Tried to call in AGAIN last night to present the song question and my sequel idea and it was already full-up, repeatedly called....no dice.
Sequel ideas:
Rocky vs. Rambo....I've joked about that for years, but if you used CGI it would look like goofy fun, a "de-aged" Stallone playing both Rocky Balboa and John Rambo. Both characters haunted by their ghosts; Rambo by Col. Trautman (Richard Krenna) and the logging country sheriff played by Brian Dennehy in "First Blood"; Rocky by Mickey and Adrian. Are they actual ghosts or just PTSD delusions? I haven't decided. Will Rambo box Rocky, or will they duel it out in the urban wasteland of North Philadelphia? I haven't decided. I think the title alone would get people into theaters/streaming it on decent-sized TVs.
There was a satirical novel from György Dalos titled "1985: A historical report (Hongkong 2036) from the Hungarian of ***" Which was released in America as "1985: The Year Big Brother Dies". I think we should make it as a film sequel to the 1984 version of "1984", same run-down British areas, different cast because Richard Burton and John Hurt are dead. The blurb from "Goodreads":
January 3, 1985. The announcement comes over the telescreen: Big Brother is dead. His empire, Oceania, has been defeated in a disastrous air battle and is no more. Only two great powers remain: Eurasia and Eastasia. Behind the scenes Big Sister (Big Brother's widow) struggles with the Thought Police and the army for power, while elsewhere the winds of reform sweep through the remnants of Oceania.....Everywhere, under the bitingly humorous hand of György Dalos, George Orwell's chilling world of "1984" seems to be experiencing a thaw, as Orwell's tortured lovers Smith and Julia, O'Brien the Thought Policeman, Ampleforth the hack poet, and Syme the cynical philologist come alive again. However, when the thaw becomes a revolution as the proles get involved, the now-friendly neighboring empire Eurasia steps in to "restore order."
The book was published in America in 1984 and underground in Hungary in the early 1982 or 1983. The model is a mix of the death of Stalin in 1953, Prague Spring (1968) and the Vietnamese takeover of Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge) in 1979 after three years of off-and-on border skirmishes between the DK military (more of a heavy militia with a tiny jet fighter-bomber "air force"*) and the superior Vietnamese forces. It turns out that Airstrip One (Britain) was cut off from the American landmass a while ago and "1984" took place in a semi-rump state. I think you could make the novel work as a film, but you would have re-arrange the structure a smidge for a visual medium.
Written while listening to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LY3ftiLqmE (17 minute version of "Elgia" by New Order)
Also
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNM_ekVl3gI ("Rumors" by Fleetwood Mac)
* The dirty secret of the Red Khmer/Khmer Rouge was that they were started with help of the North Vietnamese in the early 1960s as the "Indochinese Communist Party", and after their victory/American withdrawal from Cambodia and the collapse of the Lon Nol government, the Chinese (still in the middle of the Cultural Revolution) backed Pol Pot to the nines. This meant they got Chinese heavy artillery, rocket launchers, and Shenyang knockoffs of the MiG-19 and MiG-21 jet fighter-bombers. The Vietnamese found all that stuff when they took Phnom Penh, the capitol of the country. They also found freshly shot bodies at
S-21 prison camp, the former Lutheran girls school called "Tuol Sleng" or Strychnine Hill, which is now a museum. All of it was a propaganda bonanza for the Vietnamese, who made films of the material, the prison camp and its endless photos of people they shot, etc. Journalist John Pilger, walking through the semi-jungle-overrun city in 1979, found banknotes printed by the DK government rotting in the gutters. They had printed money for the entire country to restart a cash economy, and the Vietnamese had blown up the warehouse the money was stored in, and it blew in the wind and rain.
