Shark Beast 2: Paranormal Sharkitivity Page 2

  "Hey, there's no such thing as bad publicity," Jake the Producer smirked. "Thank goodness, or you and I would be out of a job. Speaking of which ... let's do it to it, shall we?"

  "Do what--?" Mike blinked, then sighed. "Oh, yeah, right. 'The Talent.'"

  Jake the Producer gave Mike a quick look -- ( you're killin' me, dude! ) --

  "No, got ya, I dig, all that," Mike said, with anything but a producer's smile. "Gotta wonder, though, do you really think it's a good idea for cast and crew to be living all together under the same roof here on location -- in the actual set -- for two weeks?"

  "Hey," -- all producerly Jake-grins -- "it's camaraderie, we're family, that cinematic spirit of friendly good-fellowship ... besides, it's not exactly a full crew, anyway, is it? Never is, in BeddlamLand, where being a director means you hold your own boom mike. And that's on a good day. Plus, it's either that or we have to pay for hotel rooms, and you know what that'll do to our kickbacks."

  Jake the Producer waved his fingers, magician's style, and made a disappearing poof! sound.

  Mike, suddenly startled, let his eyes go wide--

  "Hey, just between us, I know, I know," Jake said, smiling what seemed suddenly like a "Joker" smile. "But, let's face it, just calling it like it is. We made us a deal -- The Deal -- and I don't want either of us taking that lightly --"

  "I'm not, but --"

  "But nothing, partner. We made an agreement, you and I, whatever budget money we don't spend, we split, right down the line. That's why we're using this skeleton crew here. That's why we're cutting the costs even after we cut the costs that we already cut again. That's why we got the on-the-fly camera equipment. And that's why we're having this little mano-a-mano chat. Because I'm not putting us through all these hoops 'n hassles to save ourselves primo cash-skim that you're gonna blow if you keep attitudin' The Talent. We got to work together on this, we got to take this stuff seriously -- muy serioso, amigo -- am I right?"

  "Yeah, yeah, let's -- not -- talk about it, you know? Out loud, at least? Not exactly legal..." Mike muttered, looking over his shoulder.

  "Well, don't make me have to talk about it, out loud or otherwise. But when you're standing there, rolling your eyes and mutterin' and mocking the talent -- I mean, The Talent -- makes me think we're not on the same page, and that makes me nervous. And makes me talk loud."

  "All right, all right," Mike sighed. "You've made your point. I'll behave. I'll treat this shoot like Citizen humpin' Kane, okay? I'll be a good bad director, from here on. I'll be fake Alfred Hitchcock, and this" -- Mike gestured toward the large beach house -- "will be my 'Psycho.'"

  "Ahh, that's more like it," he said, biggest grin yet. "And I'll be the Bridge, and you'll be... my River Kwai."

  "You got it, Jake. Uh, the P."

  They 'high-fived,' and did an awkward but jubilant "funky" handshake. "Now we're back in showbiz!" Jake the P exclaimed toothily. "The outskirts, at least. Either way, Professionals, once again. Am I right?"

  "You're right. Professionals -- that's us."

  "Pro-fessionals!"

  A super we-all-cool smile, then, after a look of deep contemplation and tepid consideration, Jake the P added, casually:

  "Oh, that reminds me. The Goth Girl lesbian twins texted me, they're going to be a couple days late. Apparently, they're in jail for some reason. You want to go bail 'em out, or should we just send Cameraman Bob?"

  Tentacle THREE

  Welcome To Showbiz, Kiddo

  The first day of shooting was a jumbled mix of camera tests, background stock, B-roll, C-roll, inserts, all-'round random beach footage, and -- ta-dah! -- (or what Mike was hoping to be "ta-dah!") -- a test of the "shark beast."

  Mike wasn't expecting much -- and that's what he pretty much got. The beach and location bits, fine, nice sparkles on the water, all that, and the girls looked nice enough in their bikinis, double fine, bouncing about (and why shouldn't they, that's what they were hired for) -- but the "shark beast" was a disaster, even by the unintentionally hilariously low standards of Beddlam Studioz. To be fair, they -- like all of Hollywood -- turned over almost anything you could reasonably (and often unreasonably) term a "special effect" to the CGI nerds, so making practical rubber monsters was an even more lost art than it was back in the day. But this, this "shark beast" --

  "It looks like a sock puppet," Mike groaned to Jake the Producer.

  Jake the P's answer was pretty consistent --

  "Use more fog."

  Mike sighed when he heard this predictable advice. Gave Jake the P a bit of a glare.

  Then went out and used more fog.

  Still -- looked awful. And hilarious. But not the good kind of hilarious.

  Mike groaned about that to Jake the P, and J the P was pretty consistent there as well --

  "Use even more fog."

  "I did."

  "You did?"

  "I did."

  "How much fog?"

  "Lots. Foggier than fog."

  "Exponentially more fog?"

  (That was one of Jake the P's favorite words, exponentially. Effective, too -- considering it didn't actually mean anything, other than Jake the P was done with whatever conversation he was vaguely engaged in at the time.)

  So Mike did that too.

  "How'd it go?" Jake the P asked.

  "A colossal waste of time, energy and fog juice."

  And Jake the P smiled (of course), and gave his most consistent advice of all...

  "Welcome To Showbiz, Kiddo"

  So Mike spent the rest of the day shooting sparkles on the water.

  Why am I doing this, anyway? he wondered sullenly, up to his knees in muck and weeds. This is Cameraman Bob's job.

  Still -- nice sparkles.

  ~ ~ ~

  Later that night.

  More research; more rewrites. Anything to distract from that awful tentacled sock puppet. Mike didn't know why he bothered even caring about how fake and stupid the "shark beast" looked -- the studio didn't care, J the P didn't care, and the people who rented these monster videos didn't care. They lapped up this stuff no matter how bad the creatures turned out -- sometimes seemed to like it more the worse the monster effects were.

  Meanwhile, critically acclaimed, intelligently made, and actually good movies sit on the shelf collecting dust and --

  Whatever.

  Stop torturin' yourself, there, Mike-ol'-boy.

  That road of thinking leads only to madness. And excessive alcohol.

  With a very big sigh, Mike sat there, in the office, going through the "research" materials that Jake the Producer had provided. All piled up in a duct-taped cardboard box. Mike was about to mutter a sarcastic comment about that, but remembering how cheap Jake the P could be -- be grateful for the duct-tape, Mikey.

  Mike shuffled through it lackadaisically. Lots of stuffed shark plush toys, and -- squueek! -- at least one rubber shark down there as well. He gave it another bored -- squueek! -- then, started flipping through some DVDs ...

  Jaws 3-D

  Jaws 2

  Sharktopus...

  Red Water...

  Open Water ...

  Deep Blue Sea...

  Blue Demon

  Shark Attack 3: Megaladon...

  Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus ...

  Sharks In Venice ...

  Dinocroc vs. Supergator...

  Shark Zone ...

  Orca...

  Spring Break Shark Attack...

  Hammerhead...

  Cyclone ...

  Malibu Shark Attack

  Lake Placid...

  Shark Swarm ...

  A bunch of grade-B shark and/or/vs monster creature features -- Mike couldn't help but notice Jake the P hadn't included the one good shark attack movie, the original "Jaws." Figures. Only the crassest and cheesiest for Beddlam fans ...

  And -- of course! there it was...

  The Legend of Shark Beast

  The "vaguely entertaining but exceedingly bland quickie ca
ble movie version" of this epic tale.

  He looked at the cover -- vaguely topless girl... check!... tentacles and a fin reaching half out of the sand and half out of the surf... check!

  It always amused Mike how much of these cheese-o movies' budgets went toward making a really sexy-scary poster and DVD cover -- all involving imagery (and model-hot actresses) not actually in the movie. Oh well, that's showbiz, kiddo...

  He flipped it over, glanced at the back of the DVD container...

  The Electrifying But True Tale of the strange shark-monster that went on a wild rampage in a small boardwalk town that made the ocean waters and once-friendly sands go red with horrifying terror...

  (Wow, he mused. That's awful writing, even for a creature feature.)

  Disbelievers, put this DVD back on the shelf -- unless you want what you thought you knew SHAKEN TO THE CORE. For one thing cannot be denied -- something happened that Halloween night, something fin-tastically scare-ifying, and this movie provides a detailed account of the REAL TRUE-LIFE attacks, and MORE--!

  (Wow, just when you thought it couldn't get worse -- it did. Mike grinned at that end bit --"and MORE--!" -- which basically gave the filmmakers license to make up whatever they wanted to. Which, ironically, usually amounted to a whole lot of uninspired "not much." Something told him "Shark Beast: Paranormal Sharktivity" was probably headed right down that exact road.)

  BEWARE, it attacks without warning, dear viewers. You have been WARNED.

  (Gotcha, Mike mused. You warn the viewers about something that attacks without warning. Thanks for the update, cheese-ranglers.)

  "Ahh, what am I doing," he sighed, tossing the DVD back into the -- squueek! -- box. "Get all Hitchcock and Spielberg thoughts out of your head, Mikey-boy -- just a job, just a crappy Alan Smithee We hardly Knew Ye flaky flick gig -- so let's just get this over with."

  Another sigh, as he looked around in the box and -- there it was --

  A little blue rumpled paperback.

  On the cover was a girl underwater in hardly-a-bikini, apparently swimming away from something in terror.

  Just in front of her, in a "scary" font... "SHARK BEAST."

  "This is as close to Citizen Kane as you're getting, Michael," he moaned, and started flipping through the book.

  His mind settled in for a soupy jumble of a ride... trying to get a grip on this whatever of a movie ... sigh... He'd never read the book, nor seen the cheap cable movie made from it -- Beddlam had dithered back and forth on the idea so much, he'd decided to wait until the project was more likely to be a "go"... sigh... and when it did, it was all last minute (surprise), thanks to that so-called horny teen viral YouTube footage -- it's in the news again! do it yesterday! -- the usual butt-backwards Hollywood way of making movie magic ... super-size sigh... So, once again -- he'd gotten assigned to a "true life" project with only a vague idea about what supposedly "really" happened. All he'd read was the script -- or the many scripts -- that Jake the Producer had chucked at him, in random and very inconvenient intervals -- one after another, each one just the typical "creature feature" cliche mix-n-match mishmash of teens and more teens getting naked then attacked...

  ... sigh sigh sigh...

  ... none of which jibed with what little he remembered from a few months back, on the news, when all these attacks supposedly happened. All he'd retained from that distant vaguely paying attention memory was something went on a wild attack spree, and about a half dozen or so people were killed or turned up missing. But even that little bit of recall was fogged up by so many other people piping up, in interviews and scandal rags, claiming to have seen the thing -- which was always described differently --

  It had tentacles!

  It had electric eel arms!

  It had two shark fins! No! Three!

  It had fiery lobster claws!

  It roared like a cheetah!

  (-- he laughed at that last bit. He actually liked the "roaring cheetah" rumor.)

  It shot lasers out of its teeth!

  -- and then, of course, all that supposed paranormal -- SIGH -- junk started making the rounds, on TV and the Internet, claiming there was some spell on Parrot's Cove or curse or some stupid blah blah, the creature was magic in some way, or haunted--

  (After all -- It roared like a cheetah!)

  It was all so silly, at the time, anyway (still was!) that Mike stopped paying what little attention he'd been giving the whole circus, because a) he wasn't into all that monster weirdness -- (he'd never even seen "Shark Week") -- and b) who would have ever thought he'd have reason months later to know anything about the whole stupid thing anyway!

  (fiery lobster claws!)

  Mike was halfway to chucking the book back into the duct-taped research box, but --

  (sigh)

  (roared like a cheetah!)

  -- to clarify the vast difference between what supposedly actually happened, and the events in the millions of revised "Paranormal Sharktivity" scripts he'd received, and, of course, to take his mind off the waterlogged sock puppet --

  (siiiiigh)

  -- he reluctantly decided it might be a good idea to make a list of the real victims as they appeared in the book, just so he'd be aware, when the inevitable on-set time-is-money argument/debates/hissy-fits reared their diva heads, and also to make sure the movie stayed true to--

  Oh, who was he kidding.

  He did it because he was bored, had nothing better to do, and to take his mind off the waterlogged sock puppet.

  (Plus -- he was really curious to see where the Goth Girl Lesbian Twins fit in to all this...)

  With great reluctance, he closed the book, and then -- pencil in hand, sigh in his throat, flipped open PAGE ONE of the ragged copy of Shark Beast.

  ~ ~ ~

  He scribbled some notes...

  ... 19-year-old hottie, model type, rather loose with her bikini tops, gets munched one late night on the beach ... (Mike nodded. You can bet Jake the P would keep THAT one in.)

  ... buncha hooey about bookstore employes in a make-out party Ouija-fest (ahhh, the "paranormal" hoodoo-voodoo that made all the blogs. Because, apparently, people are nutburgers, who aren't satisfied with just a plain old shark attack) ... (hmmm, this bookstore seems to be kind of a major presence in the book. Funny, wasn't a bookstore in any of the script drafts. Not visual enough, he guessed)...

  ... something about The Island of Rock (more boring more hoodoo-voodoo) ...

  ... a Hooters waitress and a surfer ... (of course, why not)

  ... a couple of horny nerds... hmmm, wait, that Hooters bit rings a bill -- in at least 3 of the drafts he'd flipped through. Interesting. He assumed the "Hooters" detail had been made up, a Jake the P special.

  He perked a bit --

  Then that means this beach house was their "loft." Oh, so this place really was rented by one (or two) of the victims? Mike thought Jake the P was just BS-ing about that as well ...

  Exploiting a real life attack ... classy ...

  Note: Ask J the P about this later.

  ~ ~ ~

  The other characters Mike recognized from the many script rewrites were -- the two nerds, one (surprise!) male and virginal, the other a "hot" nerd chick, Tara. Supposedly the virgin tries to barter some "beach blanket sex" in exchange for a reading of a short story he wrote. (This scheme of his even had a strategic title -- "Operation: Gettin' Some.")

  (Hmmm ... Would something like that ever work? Mike mused with a wistful smile, remembering his pack of short stories locked away somewhere in his laptop.)

  Of course, Jake the Perverted Producer had turned the virgin writer geek into a punk-song singing lesbian...

  And of course, in the script -- in all the scripts -- the lesbians do "do it," just in time to get munched and tentacled down into the beach. Complete with fog machine, of course. J the P loved him some fog machine.

  Interesting note -- supposedly Real-Life Tara did not realize the attack, when it came, was indeed real; she assumed it was a
prank the virgin nerd pulled on her as a pre-rejection insult, and off she goes, obliviously leaving the boy nerd to get swallowed up by the creature. Hmmm, kind of unexpected, that. Multi-layered, even. Mike wondered if he could talk Jake the P into putting the real version back in -- be more interesting, story-wise, plus would be nice to actually have something accurate in this thing.

  (Though J the P loved him some lesbians, even more than fog machines. Along with the whole Beddlam gang)...

  Still.

  Worth a shot.

  Or not ...

  He kept flipping --

  ~ ~ ~

  ... more bookstore weirdness ... boring ...

  ... a "Star Wars" fan of "Phantom Menace" gets it while using a metal detector on the midnight beach ... (so... many... nerds...)

  Hmmm... hey, the naked Hooters girl is still alive!

  (two page flips later)

  Oh! Hey, not so much!

  ... two mismatched bookstore employees, jump into and out of a dune buggy (after crashing into a ditch), get trapped by the creature, so they waded out to the "island of rock," and --

  Didn't make it.

  Apparently.

  That's the rumor -- no one knows for sure.

  (just like the YouTube horny teens)

  (They simply disappeared.)

  Hmmm, a nice bit of mystery, he thought, looking at the book's cover. "If this were a real movie, that might be an intriguing angle... would be nice to at least try to get an actual love story in this thing... at least one with everybody's clothes on ... some smidgen of recognizable human behavior, one that taps into the true feelings we all share and aspire--"

  Stared at the cover, for a long moment.

  Sighed.

  Sighed.

  Sighed.

  "... but it's not a real movie, is it, Mr. Direct-to-Director," he grumbled, a fresh wave of pity-party starting up, as he tossed the book back into the box.

  -- squueek! --

  "Whatever," he mumbled grumpily, at the duct-taped box.

  "Whatever yourself," said a slinky voice from surprisingly close over his shoulder.

  ~ ~ ~

  It was the actual "drama student" drama student.