(GUY NOIR THEME)
SS: A dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets. But one man is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions--Guy Noir, Private Eye.
(THEME UP AND OUT)
GK: It was August in St. Paul and I was depressed about summer coming to an end, the time of year when beautiful women are wearing no more clothing than what the law requires and using every loophole. I like to walk around the farmers market and see all the lovely young vegans in their summer dresses looking over the selection of cantaloupe, pressing them for ripeness. I once asked my girlfriend Sugar if women get as big a thrill out of looking at men. She glanced at me and said no. ---- I was sitting in my office in the Acme Building thinking about fresh produce when the phone rang. (RING. PICKUP) ---- Yeah. Guy Noir here.
SS: (ON PHONE): Mr. Noir, it's Ellen Glen. I'm calling from Chicago. I'm in terrible trouble. I need your help.
GK: What's the problem?
SS: I'm a writer, Mr. Noir, and I've just written the best thing I ever wrote in my entire life. It had everything ----- romance, comedy, despair, descriptive adjectives, an omniscient narrator. And I've lost it. It's gone. Gone. I need you to find it.
GK: Maybe you should ask your omniscient narrator where it went.
SS: Very funny, Mr. Noir. (BRIDGE)
GK: She sat in Chicago holding one end of the telephone and he sat in St. Paul holding the other end and I, the narrator, feeling a little less omniscient than at times in the past, ---
SS: Are you still there, Mr. Noir?
GK: Yes, Miss Glen. Tell me more about your story----
SS: I wrote it on my Packard laptop computer.
GK: Oh? You mean Hewlett Packard?
SS: No, it's just a Packard. It's very old. From the Thirties. It weighs almost two hundred pounds.
GK: And it's a laptop?
SS: I have powerful thighs, Mr. Noir. I can lie on my back and lift a quarter-ton with my feet.
GK: I'm not surprised.
SS: Anybody needs to change a tire, they don't need a jack if I'm around.
(BRIDGE)
GK: I took a flight to Chicago, a no-frills Wisconsin airline called Dairy Air ----- (COWS, BOARDING A PLANE) the flight was full of Holsteins ----- (SS HERDING COWS WITH A STICK) the flight attendant shoved me into a stall-- (CLAMP OF METAL HARNESS) and fastened the stanchion around my neck -----
SS: Would you like dinner, sir?
GK: What are my choices?
SS: Yes or no.
GK: No.
SS: You care for silage?
GK: No thanks. ----- The flight was turbulent (AIRSICK HOLSTEIN) and the passenger next to me didn't feel well. (SICKLY MOO) Would you mind not switching your tail in my face, thank you? (BRIDGE) I got to O'Hare and it was packed with musical neon sculptures (ELECTRONIC BEEPS) and businessmen (BARKING AND GROWLING) fighting to get on board, fighting for upgrades, fighting to the front of the line ---- gate agents with fire hoses (CRIES OF GATE AGENTS, FIRE HOSE SHOOTING WATER) ----- I got out of the terminal and got my rental car from a budget company called Hertz Less ----
SS: You want a steering wheel with that or you want to steer by leaning to one side?
GK: I'd take a steering wheel.
SS: How about headlights?
GK: No need for headlights.
SS: Okay. You need a hand with your luggage?
GK: No, thanks.
SS: Sign the hand waiver then. (BRIDGE)
GK: I headed out on the expressway (SEMIS SHOOTING PAST, SOME HORNS WITH DOPPLER) ----- kind of intimidating trying to merge ----- I could hear gunfire (SFX) ----- police helicopters flying in low (CHOPPER) ------ a lot of road rage (EXPLOSIVE) and then I got up past Evanston and ------ (STATELY CLASSICAL BRIDGE) everything changed. Stately homes and tastefully dressed people in BMWs driving at the speed limit, bumper stickers that said Proud Parent of An Oboeist and Please Don't Honk/ I'm Listening to Books on Tape----- people who seemed to be in no hurry, many of them listening to public radio. (BRIDGE) Ellen Glen lived in Ravinia, in a quiet neighborhood of two-story thatched cottages with flocks of sheep in the yards (SHEEP). No. 14 Parnassus Drive. (CAR DOOR SLAM, FOOTSTEPS) I found her in the kitchen, juicing some pomegranates. (JUICER)
SS: Mr. Noir, thank you for coming.
GK: A rather lovely home for a writer, Miss Glen----
SS: I'm also the head of the Ravinia Festival.
GK: I see. Interesting. Tell me about your missing story.
SS: It was beautiful ---- it had everything-romance, suspense, gerund phrases, an omniscient narrator. And it's gone!
(BRIDGE)
GK: There she stood, in her expensive sports clothes, talking to the old guy in the wrinkled blue serge suit, while I, though an omniscient narrator, wondered what kind of underwear she wore----- a foundation garment or a piece of floss -----
SS: Are you a writer, Mr. Noir?
GK: No, so I don't understand---- how could you lose a this story? Are you telling me you didn't back it up?
SS: What are you, my mother? I backed it up on three separate hard drives. I emailed it to my friends. I e-mailed it to myself at four different screen names. I printed out a hard copy. I made a PDF and FTP'ed it to my CPA.
GK: And now?
SS: I dropped my laptop in the lap pool. My hard drives crashed.
GK: What about email?
SS: Somehow I can't download the attachments -
GK: And your friends that you emailed it to-
SS: I chose the wrong friends. They were elderly and...
GK: They forgot their passwords.
SS: Exactly.
GK: And the hard copy?
SS: I accidentally put it in recycling. (BRIDGE)
GK: Just then I looked out the window and saw a man in a khaki uniform putting a ticket on my windshield----- Excuse me----- (RUNNING, DOOR OPEN, RUNNING, OUTDOOR AMBIENCE, TRAFFIC) Hey-what are you doing?
TR: Yer parked illegally, mister. No parking between 3 and 3:15 pm on even Wednesdays before Labor Day. Says so right here.
GK: That sign wasn't here before. Look, it's a cardboard sign on a stick. Somebody just stuck it there.
TR: Who would do a thing like that? Driving with improper vision. That's another hundred bucks.
GK: C'mon, mister. That uniform says City of Chicago. This is Ravinia.
TR: We're gradually working our way north. More money up here.
GK: What are you going to do?
TR: I called for a truck to come and put a clamp on and that's a $350 removal fee. And then he'll find illicit Canadian drugs in your trunk and the cops'll come and haul you downtown and ---- I don't think you want to know the rest of it-----
GK: Look. I'm from Minnesota -----
TR: I sympathize. But what can I do?
GK: I'm asking you.
TR: You------ you seem to have dropped a large amount of money on the ground----
GK: Money? I didn't drop anything.
TR: This isn't your hundred-dollar bill lying on my left shoe?
GK: Never saw it before in my life.
TR: Well-- I'll just have to hold onto it until someone claims it, then. And listen----- about the parking ticket ----- here----- (RIPPING UP TICKET) let me just take care of that for you. There----- all set. (BRIDGE)
GK: I walked back into the house and there was Ellen Glenn with a piece of paper in her hand-----
SS: I found it. An extra copy. I'm so happy.
GK: Let me see. "It was a cloudy day in Chicago and Michelle had a feeling that something bad was just about to happen as she stepped out of her Lexus in the parking lot of the Whippoorwill Mall, a large cup of latte with 2% and chocolate sprinkles in her left hand and in her right, a .357 Magnum revolver."
SS: It's not much good, is it.
GK: "She walked slowly toward the Babe & Bambi Meat Market, thinking about Mark and how he had two-timed her one time too many and now she was going to look him in the eye and tell him what she thought of him and then let him have it between that eye and the other eye and then go home and write in her journal about it, when suddenly she looked down at her white tennis shorts and noticed the stain. It looked like blueberry. She had eaten a blueberry scone at Starbucks. She couldn't go into the meat market with soiled clothing, could she? No, she couldn't." ----- You're right. It's not good.
SS: Oh dear. It felt really wonderful as I was writing it.
GK: That happens to writers sometimes.
SS: I just had this wonderful warm feeling-----
GK: It happens when a dog pees on you, too. But you don't take those pants around and show them to other people, do you? No. So----- maybe this shouldn't see the light of day, ma'am. We could bury it in the backyard.
SS: I just feel so discouraged. I wish I'd never found that story now----- What am I going to do?
GK: Who is this? (FOOTSTEPS APPROACH)
FN: (AIR INSPECTOR): Excuse me, I'm with the Chicago Board of Air Inspection----
GK: Yes?
FN: Are you using an approved cologne or deodorant, sir?
GK: I'm using Pine-Sol deodorant and a cologne the name of which I'd rather not say----
FN: I need to know the name, sir----
GK: It's just an old cologne I got at a truckstop in South Dakota, sir-
FN: Rules is rules, sir.
GK: It's called Tonight's The Night.
FN: Tonight's The Night?
GK: Right.
SS: What did you say the name was?
GK: It's a private matter, Miss Glen.
FN: Tonight's The Night ---- oh, here it is ----- on my list of Air Pollutants ---- I'm afraid I'm going to have to issue a citation.
SS: Tonight's The Night?
FN: I hate to do it, considering all the trouble it puts you to ---- they'll take you downtown, hose you off ---- there's a court appearance in a week, and then you'd be assigned to a caseworker----- Oh----- is this your money on the ground beside my foot?
GK: What money?
FN: This hundred dollar bill----
GK: Not mine. Guess it's your lucky day, inspector.
FN: I'll have to take this to headquarters. (FADING) You take care----- (DOOR CLOSE)
GK: I'm sorry about your story.
SS: I wanted to be a published author and have a book with my picture on the back cover or the inside back jacket flap, a picture of me in a black dress and my hair pulled back and a look of moral severity on my face.
GK: Well, don't give up.
SS: That was my plan for Ravinia.
GK: What?
SS: To turn it into a writers' colony.
GK: A writers' colony!
SS: But not your usual writers' colony where all these skinny people with dandruff sit in cabins in the woods and think about the interior voice ----- a nudist writers' colony where wild men and women strip buck-naked and sing their song and dance their dance in this uncaring world-----
GK: Ravinia? But it's a Chicago institution, ma'am. Chicagoans love Ravinia. It's a little paradise. A beautiful park where you can go to hear music on summer nights ---- hear the Chicago Symphony ----- hear opera-----
SS: Not my brand of bourbon, Mr. Noir.
GK: No?
SS: I may appear to you to be a sensitive suburban woman, an aesthete, a lover of Schubert and Mozart, but in fact ----- (HUSKY VOICE) I need more.
GK: What do you need?
SS: I need more.
GK: Such as what?
SS: I need this----- (HIP HOP BASS) (FN RAP CRIES) (SS REACTIONS)
FN (ON TAPE): Yo, man----- you may live in Ravinia
But you got something WILD in ya.
You got NEEDS down deep in your body
Can't be satisfied by a 2% latte.
SS: (SHRILL CRIES) (DANCING TO HIP HOP BASS)
GK: I watched in amazement as she leaped up onto her Chippendale sidetable and gyrated wildly, tearing one garment after another from her tanned athletic body and yet being careful to unbutton them first ----
SS: (SHRILL CRIES)
TR: As I, the omniscient narrator, watched him observing her and was amused at his presumption, his idea that a woman so beautiful was attracted to him, a portly old galoot in a shirt with food stains----
GK: You the omniscient narrator???
TR: Yes.
GK: I was the omniscient narrator just a minute ago.
TR: You were omniscient only because I allowed you to be omniscient. It was an illusion of omniscience. I am the real omniscient narrator. Look----- (THUNDER AND LIGHTNING) can you do that?
GK: I guess not, but I can do this---- (HE SWINGS)
TR (LAUGHTER): Never try to hit an omniscient narrator, mister. Or he might just----- (BIG SPRONG OF SPRING, GK CRY OF ALARM) ---- see what I mean?
GK: Let me down----
TR: Helplessly, the aging detective hung in mid-air, a rope around his left ankle, hanging from the powerful spring-loaded birch tree that the omniscienty narrator had placed there in the kitchen ---- why? Because he could.
GK: Help-----
TR: The semi-naked Ravinia woman suddenly remembered-----
SS: My Omega-3 Fatty Acid pills!!
TR: In her excitement, she had forgotten to take it. She reached for the bottle. (SHAKE BOTTLE OF PILLS) (SS TWO GULPS) Suddenly she felt more grounded.
SS: I better get over to Ravinia. The show's about to start.
TR: When she noticed the man hanging upside down and small change falling out of his pocket. (SFX)
SS: What are you doing there?
GK: I don't know. Could you let me down?
SS: I have to get dressed. I'm going to Ravinia.
GK: I thought you wanted to write----
SS: I have no idea what you're talking about. (FOOTSTEPS, DOOR CLOSE)
TR: She put on a black dress and tied her hair back and walked into the park for the concert. It was a recital by the tenor Domingo Placebo. (TR TENOR) Her old lover. He stood on stage in his tuxedo, in the spotlight, as she took her seat in the front row and opened her purse to get the .357 Magnum and instead found a bouquet of white daffodils. (TR TENOR)
(THEME)
SS: A dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, but on the 12th floor of the Acme Building, one man is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions ----- Guy Noir, Private Eye. (MUSIC OUT)