For this is the most ambitious film project ever contemplated: Nothing less than The Neverending Movie. The Movie starts at the very inception of mankind, indeed at the very first word uttered. From then on it attempts to show every event, large and small, that ever happened in the history of the world. We want not just the affairs of princes, kings, and heads of state, but the middling forgettable conversations and non-sequiturs, quips and meaningless puns from long-forgotten years of dull centuries.
The film is to be triumphant and arrogant in its tediousness, a remake of the Life of Man, all-reconstructed, in blazing technicolour. What Christ said upon the cross, the oaths of Caesar, pillaging Vandals and Vikings not faceless but as clear as soap opera characters, Joan of Arc, Luther nailing his theses to the church-door, Columbus embarked upon the shore. Lincoln and Kennedy assassinated, man on moon, screaming births and long drawn-out deaths.
Imagine a secret recorder of all action and all speech and thought worldwide. Imagine it recording humanity for an eternity. Imagine then the movie reconstruction!
Endless and endlessly involved, with billions of characters, subdivided into numberless screens, each life startlingly played out, authentically set-dressed and scripted, but with an extra Hollywood gloss.
It is instructive to watch actors who are reading not scripted lines but real dialogue... Look at a made-for-TV biopic or true crime story. The actors are always more glamorous and sharply-defined than real people. They always bring immediacy, largeness, precision. All the qualities lacking from real life, with its downbeat vagueness and lack of certainty.
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