Bennington in Space

One year ago today, The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth was announced. No one believed it at first—Deadline wrote: “It started with a wild report about a Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood sequel that originated in The Playlist. Being this is April Fool’s Day, it required some vetting… And because Fincher is exclusive to Netflix, the movie—if it gets made—will be financed and released by Netflix, straight to streaming. Tarantino will be paid a fortune for his words, as he readies a play he’s written and works on the final film he’ll direct.” Guess what? The movie got made. You saw the trailer during the Super Bowl. It’s called The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth and it’s coming out this August.

I’m in the movie, playing multiple parts, but I can’t talk about it much. I’ve written about the production from behind the scenes every week for the last year, but you’re only getting 700-1000 words from me each week. You have no idea how much time, work, and tsuris goes into making a movie. Every day I wake up screaming. Fincher, I mean Mr. Fincher, is anal. VERY anal. But we all know this. No one was interested in more tales of infinite takes and exasperated actors, acting as if they didn’t know what they’d gotten themselves into. “After 100 takes, I lost all sense of myself. I didn’t know where I was or what I should do.” Jesus Christ, do these people know that someone had to operate the Deepwater Horizon? What about the International Space Station?

I had an incredible idea last week after Project Hail Mary made hundreds of millions of dollars around the world: Bennington in Space. History has proven that outer space gets asses in seats: Star Wars, Star Trek, Apollo 13, The Martian, Interstellar. The Right Stuff underperformed in 1983, but there’s always an exception that proves the rule. Space sells. Everyone knows the tragic story of Laika the Cosmonaut, a dog that the dirty communists of the Soviet Union sent into space to die. What exactly was she supposed to do, quantum physics? If they needed a “guinea pig,” why didn’t they just send a GUINEA PIG? Probably could’ve made the cockpit smaller.

Right now, I’m preparing an outline for a treatment meant for the desk of My Sensei. He’s never done a space movie, and while I’ve never heard him talk about Star Wars (strange), he’s a MASSIVE fan of Star Trek, and, as you know, flirted with ending his directorial career with a Star Trek movie set on a 1930s gangster-themed planet. Sounds retarded because it is. I told him as much and he basically kicked me out of his trailer. But we made up. We were making a movie, after all. As you well know. And that’s just one of the secrets you didn’t have access to last year.

So The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth is just four months away from release, only a year after an outlet as prominent as Deadline speculated it might never be made. Please. Fincher? Tarantino? Quibbits? These are major names in show business, and Hollywood’s struggling now. They need us. Mr. Fincher and My Sensei have done their part, and now it’s my turn to go boldly where no bird has gone before: space. The final frontier. I know people call it that but it’s not true, there are several other frontiers in a variety of dimensions, but you aren’t ready for that conversation. I’ll wait until the new Steven Spielberg UFO movie comes out in the summer. Those DO NOT count as space movies. Close Encounters, E.T., Disclosure Day—those are movies about things coming from space. They don’t take place in space, nor are they concerned with the cosmos. Those movies are supposed to make you feel bad because you’re either more tolerant than the government in E.T. or you’re properly weirded out by Richard Dreyfuss’ enthusiasm for the aliens. I never understood why that movie was popular, its “iconic theme” is a random series of notes that do NOT form a melody, much less a hook.

I’m still trying to figure out if I’ll be the one in space. I guess I need to see Project Hail Mary to make sure that my boy R.G. gets out alive. If he gets burnt up or lost in space, I’m out. Or I’ll stay on the ground and work at NASA. Hey, if I can’t be a leading man, I’ll take Josh Gad and Jonah Hill roles. I’m just grateful to work (that was an insincere pro forma statement that everyone here in Hollywood does, and while I do it too, doesn’t mean you should). Because I’m telling you. I’m warning you. I’m standing outside of your house right now.

—Follow Bennington Quibbits on Twitter: @RoosterQuibbits