Another aspect of my internal universe:​

     This developed over my lifetime and really manifested itself around the time I hit forty. 

     There's a sector within my imagination that contains movies and shows that really should have been but never were.

     For instance:

     I have a difficult time watching the movie Batman from 1989. Why? It's got to do with who's playing the lead roles, both gifted, world class actors working at the top of their game. I've loved Jack Nicholson all my life, and he claims this is one of his favorite roles. And Michael Keaton, I believe, captured Bruce Wayne better than anyone else who's played him since, catching more the vulnerable and otherworldly facets of this orphaned billionaire. But, fade back in Tim Burton's filmography to the movie Beetlejuice. Isn't the lead character just another version of The Joker? And he was played with a comic gusto and a frantic nuttiness containing an underlying sinister edge missing from Batman. Yep, call me a rebel, but I can't watch Batman because I believe that the person who should be playing The Joker is playing Batman.

     In my private imaginative universe, Michael Keaton plays The Joker.

     Another for instance.

     Why didn't Clint Eastwood ever make a movie out of Rawhide, the TV series that got him started? He could have played the trail boss and hired some up and comer to play Rowdy Yates. Cattle drives make for great drama, right?  What's Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove but the best episode of Rawhide ever done? Throw in the kick ass theme song, then start counting the profits. Never happened.

     In my private imaginative universe, there's a movie called Rawhide produced and starring Clint Eastwood.

​     Yet another for instance:

     Why hasn't Robert DeNiro ever appeared in a movie version of Columbo?

​     I've mentioned this to a couple of TV purists over the years, and they, of course, recoil. What? Columbo without Peter Falk? How dare I even imagine such a thing? (I'm certain that, for decades, there were many who thought the same thing about Jim Kirk). If anyone could pull such a thing off, revive an iconic character for a different yet similar medium, it'd be DeNiro, though, right? And, if it worked, what a franchise it would make. Every couple of years, DeNiro could track down a murdering Movie Superstar, Meryl Streep followed by Brad Pitt followed by Julia Roberts followed by Al Pacino followed by whoever was hot that year. Budgets would go to salaries because special effects would be nil, and the settings would be present day.

     In my private Imaginative universe, there exists a Columbo movie franchise starring Robert DeNiro that has raked in billions.,  

     And, now, to the "for instance" that, added with that other idea about the invisible war, replaced ​Adam Forwarder as the fiction project I want to work on for as long as I can still see. 

CONTINUE