I’ve never written a screenplay.  Sometimes as I watch shows, I think I’d be pretty good at it.  But what do I know?  I also would guess that the art of writing a screenplay could have nothing to do with the ability to come up with IDEAS for a screenplay, and that the two abilities might not frequently meet up in the same person. 

(side note: I noticed during the beginning of the Evan Almighty movie that the screenplay was done by none other than Steve Oedekerk.  The only reason I know about Steve Oedekerk is that I love Thumb Wars.  Thumb Wars is easily in my top 10 “gotta make me laugh” flicks and is quite quotable when you’re with someone else who knows the “movie” well.  (“You must be, the crybaby” or “touch your tongue to mine…” or “No problem, Nasty Butler!” It’s only 30mins long and if you ever get a chance to see it, DO IT.  It’s hilarious, especially if you know anything about or like about Star Wars.  I actually first saw it on my computer via viral multimedia emails many years ago, but I’ve also rented it at Blockbuster and then ordered it from his site.)  I’ve since found from IMDB that Oedekerk actually has written / screenplayed several movies as well as been producer of not just a small few.

So, back to the screenplay idea.

It has to do with infinite mirrors.  You know what I’m talking about – you get two mirrors facing each other, and then you look at one of them, and you can see yourself in the mirror behind you, and then THAT image gets reflected again, and you see yourself again inside THAT mirror, and it continues ad infinitum until it just blurs out.  I believe it’s called video feedback.  You can see some examples online at the mirror project.

So let’s say there’s a guy who’s really into photography and technology. He’s out to prove himself in the big world of high definition LCD display technology and super-fine control of camera robotics.  Always looking for bigger and bigger challenges, he moves from slow-motion photography of being able to watch a bumblebee’s wing go through it’s artful beating to developing new processing algorithms to be able to discern detail from a blurry image, such as those from Hubble space telescope reaching out too far, or maybe even crime-solving help to determine identities from people in cell-phone shots but who are too far away for normal detail.  (insert some back story that involves his passion for video to start when he’s 6 or 7 years old, and is passing by a large mirror in his front hallway, and his parents had ordered a large mirror for upstairs and the delivery guy left it downstairs in the hallway in order to check the leeway of the stairwell to make sure it fits.  The guy leaves it facing the large mirror.  The main guy stops and looks and notices himself multiplied 50 times, and as he tilts the new mirror, he can see deeper and deeper into this maze of himself.  Maybe he breaks it and it causes strife or something; TBD)

Read the extended entry for more.

He goes through the beginning stages of his career, getting awards for this and that, starting a relationship with some fantastic girl that has some fantastic quality (develop more of this later, gotta have some more “catch” to it), and he’s running out of visual challenges.  His HD abilities have taken over the industry, and have been implemented into society on TV’s and billboards (insert some funny clip somewhere in the film about how people actually are a little upset about how detailed the reproduction can be, to the point where you can zoom in and see sweat, pores and actually get enough info to serve as a good enough lie detector test). 

He decides eventually that he’s not getting enough challenge from normal life.  He finds that in nature, there’s a concept of infinity, and if he can put his skills towards something that gives him an area to repeatedly pursue excellence, an infinite realm would be his only match.  So he figures that maybe he can retrieve some of his nostalgia for the multiple mirrors and see if he can push his camera and display technology to see how many levels he can go.  The eye can see maybe a few dozen, and maybe a hundred if you get your eye just to the right place, but he figures he can use technology to “prove” how good his equipment is by measuring how many levels you can dive into.

Continuing this approach, he starts in.  He finds that he can go to 500-600 levels pretty easily with what he’s built so far, but he’s disappointed.  He refines the technology, maybe meets up with some wacky professor guy or mentor, he gives him some tips and he’s able to refine to a few thousand.  It becomes an obsession, knowing that others equipment can still only go sub-thousand levels but they will catch up, and he wants to be the first to hit 5 figures worth of detail.

He hires some interns, gets a team together, and they continue for a few years.  More story develops with the professor, his love interest, yada yada.  At some point with the advancement of molecular or organic pixellation technology, he’s able to break through to 500,000 levels and they have a huge party.  After the party, some other side love interest (maybe one of the interns and his date, trying to impress her, go to the “lab”).  While the computer system counting down and incrementing the levels — it’s on auto-pilot, btw — he notices the picture of the main guy they use for the stock photo that’s duplicated so many times over.  (btw, at some point before, this photo is shown during setup, and they all joke about how sick they are of seeing his face so many times over and over, and even joke about putting some of those fake marker moustaches and devils horns on him, but they end up not doing it because they were interrupted by something).

The thing is, when they get to some level (say, 501,234) the guy notices that THAT ONE picture DOES have the fake moustache drawn on the picture.  The next one doesn’t.  The next one doesn’t.  He’s freaked.

Continue in this way, with the intern alerting the main guy about the difference in that one picture.  A few dozen thousand later, it re-appears.  Another hundred thousand levels later, and the main guy in the picture has a scar on his forehead (flashback to the guy in present time remembering a close call when he was in college of getting in a car crash and almost getting gashed in the head by something).  Then it’s gone again.

He tells his professor guy friend and it turns out the professor guy is *way* into alternate realities.  He pushes him to continue further and further, where as he pushes a few hundred thousand, each time something changes about the picture.  Sometimes it’s his hair color, sometimes there’s a note on the picture, sometimes it’s a picture of someone else (the wife, maybe, or the professor).  Goes deeper and deeper, into the millions and 10′s of millions and more and more changes about the picture.

The professor guy postulates that they’re looking into alternate realities, and explains how each decision every person make forks off another dimension, into an infinite number of ways such that there is, somewhere, a universe where everything is exactly the same as it is here, except you decided to drink coffee instead of soda for one lunch time.  Or maybe you drink Pepsi instead of Coke.  Or that you decided to have a different major in college.  The more that changes, or the earlier the change is, the more different it is from the existing universe.

The professor wants to try an experiment.  He writes a tiny, microscopic note in an upper corner of the photo, so small that you can only read it with the main guys super-ultra-fine equipment.  The note says “Can you read this?  PBK 10/1/2012″  (PBK is the professor’s initials).  They dive into the levels, seeing the same note over and over, and they let it run overnight.  Then the next night.  No changes, a few million levels in.  The main guy figures, at least he’s gotten himself another technological challenge he can work on, by being able to read tiny tiny print.  Then the 3rd day someone notices that the note changed to “Yes, can read. PBK 10/3/2012″.

They then realize that they’re communicating with themselves in that other dimension.  They mark that dimension level: 137,342,322 so they can come back to it.  They exchange notes of various kinds, and review the photo of the main guy and notice that he’s not wearing glasses.  One of the notes the main guy sends says “where are your glasses?” and the response is “Laser surgery, 2yr ago, Dr. Philbin, before he died” (back story of how Dr. Philbin is a associate of the main guy and offered to do his laser surgery for him, and he had agreed, but something got in the way of him getting it done and the main guy had to fly out and come back the next day for something in the business, and he had the surgery scheduled for a few weeks after that, and the Dr got into a car wreck, and the main guy never went back and finished the surgery).

They continue a conversation of sorts, equally “wow’ed” about the fact that they can HAVE a conversation, and try to discern other differences between their realities.  They then try to talk to each other semi-live by making yet another technological breakthrough of a mini lcd screen where they can type back and forth.  They learn lots of things (like differences in intern’s boyfriends/girlfriends, movie stars that are still alive or had died, or maybe that a gay guy in the group isn’t gay (or isn’t “out”) in that reality, OJ was found guilty, etc).

They go deeper, putting messages down and finding which ones respond, and hook up with a few dozen of themselves, marking down which level they were at and scheduling “conference calls” of sorts between the different levels.  They go down to 500,000,000 and find that some of the realities there have new technologies invented (need to figure out what that is) and the main guy is able to patent it in his own world and make even more money.  He shares some of his patents or his worlds’ ideas but they turn out to be minor because there are certain changes that, had they been made, would have made it impossible for the two dimensions to talk to each other, given that the “portal” is the assumption that the guy is involved, the two mirrors are there, with an ever-advancing technological push for the mirror idea and levels.  So without someone on the other end with fantastic mirror technology, they can’t “push through”.

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Now I need to figure out where to go with this – do I have the main guy find a weapon from an alternate universe, and the military finds out and comes in to take over?  Does he find out secrets about people in alternate universe, where the only difference in his is that the secret wasn’t found out? or maybe that the secret didn’t happen, and he makes a fool of himself trying to disclose the secret?  Does he try to mass-market his inter-dimensional communication device so that everyone can talk to other selves?

I might continue to work on this and might not, but I wanted to at least get it out of my system feel free to comment on other suggestions for how this can end, or maybe other fillers and backstory that can help with the “feel” of the story.  And maybe because I blogged it here before anyone else, someone might think it’s a great story, and make it into a real movie and I can be advisor or credited in some way – so be sure to log your comments to make it even better!