[…] It was one of those things where I looked for something and it didn’t exist. I thought, this is a really logical thing. This …read more […]

Totally soft spot for The Dream Team... can easily picture a remake with, say, BRadley Cooper as Michael Keaton, Alan Tudyk in the Christopher Lloyd role, Eddie Izzard in the Peter Boyle role, Clark Duke in Flounder's role, maybe Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the girlfriend and so on. So I'm already in that mindset. It's one of those flicks where our memories of it are fond but it could be improved upon and played with. So I'm already in that mindset. Mental illness and romance seems like something we see plenty of in indy films, .. it just seems like an easy premise for a failed relationship: of course these two will have trouble, one or both of them is crazy! So the trick would be... well, it's always about not doing what everyone else is doing, and you want to treat their conditions honestly. Luckily, the internet's grown to this place where, if there's a homegrown version of this out there, there's bound to be a wide resources by people who actually live with a wide range of conditions, so you can do your research and be more accurate. And of course, once you're accurate, more storytelling possibilities present themselves. But... oh boy, I'm trying to think of what to do with this. I was thinking maybe something like a traditional romcom, like how "Imagine Me & You" was a traditional brit romcom except the protagonist realizes she's gay... but they don't really do traditional romcoms anymore, those are all evolving and changing and I don't think I have as wide a frame of reference. Maybe it's like a Before Midnight/After Midnight thing... we jump over the hurdles and see a relationship that's gone on for a while: how do you add spice to a love life with two people who have trouble dealing with change in routine? Maybe it's an affair, it's easy to create this blind spot where someone with a sympathetic illness can't possibly act on bad impulses. You know, I'm watching this movie called "Fierce People" that came out... jeez, 10 years ago, where Anton Yelchin (baby Chekov!) moves with his mom (Diane Lane) to the servants quarters in this mansion, and I also thought of the scene in X-Men with Bobby and Rogue on the park bench, so I could see a movie about a young fella who has to go to a hospital and falls in love with a patient there. But I'm sure that movie exists. You wanna switch it up, maybe it's a doctor. If you want it a young person, it could be a nurse or orderly, someone new to the world who doesn't really appreciate mental illness, so he's getting life lessons in love and psychology.

Could we mix Silver Linings Playbook with maybe... Sleepless in Seattle? How about something that starts with a prank. A guy that wants to set up two people with mental illness - maybe bipolars, maybe schizophrenics. So this really mean guy sets it up as a joke, calls a radio station program that makes blind dates on air and off we go. So these two people meet and there's an instant clic - something the prankster never expected. He wanted to be a prankster, not cupid. So he will try to do anything to split them - and it all backfires.

I don't how how politically correct would be to play with schizophrenia. How about a romantic story involving a matchmaker and two schizophrenics, in the end the matchmaker ends up being a common hallucination.

And we could do something similar to The Fisher King. A man that has some deep emotional wounds (but doesn't suffer mental illness) is helped by a man who has mental illness - schizophrenia. And he tries to find redemption setting up a website: matchmaker for the mentally ill. But to make things work he isn't just an ordinary matchmaker. He has to match the couples and help them fight their demons (hallucinations) and his own demons.

Or... Our matchmaker for mentally ill doesn't work on a website. He works face to face, searching couples to match. He successfully matches some couples, but finds one particular couple extremely hard to match. Yet, something tells him it's going to be a match made in heaven. He just has the gut feeling he has to match them up. So he tires and in the end he does, only to find out that he couldn't match that couple because they were hallucinations, the two parts of his mind that were most disassociated and once they "establish a relationship" he gets better. Not cured, but can have a better control of his own schizophrenia he was denying.

I like the Before Midnight idea. The ability to watch the relationship status several years apart.