The Greatest Stories Ever Told, Prequel Format

“I can’t wait for the prequel!”

--”Star Wars” fan standing in line all night for tickets

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Hold my calls. I didn’t get where I am in the business by taking a lot of phone calls when we’re about to make a quantum leap in screenwriting. Call the trades and put out that I had this idea long before Lucas--years before. George is just a genius; I am a visionary. I think I invented the word “prequel.”

We’re blowin’ the dust off “Young Ahab” and thank God for our policy of never throwing anything away. Pay attention. Teenage Ahab, fascinated by his goldfish, sits and stares into the aquarium for hours. He’s a loner. We identify with him when the jocks in New Bedford call him “fish-boy.”

Meanwhile, far away, and offshore, a young whale is born. Another loner, and you can easily see why. He’s an albino! The other

whales laugh and call him names, never let him play any young whale games. Tortured by his whiteness (the race thing), he swims around alone, dreaming of happiness. Special effects of whale dreams. Then there’s this storm and these two loners are brought together when young Ahab’s rowboat runs aground on an island inhabited by beautiful Indian girls or something. He talks the young whale, who has suicidally beached himself, into making another try for fulfillment. “You’ll find fulfillment somewhere,” Ahab tells him. Whoa! Irony city!

Formulaic? Oh, sure, ‘cause you didn’t think of it. I got a whole team working on “Hamlet and Yorrick,” punching it up. It’s got some youth-gets-wisdom stuff, but better, and we get to really know the ghost of the father, mostly because he’s still alive. Little Hamlet riding on Yorrick’s shoulders and you think, “Yikes, next time I see him he’ll be a skull.”

See? With the prequel we don’t have to worry where the story is going. Take a load of worry off the writers, believe me. My guys come to work whistling. I just mention something and they’re on it like the literary Serbs they are. Only yesterday I said, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and they leapt to their laptops.

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Meanwhile, the real pot is boiling right here (I’m tapping my skull). My secret project. The Book of Books. “Genesis.” “In the beginning the earth was without form and void. . . . “ But go backward in time, in prequel mode, and you’re in virgin territory. If people will line up to find out what happened before Luke Skywalker, they’ll line up to find out what happened before the beginning is what I’m betting. The Lord taking a creative meeting on what people will actually look like. How many arms, how many legs? Where hair grows, etc. Gives us a fundamental insight into who we are, if you know what I mean. It’s what movies do best. We can do void.

The great thing is that there’s so much stuff out there to be prequeled. Not just the classics. Great parts for actors no one ever heard of. (People who don’t get much money, in other words.) We need a fresh face for Silas Marner as a toddler. Gatsby as a little boy. Yossarian in high school. Someone just handed me the rewrite on . . . “Young Humbert.” I can’t wait to read it.

And then there’s the merchandising. No one beats Lucas, of course, with “Star Wars” fighter planes and light swords and millions of rubber masks. But I don’t deserve to have lunch in this town if I can’t come up with a design-your-own-people toy for my Bible prequel.

Well, gotta go. My people are here and they want to talk about the roots of Orwell’s dark vision. Where did that dark vision come from, anyway? The working title is . . . “Nineteen Eighty-Three.” I like it.