“Steady as she goes.”
“That’s right, steady, see, like I’m doing, and you’ll find there’s some give there. That exit hole gives a little, and you push a little more, and then, all at once, you get past this certain point, and there—see that? I got past the point. You get past that point, and the hole actually pulls on the pencil a little bit. Kinda sucks it in. You catch the suck-in, man?”
“Suck-in caught! Immortalized forever on V to the H to the sweet-ass S.”
“Good, good. Now so this is the second key and what I was saying before about using your pencil as a yardstick. Look at this metal cuff here that holds the eraser to the wood—you don’t want to go past the metal cuff. You just destroy the whole system that way. Cure’s done for. No sick poppin. So you probably got a quarter inch of leeway or so, but you’re best not going past the cuff. If it’s a brand-new pencil, brand-new eraser, you’re deep enough if you can’t see the eraser anymore. You’re good to go. See? Check it out. No. Better, for your shot, there, Jeremy-Niles—let’s go up on the porch there.”
Jeremy-Niles zooms out, follows Robbie to the porch. Over his shoulder, Robbie says, “You hear that? It’s doing it. You hear that painsong?”
“I can’t quite hear it.”
“Well get on up here. We’ll uh—I’ll stick it here,” says Robbie. He sits down next to a knee-high planter blossoming with phlox, and sticks the popsicle into some soil between the stems, pencil point down.
In close-up, now, Scatty writhes and pulls faces, kicking its legs around, flapping its arms, alternately singing portions of its painsong and gasping. The angle of the pencil shifts a little.
“Get it in deeper there, into that soil, I think, Doc, so it doesn’t tip,” Jeremy-Niles says.
We see Robbie’s hand enter the frame in compliance with Jeremy-Niles’s suggestion.
Robbie’s thumb pets Scatty on the head. Scatty reaches up, palms Robbie’s wrist on both sides, but Robbie pulls his hand free.
“See?” Robbie says. “That’s your popsicle right there. Man, it’s a good one, too. See how it’s making that struggly face like it’s trying to enjoy what’s happening because we’re the ones made it happen and it’s—all it wants is to like be a good robot and not like seem to criticize us with that other hurt face keeps coming through?”
“It’s adorable, Doc. It’s goddamn fucken totally adorable.”
“And see that? See now? Now the hurt face is fighting its way onto there, like a twitch or something, but, ‘No!’ says Scatty. Scatty aims to please, and there’s the more smiley face. Aint gonna disappoint us, is it? Are you, Scatty? No. No, that’s right you won’t. Nuh-uh. Scatty’s gonna figure out how to like it. Goddamn will you listen to the sounds it’s making.”
“Yeah yeah yeah. I hear,” says Jeremy-Niles, as the camera zooms out rapidly, shakily, and we see Robbie sitting on the porch’s top step, leaning toward the planter. “You better say your closing thing, now, Doc,” says Jeremy-Niles. “You really better cause I think, I’m about, you know…”
“Sure yeah, my closing thing. So okay. So that, folks, that right there is what we around here like to call popsicling, and all you need to do it is a cure and {THE CAMERA GOES SIDEWAYS, ROCKS, IS FILMING THE WHITEWASHED FLOOR OF THE PORCH}—hey, man, get that camera up. I aint finished. Hey man! Don’t you even! Scatty’s mine, man, don’t you—”
Robbie’s voice is lost beneath the crackle and hiss of a mike pushed at angles through still, humid air. The tumbling frame rapidly alternates foci, encompassing glances at the sky, the blacktop, the sky, the lawn, the sky, the lawn, and the sky before it settles into the clip’s final shot: a close-up of sun-tipped, upside-down grass blades.
PlayChanger Product Placement
from Beverly Hills 90210 Season 3, Episode 21
1993, FOX Network, USA
[143 seconds]
David, a floppy-haired, younger teenage boy, skateboards clumsily in a parking lot before a group of longer-haired, older teenage boys who wear better-fitting clothes and nose rings and chin beards and mutter among themselves. “Wuss,” we hear one mutter. “Total poseur,” mutters another.
David’s board flies away from him, and he twists his ankle. “I suck,” he says, under his breath.
One of the older boys, whose nose ring is shaped like the trademarked symbol, cups his hands over his mouth and intones, loudly, “Yoooooou dooooo!” The other older boys break out into riotous laughter, except for one, played by future movie star Jared Leto, who, as the boy beside him drops to his knees in pavement-slapping hilarity, we see looking piercingly into the distance, toward David. Leto is smiling, yes, but he doesn’t seem to want to be.
David picks up his skateboard and starts walking away, and Jared Leto, in the foreground, chews his lip, making a decision, then blinks, indicating somehow that he’s made that decision. He jumps on his skateboard and tricks his way toward David. “Hey, dude,” Jared Leto says, and the younger boy stops. “It’s all about falling, dude. Those guys…they’re just…they fall, too, you know? Everyone falls. What it is is that you gotta like fall like…radder? You want me to show you?”
“No,” says David, turning away.
“Hey, don’t go home, now, man,” Jared Leto tells him. “They’ll never respect you.”
“I don’t need their respect. They’re a bunch of followers. And I’m not going home. Not yet at least. I’m going to the mall to buy some Effete and BullyKing.”
“Some what?”
“They’re these new kinds of PerFormulae. Effete and BullyKing.”
“I guess that’ll cheer you up in a couple of days, but—”
“It’ll cheer me up in a couple of hours. At most.”
“What do you mean, dude?” Jared Leto says. “How’re you gonna feed your cure some PerFormula, make it clone, emerge the clone, and then get it to grow up fast enough to like see the effects of the PerFormula in a couple hours?”
“You’re talking about GameChanger.”
“Huh?” says Jared Leto.
“GameChanger. That’s the line of PerFormulae you’re talking about. That’s what they call it now. And GameChanger’s good. It’s great, even. I’m a total freak for MegaChunker, and that latest one, RooLegs. Maybe I’ll buy some of that, too, while I’m at the mall, come to think of it, but what I’m talking about—Effete and BullyKing—they’re PlayChanger line.”