Mirror of Before & After – a film proposal
By Frank Moore circa 1970s
INTRODUCTION
MIRROR OF BEFORE AND AFTER will be a one-hundred-minute, color, thirty-five-millimeter, feature film.
The main character is Frank, a twenty-six-year-old man with cerebral palsy who sits in his wheelchair in a head shop in Washington, D.C. trying to communicate with people by pointing out words printed on a board, using a pointer strapped to his head.
The film describes his relationships with Suzy, Carol and Moe. Suzy, who has escaped from a mental hospital, shares with Frank the secrets and voices that guide her mystical and isolated reality. Carol brings Frank out for rides and movies and into his first physical closeness, but later she withdraws into the Jesus Freak movement and tries to heal him instead of love him. Moe, a bushy haired giant, runs the “Before and After” headshop, and has been Frank’s friend for many years. Frank tries to draw Moe out of his secret loneliness, coaxing him, questioning him, pulling him from the glittering trap the “Before and After” has become. Frank acts as a mirror for the audience, revealing these three friends clearly.
The film is aimed at the general audience. Its cinematic style is realistic, except for an entrance into Frank and Suzy’s inner world which is surreal.
SUMMARY:
At the beginning, we follow a seven-year-old black boy as he enters into the headshop and looks at the posters, Zap, hash pipes, etc., soaking up the world of the shop where teenage girls are teasing pimple faced boys and where older boys are sneaking a look at a girl in the dressing room. In the middle of this, he stares at Frank, sitting in the corner. Then he goes back to his browsing, lighting up a cigarette.
Moe is talking to Frank. (Frank communicates by pointing with a wooden stick strapped to his forehead, pointing to letters on a lapboard.) Suzy enters the store like a sad, silent ghost and sits near them, listening. After Moe leaves, Frank becomes aware of her and tries to start a conversation. (The words which are spelled out on a board are shown on subtitles.) He makes out that she is not able to utter a sound. He gets her to use his board and tries unsuccessfully to get her to talk about herself, except to say that she wants to leave this “world that shatters you.” We enter a flash of his dream image of her, then we drop back into reality. He reaches for her hand, and reaches into her world, triggering a smile from her, which frightens her. She runs out of the store.
Her next visit gives us and Frank more information about her, but not of her name or the past. Again, we enter Frank’s inner world of imagination. When reality returns, Suzy has fallen asleep. When she wakes up, she is lost in fear. She tries to rush out of the store, but she is dizzy. Moe grabs her and tries to talk some sense into her in his rough, satanic way, but he ends up driving her home. “Home” is an empty street. Moe and Frank are left with the unsettling feeling that she doesn’t live anywhere.
As Frank wonders for days about Suzy, worrying whether she will come again, we begin to see Moe’s almost maternal relationship with Frank.
But Suzy does come back. This time she starts revealing her private, inner world to Frank, telling him she hears voices and met Jesus yesterday. We enter her nightmare world, seeing her with Jesus. Jesus says she will shatter soon. Back to reality, Frank pleads with her not to die, because he loves and needs her. She says he can’t love her because she is not real. We learn that Frank is just in D.C. for a visit and is going back to California where he goes to college and has an apartment with his brother. Suzy is startled by Frank’s plans to leave and says, “This is why I don’t like your world.”
During Suzy’s next visit, Frank asks, “Will you make love with me?” Again, we go into Frank’s mind where sexual, almost violent, images are flashing. We also learn that Suzy is absolutely afraid of sex. Frank drops his demand.
During her last visit before Frank leaves, he asks her to come with him to California. But something she calls, “The Curse”, stands in the way, even when she says she wants to come. Frank gropes for some kind of understanding of “The Curse” and of her saying she doesn’t exist, searching for something with which to break “The Curse.” Moe offers to pay Suzy’s airfare. But Suzy cannot give a definite answer because she has to do something first and cannot make promises because she does not exist.
But she starts telling him of her past, how her parents tried to kill her on their West Virginia farm, how she lost her voice because off shock, how she ran away to New York City, and how the police picked her up, and when she couldn’t speak and wouldn’t give her name, they put her in a mental hospital and called her Suzy, and finally, how she escaped. She says she has to help her friend escape before she can go West. Frank tries unsuccessfully to talk her out of this. She still doesn’t promise him she will come. But she laughs, the first sound she has made throughout the film. It is a sign to Frank that he can go without worry about her, because in some way he has broken through to her.
He returns to California to an unexpected hostile reaction. The prospect of Suzy’s coming to live with Frank threatens his brother who is getting money for taking care of Frank. And more importantly, his brother needs this job as a way to get out from under the parental roof. Both his brother and his mother attack Frank for his “unrealistic” hope that Suzy will come. His mother’s own feelings of inferiority and her protective attitude toward Frank are shown in lines such as, “How many times do you have to be crushed before you will stop letting yourself be hurt?” and “Any girl that would want you must be sick.” Frank feels completely estranged from his family, but this kind of estrangement marks a new beginning for Frank’s life and for the film.
The film flashes forward in time. We see Frank locked inside a bus station pay toilet with a nice, meek looking young man, trying to get him out. After Frank is rescued, they go outside to, as we learn, wait for Moe to pick them up. We learn from their conversation that during the year between the present and the last time we saw Frank, he has dropped out of college, cut ties with his family; and he has hitched to Santa Fe, New Mexico, at first to live at a hippy crash pad, and now he is living a seemingly pleasant life in a small communal family. He is just on a Christmas visit to D.C. and to Moe. Dennis, the nice young man, who traveled with Frank on the bus, tells of his plans. But his plans suddenly change after Moe arrives and putting Frank into the car, asks Frank how much Marijuana he is carrying.
At the shop, Frank gets Moe alone to tell him he thinks Dennis is an FBI agent. We cut to the next day. After dusting in the store, Dennis leaves for a few minutes, and Frank gets busy hustling to get the local dealers who hang around the store to sell his grass for him. Frank explains why he had to travel with an FBI agent. As the dealer goes into the bathroom to test the grass, Dennis comes back with two of his “Cuzins” to meet his “Friends”. After they browse, they leave. Dennis follows them, after making a call for a “Job”. The dope dealer comes out of the john, stoned, and Moe makes a character analysis of Dennis.
Now it is early evening. Moe feeds Frank while talking to his girl, Debbie. Dennis is still dusting. He goes into the backroom where Frank’s bag is. Frank happens to look into the backroom to see Dennis going through his bag. Frank continues eating. When Dennis goes out, Frank tells Moe, and Moe has Debbie take the dope out of the shop. Dennis returns and very soon after, four cops come in. Moe invites them to browse. After the cops leave, empty-handed, Dennis decides he will visit his “Relative in West Virginia”.
We cut to a day when Moe is feeding Frank and at the same time, refereeing a fight between a high school boy and his Jewish father, who is trying to use an American Flag fringe jacket as a bribe for the completion of his son’s term paper. The son wins. The fourth major character comes into both the store and the film for the first time. At first we aren’t sure whether it is a boy or a girl. But, when Moe is off waiting on a customer, and the character asks Frank if he wants to be fed, we are sure Carol is a girl. Frank starts talking to her. We find out that Carol is leading a boring existence in the city. She asks Frank if he needs a friend. She promises she will come back and take him out for rides. After she leaves, Frank just sits. We enter his daydream world in which he is a Rock superstar giving a concert, ending a song, and then telling his audience how he and his band have come from another world to do a mission. Frank is brought out of his daydream world by Moe, pouring orange juice into his mouth. An old woman comes in. She takes one look at Frank and starts giving Moe a lecture on how proper vitamins and a hairbrush would heal Frank. Both Frank and Moe defend themselves with sarcasm.
Cut to Frank and Carol talking in the store about why Frank can’t fly alone. Because of airline rules, he needs to find some other way back to Santa Fe. Carol tells him about her brother’s car that is for sale. Frank says he will buy the car for her with the money he has gotten for his grass if she will drive him to Santa Fe. She isn’t sure. He tells her about his philosophy about taking risks. She leaves the store, thinking about his proposal.
Debbie, Moe’s girlfriend, walks up to feed Frank and to talk to him about how she can get closer to Moe. We once again enter Frank’s inner world. We see, at first Frank and then Moe, lying in bed in a dark room, totally dependent upon other people. Frank tells her that Moe has to learn “The Art of Receiving”, and that she should disguise her love more sneakily, so that Moe has to accept it.
Buzy, a Black who hangs around the shop, comes in to ask Moe to get his father to pull some strings to get Buzy into the Merchant Marine School. As Moe closes down the store, and lies Frank down for the night, the conversation turns to Moe’s parents, revealing Moe’s deep hate for his Mother and his intense, sad love for his Father. As the lights go off, Frank is on a mattress in the Backroom with Buzy going to sleep on the floor beside him. Moe and Debbie make love on the floor in the front of the store.
During the night, we see Debbie walking, nude, through the backroom to the bathroom. We cut to a close-up of Frank’s face, awake, watching her, revealing his loneliness and desire.
It is morning, and we see Moe’s morning ritual of opening the store, and dressing Frank. There is a phone call from Suzy. Hard cut to her face through the front window, a healthier face. She comes in to talk to Frank, not on the board, but actually with her voice. We learn that Suzy didn’t fly to be with Frank in California because “you were with me in my world”. They go for a walk outside; but they don’t get very far before it becomes clear that she still travels with invisible spirits and still is caught in useless inner rituals. The walk is a battle between Frank’s real world and Suzy’s surreal world.
Back in the shop, Frank gets Suzy to tell him her invisible friend’s name, “Past”. Suzy tries to leave but gets trapped in her ritual of going through doors many times. Debbie and Frank watch her as she finally gets through the door. Then, they talk about her.
Frank and Carol walk out of a library and stop to talk for a while. She invites him for a ride tomorrow, with some marijuana. Then she starts telling him, using the shop as a symbol for the material world, how the world keeps closing in on her with its “Corruption and Temptation”.
We now see them in the car, driving. Frank is lying with his head in her lap. She strokes his body with her free hand as she rambles in a monolog. We learn more about Carol; about how she hated her very “Religious” Father, who hit her, how she feels guilty about having felt nothing but relief when she found him dead after he shot himself.
Outside the shop, Moe carries Frank playfully into the shop where Carol is waiting to take his clothes off and to give him a massage. We start having daydream flashes, in between reality, flashes of their making love, Throughout the scene, her monolog continues, in which she tells Frank that her weak part feels love, acceptance and the simple feeling of being comfortable; but she mustn’t give in to these feelings. She must be spiritually strong. Reality fades into the daydream of lovemaking. When we return to reality again, Moe, not Carol, is dressing him.
Moe and Frank talk about how hard it is to get girls out of D.C.
Once again Carol and Frank are in the car. Carol is in her monolog again. We learn that she had left yesterday because she started feeling a human melting love for Frank. But, although she’d left, “She was still with him in spirit”. Frank winces. She tells him how purely spiritual he is. He winces again.
They are parked. Frank has his board. Carol asks him how he, being spiritual, can live in the stronghold of materiality and sin. She can’t without being influenced, without being just like “Them”. Frank tells her of his philosophy of seeing things for what they are, enjoying what is good in everything and learning from what is bad. Carol starts telling him about the events that have made her scared of people. She lets Jesus love people for her. Frank tells her of the times when people have tried to kill him; but this did not crush him or make him pull back from people, because he has seen what people really are like and has learned to duck the evil. They start talking about the trip to Santa Fe.
Frank and Moe are sitting in the store. A businessman comes in and stares at Frank. Moe and Frank artfully put him down. He leaves, unaware that he has been put down. Carol comes in and asks Moe for Frank’s grass money, to buy her brother’s car. She has decided to make the trip, but she has to wait for two more weeks. Frank unsuccessfully tries to get her to leave right away.
Frank and Suzy are selling underground newspapers on the street. Frank tells her about Carol and their plans. She is hurt. He feels guilty.
Suzy and Frank are sitting in the store. Carol comes in and hugs Frank but goes back to talk to Moe. Suzy uses the board to tell Frank she won’t get in his way with Carol but asks him if she can come for the ride. He flatly says no. She follows Frank, Carol and Moe out to the car. After Moe puts Frank into the car, he gently picks up Suzy and puts her in the wheelchair to roll her back inside the store. As Frank and Carol drive, he tries to cozy up to her, but Suzy’s sad face keeps flashing before him. Carol senses Frank’s preoccupation but Frank refuses to go back to the shop. Carol says she is frightened of Suzy, as she would be of a ghost, but that she sees how much good Frank is doing for Suzy.
They are parked in the empty parking lot of a park, smoking pot, drinking beer, eating cupcakes. Frank, his beard gooey with beer foam and cake icing, lies on the seat with his head in Carol’s lap, listening to how she made love in this park for the first time. She blows pot smoke into his mouth, almost kissing him, but the undercurrent of paranoia surfaces whenever a car drives by. Carol goes into a monologue in which she tells Frank about the lonely time in High School, about hanging around in bars, waiting to be picked up, about the short time of lonely independence, about her hippy life in California, about her return to D.C. in disgrace. This scene is a series of long takes of Frank quietly listening to her and of quick flashes of his fantasy of their making love.
Suzy and Moe are sitting together in the shop. She is crying, as Moe is trying, in his ironic way, to explain Frank’s actions, but in terms of free love. Suzy is wearing a new outfit that Moe has just given her. Frank and Carol enter. After a little joking, Moe and Carol leave Frank and Suzy alone. Frank tries to explain that he doesn’t want to hurt her. She says that she understands and is trying to understand free love. Frank says he doesn’t believe in free love. He has known too many hippies for him to believe that free love leads to happiness. He tries to explain that she can’t give him what he needs, a full, committed, male-female relationship, if she is in her own private world. Carol can give him this. Carol comes over to talk to Frank and Suzy withdraws into a corner. Carol says she wants to sleep with him tonight but then chickens out and leaves. Moe undresses Frank for bed. Suzy watches. When Frank is under the covers, she only takes off her shoes and socks and gets under the covers with him. We watch them as the covers are kicked off, watching her as she unsuccessfully tries to find her way into the strange, frightening world of sex, by stroking his nude body, too timidly, too lightly. He tries to stroke her, but every time he touches her, she pulls away in pain.
Frank is talking to Buzy about the frustrating experience, saying she is too fragile for him. Buzy jokingly says even he is attracted to Suzy, but he would never touch her because she is so looney that she would probably make him looney too. Frank starts suggesting that Buzy should go after Suzy. That would solve Frank’s problem with his conscience.
Carol and Frank are sitting in a park talking. She says they can’t leave on their trip until they find another rider to go with them. But she cuts him off when he starts discussing ways of finding one, to tell him that this rider must be a “Christian” who would keep her from getting weak and falling into temptation like she did last night. Frank tries to make her see that she did what was good last night because she was just being a loving human. But then she cuts off, almost completely, because she thinks he is trying to tempt and confuse her.
Frank is sitting in the shop with Moe, telling him how worried he feels, because Carol hasn’t come in for a week. Carol comes in ecstatically gleaming. She says she has been fasting and praying for an answer concerning them. She takes Frank out for a ride.
They are parked in the roadside park beside the river. She reads a prayer from her new book, while hugging him tightly. Then they get out and start walking beside the river. She tells him of a strange prayer meeting that she went to yesterday, where people went into a trancelike state to pray in unknown languages and to get messages directly from Jesus. Frank listens to this with an open mind, but with also a dread of what is coming. We learn that Carol has asked them about Frank. The answer came back from Jesus that Carol is Jesus’s agent working on Frank, and that she is the instrument who will be the healing channel and the guide for his salvation. At this point, Frank explodes in sad anger. Why doesn’t she see him? Why doesn’t she see what he has to do with people through the tool that Jesus has already given him in the form of his body? She says he is just comfortable in his present condition and is putting all of these rationalizations up so he won’t have to face the responsibilities that he would have if he were healed. They walk back to the car in silence. Night has fallen as they have been talking, and the streetlights are on. She kneels in front of him, beside the car to pray very passionately. She prays that he will be healed so she can love him in a woman’s way. He is crying. She picks up Frank and holds him high above her for a long time, enjoying the new strength that Jesus has given her. As she puts him into the car, she accidentally breaks his pointer. He gets her to give him his board again. He tells her he will try her way completely with an open mind if she will try his way. We see them driving fast and wild, as she drives, she holds him close to her as she would a lover.
We see Frank in the front seat of a flashy new car sitting between Carol and Mike, a balding young man with glasses and a suit. As the scene goes on it becomes clear that Frank wants to curl up and melt into Carol just to get away from this Mike. After Carol and Mike sing a Jesus song, we learn that he is the leader of the prayer group. Mike tries to comfort Frank by telling him to accept the strange things which are about to happen as natural and that the couple whose house is being used for the meeting would accept him into their hearts just fine. But Frank becomes increasingly upset. Mike asks Carol about her relationship to Frank. She tells him how she “discovered Frank in one of those headshops” and how she might drive him to Santa Fe, but perhaps she would stay in DC to do God’s work. Frank drops into sad shock.
Frank and Carol are in the middle of a circle in an upper middle-class house. In the circle there is an old woman, a young old maid and a milk toast couple. They are telling Carol who is kneeling beside Frank how nice she is to take on the responsibility of Frank. But Mike warns her about letting personal human feeling get in the way of God’s will. Now the people start slowly rocking, singing or chanting each in their own way. This reaches a peak of intensity, then is cut off by Mike standing up and reading a scripture that he says comes directly from God to Frank. He leaves the room as people build the intensity again. The individual songs and chants merge into one piece of intensity which is counter-pointed by the over voice of Mike in the next room, preaching, on the phone, fire and damnation, to a girl in the hospital, paralyzed from a motorcycle accident the day before. The intensity makes the people get up and move almost sexually stroking Frank and Carol. Carol is in an ecstatic state, half crying, half laughing, hugging and kissing Frank. Frank joins in, letting himself melt into the flowing intensity.
Frank is sitting with Mike in the car in front of the store. Carol comes out carrying a change of clothes for Frank. As she climbs in, she says that Suzy just asked her if she could go with them to Santa Fe.
Frank is lying on a mattress in a well-polished bedroom watching Carol undressing. She puts on PJ bottoms. She comes to Frank, puts her arms around him and presses him to her bare breasts. She tells him she feels now spiritually married to him in Jesus, but not physically married to him. She cuts off when they reach a certain physical intensity and lies down on her separate mat beside Frank’s to sleep.
Carol is giving Frank a bath.
Carol is fixing breakfast, talking about getting a job for traveling money. Frank sees it as another delay, but Carol insists, looks through the want ads, calls and makes an appointment for an interview. She then gets made up and dressed up. She gives Frank a present: a Bible.
We see Frank reading the Bible in the shop. Buzy accuses him, half-jokingly, of becoming religious to make Carol. Frank says he is getting answers by reading, but not the answers Carol wants him to get. Frank talks about feeling a strange restlessness, about his getting insights that have no apparent link to what he is reading but are triggered off while he is reading. Buzy changes the subject and tells how Suzy slapped him when he made a pass at her last night.
Frank still reads the Bible. Suzy comes in. She is shocked when Frank tells her he slept at Carols’ house last night. She starts crying. Frank screams at her, trying to make her feel something intensely, intense enough to explode her private world of illness, to bring her out where she can give him what he needs. Either love me or hate me, either make love with me or kill me. This is what Frank screams on his board. He tries to pressure her into killing him for her to feel something. But he suddenly becomes quiet when it doesn’t work. When she says Jesus has told her to go back to the mental hospital because their world is getting too cold for her, Frank agrees with her.
Frank is sitting in the store. A guy with an electric mandolin comes in and starts talking to Frank about God. Then he asks Moe if he could sleep in the shop. Moe starts undressing Frank. The guy comes up and accuses Frank of being an actor who puts everyone on. Frank just grins. But the guy grows violent and says he doesn’t like his mind to be played with by a parasite like Frank who wants to live his life sucking off people. He says he knows Frank can really talk. He walks toward Frank saying if Frank doesn’t stop screaming and start talking, he will choke him to death. Moe steps in the way.
Carol and Frank are driving, and she tells him about her bad luck job-hunting. They stop at a drive-in hamburger joint where she gets mistaken for a boy. As they eat, she says she really wants to be ugly because then she would have less temptation.
They are in a church looking at a stained-glass window depicting the men who have helped mankind, some of them weren’t Christians. Frank starts talking about what he has been thinking about. He says although the prayer meeting moved him, that sort of thing isn’t for him, nor is going around overtly trying to convert people. But he has to be where people are, helping people, quietly preparing the way for people to discover Christ in their own way. He says he has seen that he can’t cop out on that as he has been doing in Santa Fe. But he can only do this if Carol will share this with him. She says she wants to hide away from people, hide in Christian fellowship, hide until her faith is strong enough to drag people to Christ. Frank just says it sounds as if she has put limits on what she will do for Jesus because the quiet living of Jesus’ teachings in the world is harder than either hiding or making a grand show of believing. He asks her just to pray about it. He wants to spend the night reading John together. But Carol is going to a prayer meeting. If Frank wants to be with her, he will have to go to the meeting. He agrees.
Carol is on the phone, trying to argue Mike into letting Frank come to the meeting. Frank smiles to himself to hear Mike has reservations about letting him. Finally, Mike agrees to Frank’s coming.
Frank and Carol are talking to a young black woman who just came from Jamaica. They are in the basement of an upper-class home. About 20 people, old people, successful businessmen and army officers and their wives, and all-American kids are in the prayer circle. The intensity rises and is manifested in the same way as the first prayer meeting. An old man kisses Frank and talks to him in holy gibberish. The black woman prays simply to Jesus about Frank, which moves Frank. Mike comes into the room and stops the flow. He says God orders Frank to get up and walk, and if Frank doesn’t have enough faith to try, Carol should have nothing more to do with him. Frank throws himself up out of his chair and falls flat on his face. Making no effort to break his fall, Mike and Carol pick him up and hug him. Mike tells him that he has proven himself.
Mike is asking for Frank’s forgiveness for Mike’s mistrust of him as they ride in the car.
We see Frank and Carol, both nude, rocking on the mattress in the bedroom. But when Frank starts trying to go into sexual feelings, she goes to her own bed. Frank just lies there, sad.
Carol is fixing breakfast for Frank. Frank decides to take the risk and asks her to make love to him. She says she can’t until he is healed because his body turns her off sexually. She says she never has thought sexually about him. She says maybe they could get married after he is healed, but she isn’t sure because she wants to be married to Jesus. They are interrupted by a phone call from Mike. Mike urges her to have nothing more to do with Frank, to forget about her promise to him and not to repay his money. She argues with him but won’t hang up on him as Frank demands. Frank explodes, saying she has no right to keep him here without money or a way back, saying if she gets a plane ticket and gets him aboard, she can forget all her promises and hide from the world.
They are walking beside the river. He is telling her that he isn’t mad; that she accidentally showed him what he has to do with his life, now he has to find a way to do it. They pass a dead dog and Frank’s broken pointer.
We see Carol in the airport asking people to travel with Frank. A man agrees.
We see inside of the airplane. Carol is shaking Frank’s hand and then walking way.
The film ends with a long take of a close up of Frank’s sad face. He starts to cry, stops and breaks into a smile.