undead hordes and the cyber-assassins and formulating a plan: Divide and conquer! If they can send the zombies at the robots, perhaps the meat swarm will overwhelm them long enough for our heroic humans to get into Master Control and shut the bots down once and for all, and in a way that will take out vast numbers of walkers.

This whole movie is pure dumb action comedy. I’d outline the major characters, but you know it doesn’t really matter: Robots vs. Zombies is gory, unrealistic, and hypnotic, whoever we get to be in it. But it’s so goddamn fun.

The movie also has to end in failure: The humans get thisclose to shutting down the robots and defeating the zombies—but they don’t. Circumstances, human idiocy get in the way. And as the remnants of our small band of humans are facing down their destruction—robots marching in from one side, zombies lumbering from the other—everyone and everything all of a sudden freezes. Because, from the skies above, a new party has arrived: aliens. There will be a sequel!

Why it will never get made: I honestly don’t know. This movie should exist already. Everyone would watch it. Maybe the failure of Cowboys vs. Aliens turned Hollywood away from such ambitions? Clearly, I just don’t understand the movie business.

If you would like to see any of these three movies get made, you need to write to your local Hollywood producer and urge them to hire me as a screenwriter. I would be only too happy to do so. 🪨🪨🪨

Throughout most of my travel-writing career, I struggled with the biggest, most pressing of issues: What shoes should I wear? My trips involved nice dinners at nice restaurants, hikes into the wilderness, nightclubs and hip cafes, and finding a single pair of shoes that worked for every situation was nigh impossible.

Then, a couple of years ago, I stumbled on these boots at The North Face Japan: They’re ultra-light, with rugged Vibram soles, and one-piece uppers made from a waterproof Gore-Tex fabric (“Velocity knit”). Plus, they’re black, so they go with everything and don’t show dust or dirt, and they’re slip-on, meaning they’re ideal for Asia, or any situation where you’re going to have to take your shoes off and put them on again with any frequency. They run a little small—a wear the size 9 when I normally wear a 9.5–10—and you can only get them in Japan or on Ebay. But I love them so much I own two pairs.