David Cronenberg's Sequel To 'JFK'
An outline in five scenes
Published September 10, 1999 in Dirt

GettingIt spies were trolling through the wretched refuse of Universal Studios' dumpster when they came across an interesting memo from director Oliver Stone. Apparently, the stuck-in-the '60s filmmaker wanted David Cronenberg to shoot the sequel to JFK. But there were problems along the way. Read on to find out why.

See also...
... in the Dirt section
... from September 10, 1999

To: All Staff
From: Oliver Stone

Have just finished reviewing DC's suggested treatment for JFK II. Who the fuck is this guy? I thought he came highly recommended! Has anyone actually read this filth? As far as I'm concerned, he should never eat lunch in this town again!

-OS

JFK II: Creepy Throat
Treatment by David Cronenberg

Scene One:

BLAM! The bullet erupts from the barrel of the Italian-made rifle and rockets toward its target! As John Fitzgerald Kennedy waves to the people of Dallas, he's thinking of the soft pale weight of Marilyn's milky white breast in the palm of his hand. Closing his eyes for a moment, the air humid on his face, he feels the brush of her platinum hair across the insides of his thighs, hears her whisper his name, feels the cock stiffen in his pants.

When the steel-sheathed bullet smacks into the back of his head, he comes like World War III.

Scene Two:

John Connally, the Governor of Texas, is dreaming that he's swimming across a river of brains. In the basement of the hospital, Kennedy's at the swarming center of a persistent hive of coroners. There's a flurry of steel instruments there: It's amazing that doctors aren't cutting off each other's fingers in their eagerness to get at the dead man. Flecked with small carnage, the sheet is drawn back off the shoulders, then drawn back again over the chest, turned down into the lap, then finally removed altogether in a grisly striptease. Some members of this macabre entourage are glancing surreptitiously at the dead president's massive member. Some of them smirk and whisper rude comments to one another from behind their upraised hands:

"No wonder they called him Big John..."

"That's going to be one bereaved widow, boy..."

In the confusion, the brain is set down, then the heart and lung and kidney; set down, oozing, on porcelain surfaces, then forgotten. A voice drones on into a microphone about blue exit wounds and pale bone fragments while a lone high voice tries again to stop chortling, and fails.

Scene Three:

"His brain?!? What do you mean they lost his brain, Private?!? How the hell do you lose a brain...?!?"

Then, sudden and shocking as Armageddon itself, the general slaps the boy in front of him with a hand as big and smooth as Dean Rusk. The soldier's hand going up to his red cheek in surprise, eyes wild as a caged beast's. The sounds of the general's heavy breathing, that sharp painful intake of breath. Testosterone's musky scent heady in the air. The two frozen caricatures seem to sway toward each other in that electrified atmosphere. For a minute their eyes grow humid with some nebulous intensity ...

"Sir! They don't know, Sir!" Back stiff again, confused eyes forward again like headlights, but a strange stirring in his loins. Then, quietly: "It's just... lost, Sir. The surgeons said..." The general leans in as though he were going to kiss the boy, curses "Ahh!", then veers away with the prehistoric inscrutability of a shark and sweeps out of the room. The confounded soldier throws the edge of his hand against his forehead, the sound of the slap still ringing in his ears like a mosquito.

Minutes passing.

Alone in the office.

Arm growing tired waiting for the salute that will release the one still welded to his forehead. Sweat breaking out now on the boy's rigid body like a rock growing new, wet grass.

Scene Four:

In the glow from the light coming through an X-ray of a human skull on the wall -- in the empty silent autopsy room -- President Kennedy's BRAIN crawls out from behind a metal gurney, making the slithery squishing sounds of flaccid submarine life.

Already, it has begun to regenerate: A snaky spinal cord now propels the brain forward in abrupt, wormy, strenuous spurts. A kind of gray fetal hair has sprouted from the cerebrum along the parietal lobe. One blue milky eye, reconstituted, hangs from a stalk and is dragged along glistening behind it. Like some gelatinous mishap, a new penis has begun to bubble dead flesh at the end of those chitinous vertebrae.

Kennedy's brain is leaving a sticky mire of brown-flecked gray goo behind it, the path of some antediluvian snail across yellowed linoleum. It moves in a determinedly straight line, as though it knows where it is going.

Scene Five:

Lightning strikes blue ozone! A crackle of thunder over the night graveyard, the sound of something moving, wet dirt. Like tossing the tiny bones of small birds against a windowpane, the wind lashes a moment of unseasonable rain across the headstones: Westwood Memorial Park, cemetery of the stars.

Kennedy's brain burrows into the fecund earth, a gruesome annelid thing, below a monument inscribed with the only name she'd ever really needed, the one they'd chosen for her. The president has been transmogrified, his form that of a wet centipede covered in bony carapace.

Quivering, pale feelers push it down through the hole it's eaten in the coffin: "Marilyn ... Marilyn ... I'm here ..." The incipient cartilaginous penis has begun to stiffen in anticipation. With a sound like a rotten slab of meat being thrown into an oily puddle, the wet husk of the president plops down on the dead actress, twitching.

Blue corpse eyes shatter open like flashbulbs in her dead white face! Green embalming fluid drools from the corners of the infamous, preternaturally-red lips! She speaks!

"Bobby ... Bobby ... Is that you ...?!?"

Soundtrack up.

Fade to black.

IS THIS TRUE?

By m. i. blue
He writes, performs, and produces shows in San Francisco. He has produced the weird and successful *wordfuck* and *dadafest* series, stories for
Future Sex and Noirotica 2, as well as the informational pamphlet How to Blow Up a Church.