Movieola by John Domini (review)

I’ve followed John Domini’s fiction since choosing him the winner of Boston University’s undergraduate writing contest some forty-five years ago. He has steadily progressed in his career, publishing story collections, novels, poetry, and criticism. In his latest story collection, Movieola!, he not only has fun with meta-fictional ironies, but verges on flashes of poetry, as in “Assassins: Story Board to Date,” when his Hollywood pitchman imagines assassins in love: “For the two of them every orgasm’s as distinct and gorgeous as a snowflake.”

Movieola! features studio people: directors, producers, scriptwriters, performers, and wannabes, who are inspired, jaded, worldly, crass, and frantic to cash in on such market trends as vampires, assassins, romance (spiced up by kink and bisexuality), movie making itself—and by extension storytelling and the power of imagination. Domini’s own prose is quick-witted and closely packed; his ear for the trade idiom, precise; and his specialty breath-taking riffs, such as: “Can’t you grok the beauty of it, the bendy neverendingness of it, the superlunary concept? Our project was totally dying but with a cry in the night we slap on the paddles and defibrillate. It’s adrenalined, it’s flashing and yearning, it’s bending and bending!”

His comedy recalls that of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, as he invents the half-baked, vapid stories that his fictional creators invent. In “Royal Jelly, Pitch, and Yaw,” for instance, an eager, sycophantic assistant develops the idea for a zombie love story with Silverlake, a movie executive, who boasts: “We’re off-the-wall, and never before seen.” Their script will open with the wedding of a female scientist and her handsome zombie boyfriend, who has been converted to eating fish and pizza by means of a special inoculation that the woman has discovered; guests attend on both sides, and all of the groom’s friends are also converted zombies. From there, we move to “back story and the arc.” During a zombie apocalypse, the boyfriend had broken into the woman’s lab and tried to eat her alive and she had jabbed him with a needle. The woman, who is dark skinned like the “Grandma or Great-Grandma” pictured on her lab’s wall beside her diploma as “the only person in the world with a doctorate in the undead,” had managed to save the groom and his kind. Once sprayed with the vaccine, all the zombies were turned into “another slave race,” managed by Grandma. Apparently a happy ending! Except that the script then returns to the wedding, where the inoculation’s side effect of raging appetite takes hold. The groom’s kiss morphs into a bite. The bride is infected. One thing leads to another (“Silver Lake: See how our inspiration brings up one promising fillip after another?”) and the “Reveal,” finally, is that the woman (now inseminated with zombie sperm/royal jelly by the grandma, who had also once herself been inseminated) unknowingly has been “zombie spawn” all along. She delivers a baby girl, who, in a closing shot (as gleefully described by the producer’s assistant), is “about to bite her pet hamster in the neck. Ha-ha, ha-ha… . One last splash of adrenalin, that’s what you’re buying with the ticket.” The two creators are ecstatic, convinced they have a hit. “Silver Lake: But isn’t that our true calling? . . . to rub these antiques till a genie pops out? Don’t we want to be the first living-dead movie to break huge in Europe?”

In “Bookstores of Hollywood,” an ambitious young scriptwriter, Nola, magically succeeds. Her studio seeks a big project. As she sits in a Starbucks in Barnes and Noble, she is inspired to visualize a production that instantly becomes manifest, transforming the bookstore and nearby mall into a huge drive-in half-shell. She sits on top, while her imagined movie plays larger than life. The flustered bookstore manager teeters nearby, astonished. Then the half-shell collapses back to Starbucks, at which point wannabes ply her with business cards, the event...