Coup D'Etat (2013)

Coup E'Tat

2013 (tentative), (2.35:1), Drama/comedy/crime, color.

Crew
Director/Writer: J.L. Carrozza.

Coup D'Etat, the concept of a bunch of kids who choose to violently overthrow their oppressive Christian school, has been in my mind for years now. It began as a pseudo Quentin Tarantino kind of script that I started poking away at a little before Little Red Riding Hood where the kids sat around and spouted self-aware quotations before engaging in carnage and there were weird obscure references to things only I found amusing. In other words, it was the most cloyingly awful kind of screenplay. I have certainly have nothing against the Tarantino, quite the contrary, Quentin Tarantino can make films, but the numerous knock-off scripts made by adoring fans are often unreadable. Tarantino does what he does well and unless you can take some influence and expand upon it, do your own damn thing, something I learned the hard way I think. When I returned to the concept after some years of physically making films I decided to approach it with a much more political mindset, it's more akin to Kinji Fukasaku's body of work, especially, of course, Battle Royale. I wish to apply a similar manner of irreverent scrutiny to American society, especially the early 21st-century Bush days of course. The film tells the story of Ellen, a young American girl who is a student at an oppressive Christian school run by the domineering Roald Dahl villain-like Principal Ragner. Ellen's radical left-wing father is jailed for life because he tried to blow up Congress and her mother became a born-again Christian to get her family's forgiveness. She has always been more of a free thinker because her of father's influence, but she complies reasonably well until she discovers her father's diaries in a relative's attic, after which she begins to concoct a plan to violently overthrow the school's staff and convinces most of the students to go along with it, with the whole thing climaxing in a blazing gun battle.

Also worked into the plot is an extremely corrupt and nasty police force and a vicious street gangster named Rufus the Player who Ellen's friend Jim makes the mistake of stealing the weapons used in the revolt from. Not only will the film I'd like to make display the true idiocy of the backwards elements that are keeping America behind as a society by decades, I also want to show something even more controversial, that the anarchic and youthful rage it is often resisted by is too often another side of the same coin. Too many believe, right or left, that we need to fight to get peace. This is a complete fallacy and dangerous contradiction and has kept humankind in conflict for millennia. I am currently about half way through a new draft that I am much happier with. It's a very personal concept and script for me with some elements culled from my own experiences. Throughout my childhood and adolescence I often tussled with authority figures at school which is where my initial concept came from. I was also attached to a mental hospital idea (called everything from Madhouse to Brookwood) for a while also culled from my own experiences but I decided to drop that one at least temporarily, though I have shoehorned some elements of it into this script and the two concepts are very alike anyways, both about young people incarcerated in oppressive environments who decide to rebel against the establishment. There are still some "fetishistic" elements, but there's a big difference between using movie homages and in-jokes in a script if it actually has some benefit to the story and doesn't stop the show cold with the self-aware "look at this funny homage" mentality. Making Little Red Riding Hood and Dream House really taught me that.