Brian And Gigi Grazer Team Up For Romantic Comedy Of The Apocalypse
While things certainly seemed touch-and-go for superproducing genius-vampire Brian Grazer and writer/starter war bride Gigi Levangie for a few, uncomfortable months, today's Variety brings hope that their relationship is once again stable; after all, the couple that bankrolls the wife's Jesus-starring romantic comedy pitches for a high six-figure sum together, stays together. Var and Levangie Grazer explain The Prodigal Son, the latest acquisition of eternally supportive husband Brian's Imagine Entertainment:
Story revolves around a workaholic single woman who is set up on a date by her mother. Her date, a handsome, kind and caring carpenter who works at Ikea, turns out to be Jesus Christ, who's returned for Armageddon and settled in contemporary Los Angeles. [...]
"It's a love it or hate it idea, but we're not aiming to offend," she said. "He won't be having sex. It'll be a disarming romantic comedy, a story of unrequited love, sort of like 'Splash.'"
Grazer said she came up with the idea while driving around L.A., when it occurred to her that one can just look around and feel that signs of Armageddon might already be cropping up.
Said Grazer: "You see something basic like Britney Spears showing her crazy monkey to everybody, you find yourself thinking, is this the fall of the Roman Empire?"
It's a profound relief that the onscreen Jesus will eschew rom-co convention and remain chaste; a scene in which the lovestruck, workaholic singleton and the particle-board-hammering Son of Man she's fallen for against her better judgment find themselves locked in His cavernous Church of Stylish, Affordable Scandinavian Home Furnishings overnight, and after sharing an intimate meal of foraged Swedish meatballs by tea-candlelight, succumb to their blasphemous desires atop a futon He was particularly proud of screwing together with a tiny hex wrench would almost certainly result in protests from outraged Christians, whose faith dictates that their returning Messiah would never ply his carpentry trade at a retail outlet less upscale than Restoration Hardware. But however frivolous you find the story itself, it's hard to fault Levangie Grazer for discovering inspiration for an Armageddon tale (but: "crazy monkey"? We suppose that makes sense if one considers that Spears' anthropomorphic simian-vagina is so mentally unstable that it waxed itself bare) in the hellscape that is L.A. When the End of Days arrives, trophy wives wandering Rodeo Drive will almost certainly ignore the crazy hippie warning them not to accept the sidewalk Botox injections offered by the Four Cosmetic Physicians of the Apocalypse in exchange for their souls, finding the prospect of a free face-paralysis too good to possibly pass up.