Flip! Flop! Floop!!!

Situation

‘Flip! Flop! Floop!!!’

Zin Taylor, formerly Zinnia Taylor, originally Zarko Tadić masquerading as a teenager mimed to the ghost singer, snapped his fingers to the left, to the right, then above his head.

‘Flop!’, pronounced Benson Jeffries, head of Benson Jeffries Productions.

His yes men and fawning females echoed their lord and master.

‘He’s put on weight…get the Computer-Generated Imagery people on it.’

‘We already have…he’s put on a lot of weight, B.J..’

‘Then get that reverse CinemaScope that got Liz Taylor looking slim in Winter Kills.’

‘It already has been manipulated B.J., we’re seeing it now…that’s why we replaced the kangaroo with the wombat.’

Zinnia, his name changed to appeal to a female audience, then shortened to Zin to also appeal to males, kept moving his snapping fingers to his wide sides and above his fat head as he advanced to the camera, followed by the finger-snapping simpering Tyrolean-costumed chorus. A dancing woman in a wombat suit circled Zin like a satellite pumping her arms up and down in the air.

‘That song sucks! Have we got another?’

‘That’s the key and title song of the film…and the best of the lot.’

‘We’ll get some new songwriters!’

‘Our contract with them won’t allow it, B.J.. They’ve got us by the short and curlies and would take us to the cleaners in court.’

‘How can a songwriting team with so many hits write something that awful?’

‘Irving Berlin, Harry Warren…all the songwriters everyone loves for a dozen tunes had 100 disasters no one knew about, B.J..’

‘Besides, we renamed the wombat “Floop”.’

‘Well…if you’ve renamed the wombat…’

Simple-Zin, Floop the Wombat and the Tyrolean chorus vacuously smiled and whispered,

‘Flip! Flop! Floop!!!’

The wombat turned; the screen filled with her swaying bottom.

‘It’ll do great in Japan, B.J.!’

‘Boffo, B.J.! Boffo!’, echoed the freak chorus.

‘Go to one of the dramatic scenes!’

Zin the Pudgy held his head in his hands and wailed,

‘I tried so hard to stay real cool!’

B.J. chortled,

‘That’s pretty funny, but I said a DRAMATIC moment!’

‘That is the dramatic highpoint of the film, B.J..’

Like a horrific car crash, no one could take their eyes off the screen. The comedy was tragic, the tragedy was comic…and the songs sucked. It was the biggest disaster since the Titanic, the ship, not the film.

‘Let’s reshoot to make the wombat the star.’

‘Zin’s agent made the studio destroy all the footage of Floop the Wombat without Zin, probably for that very reason, B.J….’

‘We’ll shelve the film.’

‘We can’t B.J., we already did that with Hersoniath!’

‘Her what???’

‘The new craze that’s about to happen is the return of Peplum films. We had to change the hero’s name from Hercules because another studio has the rights, we redubbed it to Samson, but another studio had those rights, and another studio the same with Goliath, so we combined all the names and redubbed the name in post-production…not very convincingly.

The screen showed the film’s poster starring their weightlifting janitor with a speech impediment posing beneath the legally modified tagline,

‘HERSONIATH! Mightier than HERCULES YOU KNOW WHO! Stronger than SAMSON WHAT’S HIS NAME! More powerful puissant than GOLIATH WATCHAMACALLIT!’

The test screenings gave it sub-awful ratings, so we shitcanned Hersoniath!…’

‘Even the exclamation mark didn’t help…’

‘We can’t shelve another film and Zin’s lawyers are worse than the composer’s team. We’ve already released another film as the year’s tax loss.’

‘YOU want to say something, Milquetoast?’

A bespectacled mole-man was quivering in his chair with the heebie-jeebies.

‘For Christ’s sake, spazz! If you’ve got something to say, SAY IT! Speak to us or shoot yourself! Either way, give us a good laugh!’

‘We’ve already pre-pre-presold the toy and mer-mer-merchandising rights, they’re the primary fin-fin-financiers of the film, Bee-bee-bee Jay…’

The director spoke up,

‘Milquetoast’s right; the deal we made with the toy people isn’t pay-or-play, it’s play-or-pay-through-the-nose!’

‘Thanks Milquetoast! When you say something, you say something worthwhile!’

Milquetoast beamed as everyone applauded.

‘Unlike the rest of you bootlicker bozos!’

‘Yes, B.J.’, intoned the bootlicker bozos.

‘Screwdriver!’

B.J. snapped his fingers twice. A woman in a low-cut dress brought his bottle of pain killers. He took a double dose with his Vodka Orange Juice,

‘So, we’re going to have two bombs and one shelved film! We’ll reshoot!’

‘Zin’s footage wouldn’t match. Like the woman putting on so much weight making The World of Suzie Wong; they had to reshoot it with Nancy Kwan.’

‘I will give one million dollars to the person who can save the day for us.’

Producer Sam Racovich, a former director and an aspiring mogul questioned,

‘Who is this room can keep a secret?’

Everyone looked around.

‘We’re talking major losses or major rewards…’

B.J. named two people and ordered the rest to leave.

‘Let’s talk about James Dean…’

Execution

‘Can I borrow the car, Zin?’

Zin threw his lover the keys to his electric vehicle.

‘Need anything?’

‘More Coke.’

‘Regular or Diet?’

‘Sniffin’!’

Zin studied his lines for the post-production scenes. He heard a screech and saw his rapidly accelerating EV smash into a wall.

* * *

‘What happened, Sam?’

‘Zin’s boyfriend was in the car instead of him. The people controlling his EV got the wrong person. No one saw it wasn’t Zin…I didn’t know he was bisexual, B.J..’

‘He’s quarter sexual.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘He’ll do anything to anyone for a quarter.’

* * *

Zin left the Beverly Hills boutique; his face appeared in the sniper’s crosshairs…

* * *

‘Good news and bad news, B.J.!’

‘Give me the good news, Sam!’

‘The Floop the Wombat footage wasn’t destroyed! It’s all safe and intact! They backed off when we filmed Floop’s death scene with Zin holding her in his arms.’

‘Great! What’s the bad news?’

Sam gave B.J. the newspaper.

POLICE SNIPER KILLS DRUG-CRAZED POTENTIAL MASS SHOOTER

A police tactical response group sharpshooter on a clandestine stakeout shot the man they hired to eliminate Zin. His autopsy revealed he took prescription medication.

‘Why is my world turning into a Road Runner cartoon?’

Solution

Zin told and retold the stories of the car crash and the police shooting a sniper in his presence to his girlfriend/masseuse/personal assistant on their way to the studio.

‘Why is the world such a violent place, Dawn?’

She shrugged,

The gate guard waved them in, the pair entered a main building,

‘Sam Racovich! I don’t want that jerk to see me.’

Zin rapidly waddled down a hallway, followed by Dawn. They ducked into a room and shut the door until Sam passed by.

‘What on Earth…’

Zin looked at the photos of himself, then read the press releases announcing his death with the space for cause of death left blank. Half the releases were the studio fictional biography of him, the other half extolled the virtues of his final and greatest film, Flip! Flop! Floop!!!, comparing the great film to James Dean’s final films Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, telling the world to see the film as a tribute to Zin...

‘I….I…I…No, they couldn’t be planning…’

Dawn produced a flask from her pocket,

‘Here’s your brandy! This’ll calm you; you know how Big Joker loves playing pranks.’

Zin chugged the flask, felt faint, and hit the floor.

‘You poisoned me…why???’

‘They promised me the role of the singing angel who resurrects Floop the Wombat! Isn’t it fantastic?’

FIN

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