A Scenario Even Hollywood Wouldn’t Consider

What this election thing needs isn’t a revote. It’s a rewrite.

And sweetheart, you’ve come to the right town for it.

Hollywood never met a story it didn’t think it couldn’t improve upon, not even Shakespeare, and certainly not this episode in unnatural history, a saga so improbable that it has everyone groping for superlatives and falling feebly back on the flabby cliche about it being “just like a movie.”

But is it? Is a movie version of this complex, astounding, tedious story likely to turn out like “Titanic” the film, or Titanic the ship? Are the Hollywood Hills alive with the sound of laser printers whirling out treatments?

Or did the story arc lose its trajectory somewhere back around Thanksgiving, and plunge into a mangrove swamp of tedium? O.J. Simpson, a Floridian of recent and desperate vintage, says the caravan to Tallahassee was “boring” compared to his Bronco pursuit, because in his case, “people didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Bold words, O.J. Could any of us have said a month ago that we saw any of this coming?

I truly expected anti-Castro Cubans to hijack the Ryder truck and feed the ballots to the alligators, one precinct at a time, until Fidel agreed to swap Elian for what’s left of the Florida Marlins.

Movie rewrites go through different-colored paper, usually pink for the first draft, then yellow, then blue, green, and so on. Anyone who began writing this three weeks ago has by now worked all the way through the Crayola spectrum to burnt sienna.

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So what do the pros have to say about this?

“It’s the kind of script,” says Joseph Brutsman, “that you’d just throw across the room after reading 10 pages.” Brutsman co-wrote a movie called “Free Money,” and wrote and directed a new film, “Diary of a Sex Addict.”

“The plot would be so thick, and it’d look like you’re making up rules on both sides to accommodate the next part of the story.” Meanwhile, up in Washington, there’s a president whose wife runs for Senate and wins--”and that’s when you’d really throw the script across the room, and tell the screenwriter he should hand in his card.”

Two weeks ago, Howard Suber pointed out to his class of UCLA students that “you want to construct films the way this election is going, which is down to the wire--you really don’t know for sure who’s going to win.”

After all, said Suber, the founding director of the UCLA film school’s producers’ program, “in sports, which is the better game, one that ends 102 to 32, or one that ends 102 to 103?”

So much for plot. What about casting?

Gary Ross, whose writing and directing credits run to such films as “Dave” and “Pleasantville,” assesses it as ironic that the two principals, Bush and Gore, “evoked so little passion through the entire campaign but evoke so much passion when it’s over.”

So we have two dullish candidates who left the electorate ferociously indifferent; we have Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the Tallahassee Lassie; Madame Butterfly Ballot, Teresa LePore; a Greek chorus of TV pundits all eager to play themselves in the movie version; and the Bush dynasty, father and sons.

And what of Gore? How do you cast a leading man who has spent eight years as a sidekick and can cure sleep disorders in one speech? “It’s the fight that makes the character interesting,” contends Suber, “not the character that makes the fight interesting.”

Take “Rocky”--”Implausibility is the stuff of great films. It’s implausible that Rocky, a nebbish bum, is gonna defeat the champion of the world, and of course in the end he doesn’t--most people forget that. But like the central point of ‘Rocky,’ Al Gore is a guy who wants to go the distance. For his own self-respect he’s got to rise to his feet and at least stay in there till the bell clangs . . . that’s the ultimate triumph: He may not win, but he can’t afford to lose.”

For wardrobe, Gore has a lock on the radioactive-white dress shirt, and Bush has taken to Ralph Lauren ranch-hand togs, evidently hoping people will think his dad is Ronald Reagan.

But the rewrite-killer is POV, point of view, how to tell the story. An omniscient narrator? First-person, like LePore telling her grandchildren about her bit of history? Or Bill Clinton, the master pol who’s out of the big game but by now bigger than the game?

“That’d be like when you pay 10 million to get Jack Nicholson to show up for a film,” says Brutsman, “and he just walks in with this invisible power over the whole movie--a big force.”

You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth. Truth is, forget the movie. The real money’s in merchandising: I’m investing in “West Wing” action figures.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com