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Throwdown:
The Burden of Iron
Treatment for a Digital Feature Film and Web Serial
©2001, Floyd Webb
The most futile war America has ever fought is the
war on drugs. It is a war that can't be won. But for the government
no price is too high to continue trying. The US Government seems
prepared to build a prison and detention system larger than the
Nazi Concentration camps of World War II to supposedly act as a
deterrent to drug use, and distribution.
It
is not working!
Throwdown is
an speculative action-sci-fi/mythology about an effort to legalize
drugs in the early (2010) 21st century.
The screenplay is written for a small cast and it is a film of brief
intense action sequences taking place over 24 hours as two young
men roll the streets of Chicago eliminating key underworld and public
officials who benefit from the drug trade and have fostered legislative
and physical opposition to efforts to legalize it.
The film is heavy on the dialogue of the meaning of the drug economy
and the satiation of human desire through spiritual, botanical and
chemical means since the Korean War.
The story is
set in Chicago, in the year 2010, where the war on alcohol of a
century ago, seems to have started and ended, where the ghost of
Al Capone still strides the halls of memory from City Hall to the
tourist trade.
It centers on two young men, one black and one hispanic, who have
grown to manhood as assassins in the drug trade due to their unique
status as invulnerables, "snakes". They are the sum total
of a spiritual cry from their mothers to a "babalorisha"
to close their bodies to the dangers of the streets in the mid 1980s.
This call to the gods worked, but it has also ironically brought
them into the fold of the the local, and now globally dominant drug
baron, Leon Legba.
Leon Legba is
a failed medical student who was schooled in Gramsci and is obsessed
with the film
Dune. Hence his creation of the designer drug, "spice"
and his recognition of the altering hegemony of the "decrim"
movement. His crew is a rough crew but a well read crew.
The "snakes" were able to bring about stability in the
trade and were the weapons of choice in the resolution of disputes
among the regional and national drug trade orgs. They are romanticized
fantasy characters who are based on the political consciousness
of actual characters of marginal street life over the past 50 years.
They live in a world where higher education is a luxury, where prison
has taken the place of university, gone private and brought American
manufacturing back from Mexico and Asia by utilizing and maintaining
a captive labor pool of "criminals", felonious and political.
The "joes",
a secret movement among the street wokers, say this:
"The
13th Amendment did not end slavery as is commonly thought, but
"EXCEPTS" it:
"13th Amendment
SECTION 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, EXCEPT
as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place
subject to their jurisdiction. "
The key mission
of society is security and surveillance. Smiley-faced fascism is
the order of the day. With the help ot "tech weasels"
the anti-heros of the film are able to subvert the high tech surveillance
measures in place.
They have an analysis of the world they have chosen, and they seek
a solution to the limitations of that childhood choice.
One has lost his family to the trade and the other is losing his.
They have no formal education, are not part of the status quo in
the early 21st century and they are rare in that they have accumulated
capital . They cannot use it as the rules regarding business and
finance have changed and the goalposts have all been moved since
the crash of 2003.
They and their compatriots, identified by the heinous stree term,
"joes" and "decrims", want out and there is
only one way, the end of drug prohibition. They want to "live
like joe!", Joe Kennedy (thebootlegging father of the Kennedy
family). They have a vision of their children rising from the ashes
of the underworld to contribute to society and the world and end
the downward spiral.
They have the means and the will to eliminate the opposition to
this high profit underground economy. They join with a leader of
the legalization movement after the death of her associate to offer
her technical and "logistical" assistance in giving the
argument of legalization a chance to make it to congress based on
the true facts, economic realities and human casualties of the trade.
They go against friends and enemies with high tech tracing abilities
and traditional pistolero methods of enforcing their position. Two
"bad guys" witness the millennial change and acquire a
mission to change the world in which they have grown.
There are no solutions offered just ways of looking at the problem,
exposure of old and new ideas regarding prohibition. The purpose
of the film is to engage critical thought on this issue.
Throwdown, ©2001, Floyd Webb fw@itutu.com
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