By MICHAEL GRAIS, MARK VICTOR (1990)

In the lexicon of unmade, or rather ill-served, screenplays, COOL WORLD deserves a place of honor.  It was made into a notoriously bad 1992 movie by director Ralph Bakshi that deviated considerably from the initial conception by writers Michael Grais and Mark Victor (of POLTERGEIST and MARKED FOR DEATH), which was unique and interesting.  Specifically, the script is a dark and intense variant on WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (in its mixture of animnation and live action), while the film is a bland PG rated bummer.

Precisely how things went wrong remains in dispute.  Bakshi blames producer Frank Mancuso, Jr., who allegedly altered the material during production, while Michael Grais blames Bakshi, who shot footage, Grais claims, that was “unusable,” and in the process “offended so many people that he was never allowed back in Hollywood.”  Whatever the reason, the film was a disaster, but at least we have this screenplay (the third draft of which, dated 9/7/90, is under review here) to show us what could have been.

It’s about Jack Deebs, a comic book artist who as the screenplay opens is incarcerated for having murdered his wife.  In the movie Jack was made to have murdered his wife’s lover, but here this lonely, disillusioned man has to face up to and live with having irretrievably screwed up his life.  He also, upon being released from prison, moves into a house located directly across the street from Isabelle, who witnessed Jack’s crime, and her daughter Jennifer.

The script’s major concept is the “Cool World,” a cartoon realm created by Jack.  It’s in the Cool World that Debbie Dallas, a punked-out seductress (as opposed to the Marilyn Monroe wannabe of the flick) conjured by Jack’s repressed libido, reaches out to her creator.  Her ultimate desire?  To escape into the real world, which she plans to effect by seducing Jack—a plan complicated by the fact that the major law in the Cool World is that “Noids” cannot have sex with “Doodles.”  Enforcing this proviso is Frank Harris, a real world detective trapped in the Cool World.

Guilt, fantasy and sex: all are well juxtaposed in a script that’s uniformly gripping and evocative—up until the third act, at least.  Written by an uncredited third party (because according to Grais, “we couldn’t figure out how this fucking thing ended”), the last thirty pages grow trite and predictable, with Debbie escaping into the real world in pursuit of a “Spike of Power” that can disrupt the fabric of the universe, located atop the Golden Gate Bridge.  This leads to a hokey chase involving Jack, Debbie and Jennifer, and the concluding line “Ya deserve a medal, Harris, ya saved the universe.”

So COOL WORLD in script form is no masterpiece.  It is, however, an interesting artifact, and far preferable to the lousy movie it inspired.