- Creator: Philip Boast
- Genres: Comedy, Horror
- Length: 1:33
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DRUIDS END
Harry and Caylee's Test Movie goes badly wrong when an ancient curse awakens, and a tragic long-dead love story comes to life ...
Project collaboration:
Open
Synopsis:
"The True Story of the Making of a Movie, from a Movie, from another Movie, which is a Remake of a Movie from a Book, based on True Events 2,000 years ago"
Harry and Caylee are serial losers, who graduated from Movie School with dreams of making great movies and being the high-grossing heroes of the gold-paved streets of Hollywood. And loved by the critics. And artistically acclaimed. And socially relevant. And, most of all, rich.
It went so well. Harry’s first acting job made him famous ... for thirty seconds, the length of a Mr Dee’s sausage advert. For one minute, if played in slow-motion, Harry was a household name among sausage-eaters everywhere.
Brilliantly Harry and Caylee invested the sausage money in film projects of breathtaking ambition – Difficult Landing, an airport thriller about two lovable rogues who steal an aeroplane before learning to fly, but not only the plane crashed and burned, the box-office did too. Their next sure-fire winner was A Dog Called Miaow, about a Great Dane puppy who is brought up by cats in the belief that he is a cat. Undeterred by the total failure of this movie Harry and Caylee spent all they had on the epic sequel, Cat Lady 2, a tear-jerker about a girl raised by Great Danes who battles to achieve recognition as a cat. For their next brilliantly conceived project Harry and Caylee begged, borrowed and stole from strangers as well as relatives and small gullible children to make the awe-inspiring box-office flop Final Losers, about some people like them who lose everything, including their house, their parents and everyone who loves them, and are left living in a hovel too poor even to live apart – a textbook case of life imitating art.
As Druids End opens Harry and Caylee have reached rock bottom, penniless, hopeless and quarrelsome. Their dreams lie trampled on the cutting-room floor and they are down to fishing in the disgusting sink for fragments of sustenance – where Harry miraculously plucks out an unmarked can that may or may not be Chicken of the Sea. Searching for a can-opener in the fridge, Harry is astonished to find a forgotten envelope. Their long-forgotten project for a loving remake of the World War 2 classic Lingering Encounter for modern audiences has been awarded a grant. They’ve got money!
There’s only one problem. At a screening of the old Lingering Encounter they realise to their horror that it is a complete dog, a totally appalling film in every respect, that stands no chance whatsoever of communicating with modern audiences. The precious grant must be wasted making a completely unmakeable movie.
At that very moment, something horrific happens as an immense, bloody, vengeful, hooded figure rises up in the movie auditorium, towers over them, and roars for justice, peace, and the truth to be told. It is utterly real and shocking. The thundering ghost disappears leaving Harry and Caylee deeply shaken.
The projectionist doesn’t know what they’re talking about but says it sounds like something from Druids End, the 1970s classic he recently ran for the film club. Later, by chance, in a secondhand bookshop Harry sees a novel of that name, and impulsively steals it.
It’s a famous romantic novel written in 1900 about the Roman genocide of the Druids in Britain 2,000 years ago. Harry reads it for the battle scenes and massacres and the Druids’ human sacrifices, but mostly it turns out to be a sickly romance about two lovers, the Druid prince Fox and Juno the Roman general’s daughter, who fall in love and, when threatened by their parents, run away together to start the royal family of Britain. Caylee loves the romantic story however and is determined to make Druids End into a film – they’ll use the grant money so they’ll have to call it Lingering Encounter, but it will really be Druids End. The grants people are accountants – they’ll never notice.
Harry is won round when he realises Druids End has been a film not only in the 1970s but also the 1950s and 1919 – and each time the box-office has been huge.
It’s a shoestring budget so Caylee consults her Dictionary of Out-of-Work Actors, starting at the top with Sir Reginald Devine, the alcoholic legend of stage and screen, who when he hears of Druids End immediately accepts the part of Alban, not even caring about the difference between net and gross – it’s the film that started his career back in the 1970s. Caylee then books handsome bad boy Justin Atkinson, who believes he is a Robert Pattinson lookalike and has always wanted to be a vampire in a vampire movie, so Caylee promises him he’ll be a Druid in a Druid movie – ‘Druids are the new vampire.’ Her next call is the faded teen star Kitty Avro and such disturbed stars as Tarquin, famous as Robin Hood in Robin Hood Commiting Suicide.
Rehearsals are held while Harry is still finishing the script. While Caylee is still deep into rehearsing the burning village scene where the wife and baby son of Alban, the Druid leader, are horrifically murdered and all the Druids massacred by the Romans to the last man, woman and child, except the escaped Fox and Juno, Harry bursts in. He has a map. Druids End exists – it’s a real place, remote even now. They’ve found a way to film Druids End cheaply – at Druids End, living in tents to save hotel expenses.
Filming starts in the field, but almost at once things go wrong as famed but cheap Hollywood director Gryff is addicted to exotic cheeses and has previously only directed pornography, Justin can’t remember his lines, and Kitty is too busy giggling with Sir Reg who is mostly drunk. The key scenes by the river where Fox and Juno fall in love are terrible – and then Kitty, who plays Juno, goes missing. Caylee takes over her part. Then Justin, playing Fox, sees Kitty dead but alive again on a sacrificial rock. He loses his mind and runs away shrieking wordlessly, cannot be stopped, so Harry takes the part of Fox. The modern lovers Harry and Caylee are now playing the ancient lovers Fox and Juno – and the filming starts to become real, mirroring the events of 2,000 years ago, as the intensity of their relationship takes over the production and Sir Reg’s Alban, retreating into booze-fueled paranoia and sacrificial blood-lust, is possessed by the murderous ghost of the real Alban, and all the Druid families left unburied by the Romans at Druids End arise to ghastly new life with the power of Fox and Juno’s love, as reprised by Harry and Caylee.
Harry is contacted by the great-granddaughter of the book’s original writer in 1900 – they must meet at the local pub. Irma tells them that her family, though made wealthy by Druids End and the films made over the years, has been cursed by it. Her great-grandfather was killed the day after it was published, its various stars have all met ghastly deaths, including her own mother. She urges them to cease filming at once. Druids End was written as a romance with a happy ending by her great-grandfather but he, although he had discovered the tragic truth of the lovers’ end, hid it in order to sell his book. In reality Fox and Juno did not escape. They were sacrificed together in one knife-stroke by Alban to appease the Druid gods.
Caylee refuses to stop filming – a decision she regrets the next day during the scene when Fox and Juno are to be almost-sacrificed by Alban, but escape to freedom. Sir Reg is taken over completely and tries to kill them for real, and Harry and Caylee barely get free. Sir Reginald, with the sacrificial knife embedded through his beating heart, follows them with superhuman strength to their hiding-place, attacks them – and they kill him by withdrawing the blade from his heart.
As to what happens next we eagerly anticipate Druids Deep and Druids Curse and a budget.
Harry and Caylee are serial losers, who graduated from Movie School with dreams of making great movies and being the high-grossing heroes of the gold-paved streets of Hollywood. And loved by the critics. And artistically acclaimed. And socially relevant. And, most of all, rich.
It went so well. Harry’s first acting job made him famous ... for thirty seconds, the length of a Mr Dee’s sausage advert. For one minute, if played in slow-motion, Harry was a household name among sausage-eaters everywhere.
Brilliantly Harry and Caylee invested the sausage money in film projects of breathtaking ambition – Difficult Landing, an airport thriller about two lovable rogues who steal an aeroplane before learning to fly, but not only the plane crashed and burned, the box-office did too. Their next sure-fire winner was A Dog Called Miaow, about a Great Dane puppy who is brought up by cats in the belief that he is a cat. Undeterred by the total failure of this movie Harry and Caylee spent all they had on the epic sequel, Cat Lady 2, a tear-jerker about a girl raised by Great Danes who battles to achieve recognition as a cat. For their next brilliantly conceived project Harry and Caylee begged, borrowed and stole from strangers as well as relatives and small gullible children to make the awe-inspiring box-office flop Final Losers, about some people like them who lose everything, including their house, their parents and everyone who loves them, and are left living in a hovel too poor even to live apart – a textbook case of life imitating art.
As Druids End opens Harry and Caylee have reached rock bottom, penniless, hopeless and quarrelsome. Their dreams lie trampled on the cutting-room floor and they are down to fishing in the disgusting sink for fragments of sustenance – where Harry miraculously plucks out an unmarked can that may or may not be Chicken of the Sea. Searching for a can-opener in the fridge, Harry is astonished to find a forgotten envelope. Their long-forgotten project for a loving remake of the World War 2 classic Lingering Encounter for modern audiences has been awarded a grant. They’ve got money!
There’s only one problem. At a screening of the old Lingering Encounter they realise to their horror that it is a complete dog, a totally appalling film in every respect, that stands no chance whatsoever of communicating with modern audiences. The precious grant must be wasted making a completely unmakeable movie.
At that very moment, something horrific happens as an immense, bloody, vengeful, hooded figure rises up in the movie auditorium, towers over them, and roars for justice, peace, and the truth to be told. It is utterly real and shocking. The thundering ghost disappears leaving Harry and Caylee deeply shaken.
The projectionist doesn’t know what they’re talking about but says it sounds like something from Druids End, the 1970s classic he recently ran for the film club. Later, by chance, in a secondhand bookshop Harry sees a novel of that name, and impulsively steals it.
It’s a famous romantic novel written in 1900 about the Roman genocide of the Druids in Britain 2,000 years ago. Harry reads it for the battle scenes and massacres and the Druids’ human sacrifices, but mostly it turns out to be a sickly romance about two lovers, the Druid prince Fox and Juno the Roman general’s daughter, who fall in love and, when threatened by their parents, run away together to start the royal family of Britain. Caylee loves the romantic story however and is determined to make Druids End into a film – they’ll use the grant money so they’ll have to call it Lingering Encounter, but it will really be Druids End. The grants people are accountants – they’ll never notice.
Harry is won round when he realises Druids End has been a film not only in the 1970s but also the 1950s and 1919 – and each time the box-office has been huge.
It’s a shoestring budget so Caylee consults her Dictionary of Out-of-Work Actors, starting at the top with Sir Reginald Devine, the alcoholic legend of stage and screen, who when he hears of Druids End immediately accepts the part of Alban, not even caring about the difference between net and gross – it’s the film that started his career back in the 1970s. Caylee then books handsome bad boy Justin Atkinson, who believes he is a Robert Pattinson lookalike and has always wanted to be a vampire in a vampire movie, so Caylee promises him he’ll be a Druid in a Druid movie – ‘Druids are the new vampire.’ Her next call is the faded teen star Kitty Avro and such disturbed stars as Tarquin, famous as Robin Hood in Robin Hood Commiting Suicide.
Rehearsals are held while Harry is still finishing the script. While Caylee is still deep into rehearsing the burning village scene where the wife and baby son of Alban, the Druid leader, are horrifically murdered and all the Druids massacred by the Romans to the last man, woman and child, except the escaped Fox and Juno, Harry bursts in. He has a map. Druids End exists – it’s a real place, remote even now. They’ve found a way to film Druids End cheaply – at Druids End, living in tents to save hotel expenses.
Filming starts in the field, but almost at once things go wrong as famed but cheap Hollywood director Gryff is addicted to exotic cheeses and has previously only directed pornography, Justin can’t remember his lines, and Kitty is too busy giggling with Sir Reg who is mostly drunk. The key scenes by the river where Fox and Juno fall in love are terrible – and then Kitty, who plays Juno, goes missing. Caylee takes over her part. Then Justin, playing Fox, sees Kitty dead but alive again on a sacrificial rock. He loses his mind and runs away shrieking wordlessly, cannot be stopped, so Harry takes the part of Fox. The modern lovers Harry and Caylee are now playing the ancient lovers Fox and Juno – and the filming starts to become real, mirroring the events of 2,000 years ago, as the intensity of their relationship takes over the production and Sir Reg’s Alban, retreating into booze-fueled paranoia and sacrificial blood-lust, is possessed by the murderous ghost of the real Alban, and all the Druid families left unburied by the Romans at Druids End arise to ghastly new life with the power of Fox and Juno’s love, as reprised by Harry and Caylee.
Harry is contacted by the great-granddaughter of the book’s original writer in 1900 – they must meet at the local pub. Irma tells them that her family, though made wealthy by Druids End and the films made over the years, has been cursed by it. Her great-grandfather was killed the day after it was published, its various stars have all met ghastly deaths, including her own mother. She urges them to cease filming at once. Druids End was written as a romance with a happy ending by her great-grandfather but he, although he had discovered the tragic truth of the lovers’ end, hid it in order to sell his book. In reality Fox and Juno did not escape. They were sacrificed together in one knife-stroke by Alban to appease the Druid gods.
Caylee refuses to stop filming – a decision she regrets the next day during the scene when Fox and Juno are to be almost-sacrificed by Alban, but escape to freedom. Sir Reg is taken over completely and tries to kill them for real, and Harry and Caylee barely get free. Sir Reginald, with the sacrificial knife embedded through his beating heart, follows them with superhuman strength to their hiding-place, attacks them – and they kill him by withdrawing the blade from his heart.
As to what happens next we eagerly anticipate Druids Deep and Druids Curse and a budget.
Latest Work
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Trailer 1 - Director's original04/01/11
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Test Movie 1 - Version 103/31/11
Creative Notes:Still awaiting artwork for the battle scenes at the beginning and end so that the full story can be told. Otherwise it's full steam ahead for full action, full video, a real movie and a bundle of fun. And human sacrifice.
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Script 2 - Philip's 2nd Draft05/28/11
Creative Notes:Version 2, that we originally wanted to use for the Test Movie but couldn't, with the historical battle scenes and modern character revelations that underpin the plot. Improves the narrative no end. Also explains the premise much better.
All Work
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Script 1 - Philip's Original Draft03/28/11
Creative Notes:This is the first version. It's so simple because we wanted to shoot it as cheaply and easily as we could - so everything is designed for that, no frills. I couldn't afford the twenty thousand soldiers of the Roman Army or the 50,000 Druids, yet - we just say 'They're over there!'