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YOKNAPATAWPHA COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT
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Investigating Officer(s): Det. S. Murphy, Det. T. Armstrong
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Incident No.: 002221-15H-2004
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Case Description: Corwin Fitz Homicide
The following treatment (synopsis) of Fitz's movie, Bacchanals'
Destruction, (Evidence # 002221-11) was found among the papers taken into
evidence from the film crew's lodge.
BACCHANALS' DESTRUCTION -- TREATMENT
RALDLER is a young actor traveling with a theatre troupe
across the East. Their style of performance departs from the devoted
school of the dramatic arts. These players seize their audience with
violent, realistic images, staged so cunningly that drama and
reality are indistinguishable. Only the mind is left to decipher.
The crew consists of COSTA, the director and weapons expert;
KENNY, the inveterate leading man; MIGUEL, the auxiliary hatchet man;
and Raldler, who is forever lost in a world of conflicting characters,
who are always acting him out rather than the opposite.
When at first we meet these performers, it's at land's edge, on
the Gulf in the lowest of Alabama. The routine of their trigger
shows have soured the players toward one another, and the source of
the trouble is Costa, who has become too lax in his planning, too
complacent about their safety. When Kenny is nearly captured by
local law enforcement for a mock shooting, the crew hides out in a
Mississippi Gulf Coast casino. There Raldler meets and falls in love
with CHEYN, a scam artist and classic femme fatale whom he spots from afar. Before he is able
to express his love, the law is on them again, so they retreat to a
country lodge, further upstate, with Cheyn along as a hostage.
Sensing the group's restlessness, Costa plans an awful scene on
their trip north; the scene is designed not to blur reality and
drama, but to bring them into focus and show that they have swapped
places. As a result, Raldler unwittingly shoots Kenny, his friend and
mentor.
The crew arrives at the lodge bitter and shaken. Unwilling to
call a doctor, Costa puts Kenny to bed as Raldler administers care.
Drunk with power and madness, Costa abuses and violates Cheyn. On
his deathbed, Kenny tells Raldler how the world is deceived by
ornaments, how he had been guilty of it himself. Kenny tells him
that life is like the stage, only the acts can be rewritten in an
instant. His final words convince Raldler to overthrow Costa in an
elaborate finale that pits drama against reality, friend against
friend, lover against lover.*
The players craft the drama of their
own deaths, rehearse their own salvation. There is no one left for
the curtain call, but the audience leaves feeling the trembling threads
of their own mortality, as if they too were playing out their lives
like some strange, harrowing play.
* The ending cannot be spelled out here as it will be determined
by the actors' performances. The performances will be managed in
such a way that allows the players to write the ending by their own
actions, making the outcome more realistic while retaining the
dramatic nature of the film.
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