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I don't want to get all maudlin about this, but let's face facts: To succeed, a movie has to reach out and touch somebody. A movie can't just be a series of gags. It has to be about something important. Otherwise, who gives a shit? I'd seen enough movies, and written about enough movies, to realize that the most memorable films in motion picture history were the ones that addressed a universal human concern. Whether it was friendship (Midnight Cowboy) or honor (Grand Illusion) or deathless love (Wuthering Heights) or why you can't trust the government (The Conversation), the great movies always spoke directly to the human heart. They concerned themselves with something of value. They addressed the great issues of the day. They weren't just big yuckfests.

So, after carefully mulling over these extravagantly foolish movie themes for several months, I finally sat myself down and started to think about the Vision Thing. What was the single issue that spoke most directly to the viewers I wanted to reach? Love? Too corny. Racism? Too downbeat. Poverty? Been done. Greed? Cut too close to the bone. And then it hit me. One day, while paging through my local newspaper, I read a story about a support group for people who had trouble dealing with their emotions. The group was called Emotions Anonymous, and it claimed to be a twelve-step program for the emotionally undernourished.

The concept came to me in a flash. Deep down inside, wasn't everybody in this country sick to death of people who claimed to be suffering from pop dysfunctions? I'm not talking about cokeheads or boozers or heroin addicts; I'm talking about porkers who blamed their obesity on genetics, about goldbrickers and layabouts who claimed to be suffering from Chronic Lateness Syndrome, about greedy, acquisitive fuck-knuckles who claimed to have credit-card addictions, or addictions to sex, or fatal predispositions toward slamming away bacon double cheesburgers when in fact they were really nothing but standard-issue assholes.

"Assholes!" I thought. Now there was a subject with universal appeal. Everybody hates assholes. But nobody ever does anything about them. Well, here was my chance to strike a blow for all of us. Somewhere along the way, the plot line for a movie about twelve-step programs started to take shape. Somewhere along the way, I decided that a black comedy called Twelve Steps to Death was what I was looking for. Over the next few days, a vague plot began to take shape. My basic idea was a murder mystery in which a psychiatrist is found brutally murdered and all of the suspects are his dysfunctional patients, every one of them in some sort of twelve-step program. The viewer would thus be kept glued to his seat wondering whether the murderer was the sexaholic, the gambler, the porker, the Valium addict, the wife-beater, the binge shopper, the mule humper, the chocaholic, the failed anorexic, or the person suffering from bulimia envy (enormous jealousy caused by all the attention that bulimics get).

But after the psychiatrist was found dead, who would be the central character in the movie? That was easy enough: someone who had suffered at the hands of the recovery movement. I decided that the protagonist of the film would be a cop whose wife and two children had been killed in a hit-and-run accident by a schizoid anorexic recovering alcoholic with Attention Deficit Disorder who got off with a suspended sentence because she claimed to be fleeing an abusive chocaholic husband who used to beat her up whenever he had one too many of the nougat caramels. Thus, the case would present the hero with a wonderful opportunity to avenge himself on the recovery movement, which had ruined his life. His predicament was something everyone in the United States could identify with. Except for all those weepy, self-pitying bastards in twelve-step programs.

Posted 24 November 2001

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