My Own Jetpack
And now, a word from Dan Szolovits:
When I was six years old I came up with my first screenplay. I didn’t write it, of course. I think if I had attempted to it would have been at most three pages and probably have been a lot of really, really crappy drawings of dinosaurs and jetpacks (I was never what you’d call a gifted visual artist.) Oh, the title of the film was “My Own Jetpack.” There are two things I obsessed over as a child (three, if you count black holes, but that obsession was more a kind of existential terror and a budding understanding of mortality that was not what you’d call “fun to think about.”) The first was being able to fly. Before Aladdin came out (and note that a big part of the fantasy of Aladdin is that he has a flying carpet he can ride on,) my favorite Disney movie was Peter Pan, and we also had a tape (and later a LaserDisc, because we were the family that had LaserDiscs) of the stage show starring Mary Martin, so I think as a kid I always kind of suspected Peter Pan was actually an adult woman. I regularly made my blowing-out-the-candles birthday wish the ability to fly (crap, I guess that means it won’t come true now.) Yeah, I didn’t worry about how racist the depiction of Native Americans was or how the mermaids are freaking psychopaths – it was all about being able to fly. I loved Hook as well, and refuse to watch that again out of fear that it’s actually a terrible movie that I only liked because I was a dumb kid.
The other obsession was time-travel. I had a worn-out VHS of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure that we had taped off of TV, and I watched Back to the Future an absurd number of times. In fact, I had that similar dread of watching Back to the Future until a couple years ago, when I finally sat down and watched it again, and was incredibly relieved to discover that it remains a fantastic movie. (And much like Howard the Duck, leaves me with really strange feelings about Lea Thompson.)
So bring that all together and you have the very first movie idea I ever came up with: “My Own Jetpack.” It was about a six-year-old named Dan (no connection, of course,) living in the future (naturally.) He gets a jetpack (these are like bicycles in the future – probably around 2010 or so) that malfunctions and sends him back in time (rocket science is way, way more complicated than you’d think.)
I don’t remember what eras he would go to. Probably at some point the present (so 1992,) and certainly at some point he’d come across a medieval drawbridge with a knight keeping watch. He’d also encounter a jerkass dinosaur who demanded his credit card information before allowing him to pass, un-chewed. (I had no idea what a credit card actually was as a six-year-old, except that I knew that people were constantly asking my parents to produce theirs whenever we went to restaurants or bought Legos at the toy store. I like to think that even at a young age, I was already writing witty commentary on our consumerist culture.)
Anyway, “Dan” (not me) eventually comes home from his adventure (after finding the right fuel or something to send himself back in time to the future/present) and the movie ends. I’m pretty sure it would have been the best film ever made.
-Szolo
