Confessions of a Confirmed Nut: The Story of Paul Krassner. Based on his entertaining and provocative autobiography, and not to be confused with the doubtlessly amusing Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which is based on “The Gong Show” host Chuck Barris’ autobiography, stars George Clooney and will be released shortly. Krassner was the long-time editor and publisher of his own countercultural 'zine The Realist, and at some point or another met, got into a shouting match with, or sued or was sued by, just about every interesting public figure from the '60’s to the Reagan years. Should be a corker, if a writer can figure out how to squeeze his life, iconoclastic political passion, and, ahem, oversized personality into two hours.
I’d also like to see someone take a stab at [no pun intended] an obscure sci-fi short story, “The Screwfly Solution”. An expansionist race of extraterrestrials plan to colonize the earth, but only after depopulating it of its resident Homo Sapiens. The aliens, unseen in the story until the very end, engineer a sophisticated application of biochemical warfare, exploiting a (fictive) weakness in our species – where neurochemistry, hormones, the sexual drive, and mass psychology merge – to induce the world’s men to impulsively murder (mainly by stabbing, in a gruesome imitation of copulation) all the women on the planet, while a few individualized scientists, etc., race the clock to figure out what’s going on and resist it the best they can. The title refers to a parallel genocide using the same methods and successfully perpetrated, at the beginning of the tale, by the story’s scientist protagonists on the troublesome screwfly species, an agricultural pest. The fate of the screwfly sadly foreshadows the fate of humanity…
It’s an exciting premise, but it has a few problems. The short story is seriously flawed both in its science (IRL, no such neurological trigger really exists linking sexual lust in men to blind murder, except in a few psycho- and sociopaths) and in its sexual politics (we now know that male hormones play a key role in the sexuality of women; besides, the core premise has some notable plot holes in the way a global femicide would actually play out, such as the possibly civilization-saving role of gay men). Probably most damning, Hollywood usually opts for cheap uplift at the end, and eschews such downer stories altogether. But, given current anxieties about anthrax, smallpox, global warming, genetic engineering, and perennial concerns about male violence against women, domestic violence, and how men in religious fundamentalist societies oppress women, I should think the plot would hit a nerve or two. And who says sci-fi flicks have to be realistic or accurate, anyway?