_Note: there’s really no good explanation for this. We were talking about our Ultimate Cast, and we started plotting out a suitable move to put them in, and then…._
Further note: Turns out we preserved the entire conversation in which this evolved. See Ultimate Cast Discussion
Action-comedy-revenge drama. Oldman, Caine, and Walken are brothers, orphaned when Lili Taylor killed their parents. As boys they are raised by lesbian couple Lena Olin and Parker Posey and trained in martial arts by their retainer, Holly Hunter. Jean Reno, Peter Stormare, Steve Buscemi, and John Turturro are the guys they have to fight through to get vengeance, of whom Reno and Stormare are conjoined twins. The brothers travel incognito, working for Weaver and Murray’s roaming vaudeville company. At one point, they must fight their way out of a death-brothel run by blind pimp/ninja Alfred Molina and his chief dominatrix Felicity Huffman; they recruit whores Selma Blair and Clea Duvall to their cause, and they kill Molina in a climactic showdown while the brothers make good their escape, having to tragically slay Frank Langella, a good man whose only crime was his inability to resist having his ass beaten savagely by Huffman on a regular basis. However, he does free Senator Raul Julia from Huffman’s utility closet before he dies. Dave Foley plays sundry small roles throughout the movie, a la Cheech Marin in dusk ‘till dawn.
Carradine and Rickman play police officers who follow the trail of blood and get in repeated gun battles with all parties. They are also lovers. Hope Davis and Maura Tierney are mercenaries who play all sides against the middle, while simultaneously competing for Walken’s affections. At the end of the film, the only surviving bad guy is Reno; he is disconjoined from Stormare by a single sword-blow from Hope Davis, and the doctors decide they can only save one. We end the film with Reno in a nice courtyard somewhere practicing his one-armed swordfighting.
Note: Fuck movies. This is clearly a TV show. Or at least a mini-series.
Chronological progression
# One ## Opening bloodbath ## The orphans find a second home ### Doorstep arrival ### Montage town ### Departure ## On the road ### Sundry filler misadventures ### Finding the circus—and Weaver and Murray’s traveling vaudeville act ### Montage city ## The Brothel of Death ### Meeting the Girls ### Meeting the Man ## Misc. ### Langella and Julia ### Filer ### Showdown I ### Persuading Blair and Duvall ### Some hijinks of some sort ### The boys and the girls against the man. # Two ## Setup ### Carradine and Rickman sift through the ashes of the bordello ### The brothers are back with the circus, slowly tracking Lili ### Lili is priming her forces to avenge Molina ## Sometown ### The circus comes to play for a town run by the four henchmen ### Intro Tierney and Davis ### Fill—perhaps some kind of masked war… ### Some sort of large-scale gunbattle, with considerable roving

TB1

EXT. Brothers’ Home. – Night
A country home, comfortable and tidy without being overly neat-the garden is more full of flowers than it is free of weeds. Inside there is light, music (anonymous early twentieth-century instrumental), and the sound of children playing. The windows are large, and we see silhouette against the curtains, black on amber: to the right of the front door, a mother and father are dancing in the kitchen, a private moment perhaps, stolen before dinner. To the left of the door, we three boys play-now they are airplanes, now cowboys, now ninjas. They wield simple, inconic toys whose silhouettes are obvious—the sword, the gun, etc.. We move in gradually with a POV, and as we approach the door, the camera stops, and we see a short woman clad all in black, LILI, traversing a garden path composed of rough-hewn individual flagstones, set at a distance. She crosses them with a manly swagger. Other black-clad figures can be half-seen moving against the black background of the night. They are encircling the house. LILI approaches the door, which is painted red, and places her gloved hand against it, again silently.
Lili—(half-whisper) Knock. Knock.
INT. Circus wagon. – Morning
The wagon is a brightly-colored, heavily cramped affair. It’s mostly filled with props and costumes and other performance paraphernalia, but it also contains three hammocks, strung one above the other, and in the hammocks we find CHRISTOPHER, MICHAEL, and GARY, our three brothers.
Weaver—(Off-camera, Knocking on the door)
Up and at ‘em, boys. You don’t sing, you don’t eat.
Revised on September 24, 2006 15:19 by Nick