part one
part two
Ben Richards: The baby is crying again. Her temperature is up to 85 degrees. She has a high fever. I have to find a way to make money, Sheila. I worked at jobs so disgusting like shovelling slime from sewers when people who honestly believed that they were looking for a job were unemployed. I am going to the games building and try out for one of the death games on television. The one I think that I will most likely qualify for is Swim The Crocodiles where a man must survive crocodiles.
Sheila Richards: Give me a kiss before you go, then.
Richards walks past, under a red neon sign. The inner city. The future. The occasional flying car.
Narrator: The line up outside the Games Federation Building stretched for blocks.
Nurse: The next part of the test is the Weschler's Word Association Test. Red.
Richards:Black.
Nurse: Silver. Richards: Dagger. Nurse: Rifle. Richards: Murder. Nurse: Win. Richards: Money. Nurse: Sex. Richards: Tests. Nurse: Strike. Richards: Out.
Richards: Nice tits.
Nurse: I could have you disqualified.
Richards: You could get yourself fired, that's all.
In the lobby with the other contestants. One of the contestants named Laughlin with the name on a nametag.
Laughlin: They handed us these envelopes which tells us which games we have been assigned to. Which one did you get?
Richards: The Running Man.
Laughlin: That is Prime Time. Not one of the ones where they take out an eye or an arm. That is one where they kill you. I got assigned The Running Man too!
Secretary: Mr Laughlin, Mr Killian will see you now.
20 minutes later, Laughlin emerges with a girl around his arm. He winks:
Laughlin: A friend of mine from the car pool.
Secretary: Ben Richards, Mr Killian will see you now.
A large office.
Mr Killian: The Running Man has been on for thirty five years. We have no survivors. To be honest. We expect none.
Richards: Then you are running a crooked table.
Killian: You will have to contend with McCone and the Hunters.
Richards: Sounds like a neo group.
Killian: If you survive 30 days, you get a billion new dollars.
Richards threw back his head and laughed: Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Killian: My sentiments exactly.
Killian about to press a button.
Richards: Spare the cheap snatch. I'm married.
Killian: Are you sure? Is there anything you want?
Richards: A bottle of bourbon, make that two.
Narrator: Friday night. In the room, there were three novels, Not As A Stranger, God Is An Englishman and The Pleasure Of Serving. Poor boy makes good in General Atomics. Rises from engine wiper to gear tradesman. Takes night courses, on what money? Richards wondered. Meets a beautiful girl, apparently syphilis had not rotted her nose off at a block party. Promoted. Three year marriage contract follows.
Richards throws the book across the room.
He looks at a picture of his little daughter. Drinking bottle of bourbon. Easy drunken tears flow down his face.
Narrator: He wonders if he could finish the second bottle before passing out. He almost made it. He spent all Saturday nursing a hangover. Sunday night he orders two more bottles of bourbon. He wakes up Sunday morning seeing green caterpillars crawling all over the room. He decided then that it would be against his best interests to completely wreck his reflexes before Tuesday and decided to stop the booze.
A cutaway to auditorium and audience: Richards! Richards!
Richards runs out onto the street. He catches a cab.
He goes to ID forger Molie: I have been doing this for a quarter of a century. Saty close to your own people. You have the power to cloud men's minds if you use it.
The cab takes him to the airport. The plane lands in Los Angeles, the largest city on Earth.
The Brandt Hotel. Richards signs in using his ID the name on the ID John Griffen Springer.
Narrator: A black boy wearing a shirt large enough to play killball in was yelling at a slot machine.
Black boy: Yo! I lost my mufuckin nickel. I lost my motherfucking nickel!
That goddamned machine took my nickel!
Desk clerk: Good to have you here, Mr Springer.
Narrator: Richards walked down the hallway of the Brandt hotel. In his room, he looked out the window and looked casually at the traffic. However there was a man in a trenchcoat leaning against a lampost. He just stayed there. Another man came and sat down at the bench. A Police Officer showed up and a man was talking to the Police Officer. Richards became aware of all this like when you recognized the voices of the dead in your dreams. I'm being bracketed, he thought with a helpless rabbit terror. No, his mind corrected, you have already been bracketed.
Richards returned to the lobby to the desk clerk: I am paying for two more days.
Desk clerk: Very good sir.
Richards went to his room and put on a Do Not Disturb sign around his door. He then then took a toothbrush and snapped it in half. He goes to the elevator. He presses B for basement. When the elevator reached the basement, he jams the toothbrush end into one of the elevator buttons. The elevator panel smokes and the elevator lights go out.
Richards is in the basement of the Brandt. He lights a match and lights up some newspaper and places it under the boiler near some gasoline tanks. Some hunters outside the Richards room at the Brandt hotel. Richards runs for it. Outside as Richards runs away, the Brandt Hotel blows up.
Narrator: Richards stays with some people. He stayed with a black family in the ghetto projects but the mother called the Police. Mother in nightgown on phone. Police cars pull up to the projects. The black guy drives Richards across the State line but the car falls over a bridge.
Black guy: I am too injured to go on. Run! Go on without me!
Richards runs across a minimall.
Richards: At the minimall there is a mailbox. I have to send in my video clips. I have to send one everyday. I made one this morning:
Richards in hotel room: Peekaboo! You can't see it, but I am laughing at you shiteaters!
Richards hitchhikes. A woman pulls over and picks him up.
Woman: You are that guy, Richards!
Richards: Just drive to the airport!
They drive past a billboard. Rich folks blow dokes.
Woman: Have you got a jay?
The car drives into an airport.
Richards uses aikido and gets the gun away from one of the Hunters. Evan McCone fires two fast gunshots. One blowing away the head of the other hunter and one shot getting Richards in the stomach. Richards fires and blows away McCone.
Richards: Gutshot. I'm gutshot.
Narrator: Richards remembered once sitting at work during a midnight lunch break discussing with his coworkers the worst ways to go. Gutshot has got to be one of the most painful one of them said with no conception of Pain.
Pilot: He didn't like Otto, do you know that?
Smash. A coffeepot smashes down on the pilot' head. Richards takes over the helm.
Voice over radio: C one niner eight four. Acknowledge. What's wrong?
Richards: Speak boy! Rowf rowf!
Narrator: A Push freak stood in a doorway stared up and thought he was seeing a hallucination, the last dope dream, come to take him away, perhaps to General Atomics heaven, where all the food was free and all the piles were clean breeders.
author's note: No rules. I will endeavour to employ the 85% rule which is better than going for a just as imaginary 100%. As long as I come up with some image which has a semblance, or even a semblance of a semblance of what I am trying to portray.
I thought of re-reading the book. The movie The NeverEnding Story said that every time you reread a book, it is a slightly different book and you will pick out parts that you didn't the previous reading. If I reread the book two, three times the third time I would find parts that I did not the second. As it is, I already remember enough of the book. So I won't reread it.
Note: Only an ET or an extra advanced shaman can look at my movies, and say, that frame is from a daydream; from the imagination, but that frame is culled from the dreamworld. There is a resonance.
I have, it seems reached a level, which is a level, where I have inadvertently become a walking dream encyclopedia. Say kitchen and I can draw a dream I had in a kitchen. Say fancy hotel, and I can draw a dream of a fancy hotel. Say run down skid row hotel and I can draw a dream I had in a run down hotel. Say bus and I can draw a dream where I was riding on a bus. Say Safeway, say Chinese restaurant, say European restaurant even. Say zoo and I can draw dreams where I had where I was in a zoo. In most cases, not just one dream of say, a kitchen, but multiple dreams. etc etc etc.
PS
http://www.horrorking.com/runningman.html
Photographs taken on November 14, 2008.
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