*#@COWBOY SAMURAI @#* (IN MINOR SWING)

Objective:
To string the elements of the West, the Japanese, and the jazz into a comedy and to reconstruct the classic story of the hero saving the damsel in distress.


Treatment:
Intro – Deep Purple, Smoke in the Water
The Cowboy samurai, the Damsel, the Underlings, the Pirate stand at the Arch De Triumph, Washington Square Park.

The Asskicking, the Showdown, the Serenade –
Minor Swing, Django Reinhardt
Cowboy samurai zigzags from one cover to the next. He rolls over, falling at the feet of the Underlings. The confrontation kicks off – the jitter to the right, the jitter to the left. Underling 1 pushes Underling (wheelchair) to strike Cowboy samurai. Cowboy samurai dodges. He slashes the Underlings in a fatal symphony.

Cowboy samurai dashes across the grasslands, the trees, the fences, the people of Washington Square Park. Pirate swaggers, and teases his prized Damsel. Cowboy samurai saunters in, puffs a cigarette. The close in, the jitter to the right, the jitter to the left, the slash - Pirate breaks and falls in a tragic rhapsody.

The Damsel is saved. The Cowboy samurai, the Damsel, serenades in a minor swing.



This film, I think, is really the most ass-kicking, and a gut-wrenching one! Really proud of my cheesy story idea, that is the essence of the comical set-up! A cowboy doubling up as a samurai, slashing bad asses and then goes on a serenade with the damsel he saved from distress!!!

I had 6 actors involved in my cast and there was certainly the trouble of finding them, BIG TIME! Well, in the end, I got them right at the last minute. The cowboy samurai is a real cowboy from Texas, my roommate. The damsel is the cowboy's lady in interest, the underlings, one being my other roommate, the other two coming from another crew in my class whom I took great effort to convince. The baddest of all villain, the kungfu master, was to be me initially. But it turn out that the villain is to be the pirate, played by my roommates' TV and Documentary classmate who came for a stroll in the park and who is also a professor in Turkey. My other roommate who played the villain became the wheelchair bound underling at his own initiation since he liked playing on the wheelchair that I borrowed to make my dolly shots.

Of course, with the cheesy sequences, there were constant jibes by the actors, my frequent hair-pulling, eye-rolling act of frustration at getting the ridiculous feat done. I almost gave up, and I almost gave up!

And so the shoot went, a swashbuckling cowboy doubling as a samurai displaying cheesy strokes on the plastic sword, killing off the bad villains who were too willing to fight the great cowboy samurai without any weapons. The rescue was a dance, a romance, with the damsel flashing a sweet smile to end the crowning affair.