 Release date: December, 1999
Type: Full-length Motion Picture
Object of Ridicule:
City of Seattle
  You cannot do important paperwork with a fat man sitting next to you crinkling cellophane, and that's why I've always considered movies to be little more than a nuisance. But part of being a role model to young people means being receptive to their ideas, and recently I gained a new-found appreciation for one of their historically least-successful ideas: movies.
Was clearing teens out of the break-room around this time last year when I happened to glance up at the televised "movie" they'd been using to help themselves keep quiet and rested ... and I had a revelation. Interesting.
Now, I'm a prominent local businessman. Normally it would never occur to me that one might attempt to communicate an idea using the expedients of "light" and "sound," because they are in of themselves ridiculous and no one would understand you ... yet here I was marveling at a surprisingly simple -- but to me, wondrous -- notion: that light and sound -- which generate sensations -- can, in the hands of a master filmmaker, a cinéaste fantastìque, be combined in remarkable ways that -- far from being just "a nuisance" -- can create enormous human suffering. Experiments with laboratory animals have proven it.
Try it for yourself. Prepare some important paperwork while watching "Titanic" next to a fat man forcing enormous chocolatine wedges into his mouth and weeping like a schoolgirl. Then send me that important paperwork in a clean, unmarked manila envelope. Bet you anything I will glance at it, mark it UNACCEPTABLE, then have it carefully shredded and tossed into the main furnace, and boy will you hate that. [To place a wager of this sort, please go to www.betgeorgeclark.org]
Movies could be used to affect a person. For example, they could be used to modify self-destructive personal habits. Say a man is acting like an idiot; you could just have him sit down and watch, say, "Titanic." Then, if he continued to act like an idiot, you could just aim the projector directly into his eyes until his retinas were destroyed. Think of that: the last image you ever see is of those teens kissing on that awful boat. Don't tell me you wouldn't be affected.
Imagine using movies to do good things. Example: you could put an end to that Seattle Gay Pride Parade. Just arrange for it to include a free screening of "Titanic." Then when they realize what they've perpetrated: not so "proud" anymore ... eh, Gays?
Or here's another one: let's say you find yourself inclined to force some poor soul into early retirement. What you do is you place him in a screening room and have him watch "Titanic" until, some three days later, he just curls up and dies. The idea being that, this way, at least he maintains a little dignity.
If you're going to make people suffer using movies you can't just show them "Titanic" over and over because everybody's seen that already and anyway no one would sit through it long enough to suffer, it's that bad. I decided to do better and that's how Doomed Planet was born.
Movie-making is a natural thing for me because I have excellent people skills. I know this because when I deal with people I can see it in their faces, the fear there. For the Doomed Planet project I used these skills to assign miscellaneous directing, producing and "acting" duties and I believe I jotted down a screenplay for them, I don't know, I haven't watched the movie but if I do I'll check the credits.
I'm proud of Doomed Planet. I use it to punish employees, patrons, friends and family. And now, when I settle into the screening room to do some important paperwork, that fat idiot beside me (Nathan, my personal secretary) isn't making a sound. That's the power of film.
 |