Hal: The Movie - College Days

EFX – Yearbook opens and we see a college dorm and we are suddenly…

INT – DORM ROOM - AFTERNOON

Two college students in room, guy and a gal – her room. He is skinny and high. She is overfed and hostile

.

Hal: (VO) It was like a toast. Right? To me. Hey, she didn’t like me, I thought, but here we were and I was about to drink from her private stash. She must like me. Right?

EXT – COLLEGE CAMPUS – DIFFERENT AFTERNOON

Two college kids walk through campus. Book bags, bikes, lots of kids moving this way and that. Hal is one of the two kids.

Hal: (VO) I was king of the mountain in college. I aspired to all things no one gave a shit about. You’d have thought I’d really corrected my life. I was so busy. I could walk through campus and say a constant hello from on side to the other. You want annoying? Walk with me.

Friend: Yah, I don’t know… I’m really depressed.

Hal: Oh, you know…

(to boy on bike) Hey Steve

(to friend) …you’re not…

            (to pretty coed) Hi June, yeah….

(to friend)…you’ve got to

…

            (to guy with St Bernard) Hey Scott – did you bring Bandit? –

            (to dog) Hey Bandit!

Hal: (VO) And by this time my ‘friend’ has committed the razor blade to his wrist, blood spurting all over my backpack –

Hal: (to JAP) Hey Shira.

.

VARIOUS EXT’S AND INT’S – VARIOUS TIMES

A collage of shots: Hal sitting with friends on the grass. Sitting lonely at his desk in his room. Some girl talking trash about Hal to another coed. Drinking many plastic cups of beer. Doing laundry and ogling some coed at the dryer. Someone crossing away at the sight of him. Walking at night by himself. Sleeping students in cubicles…

Hal: (VO) Some fucking gene came alive in me through alcohol shock therapy. I woke up partying. Not that I drank or got high in the morning. I did occasionally. No. My drug was my fabulous personality and my fix was everyone’s adulation and hale hellos. And it worked for me. And it ate me alive. It was sound and fury. It was marathon dancing – dancing on air. And like those marathon dancers, when I stopped, my social structure crumbled and I was a fucking mess. Finals were a problem. Everyone got real serious. Other angry people were a problem. They were either envious of me, put out by me or they saw right through me. ‘You’re one of us, motherfucker!’

INT - 4^th FLOOR BUTLER HALL – DAY

The girl’s dorm had that 50’s cubicle building feel. Heavy blocks of painted cement. Hard floors that young ladies adorned with Maxfield Parrish carpets. Rooms with modular furniture. The stuff might allow two configurations in a room. Basically your bed could be here or there. We follow Hal as he moves through the hall and finally enters the room we were in at the open.

Hal: (VO) Marcia wasn’t the prettiest girl on the floor. She added 20 to her freshman 20. Big face. Horsey mouth…that to a drunk guy would count for a lot. I was sober and on her hall hunting Ann or Lorna or Claudia or Leigh. Leigh I remember. She died recently of cancer. But she lives in me as that 18 year old on the 4^th floor with that Keeler Ass. I was wearing the requisite Jeans and a T. I’m sure some band or college name was emblazoned across the front.

Marcia: Who you lookin’ for?

Hal: (VO) Marcia never talked to me.

Marcia: Did you see my new rug?

Hal: (VO) Typical for poor Marcia – her room had the two sides of the track set-up and she definitely lived on the wrong side…trashy messy desk and bed.

Marcia: See this?

Hal: (VO) She showed me a perfume bottle.

Marcia: You know what this is?

Hal: (VO) She told me how this 4 ounce bottle with the white top and the brown liquid was not perfume but rather cleverly disguised bourbon. And this the security guards would never check when she brought it with her to the game,

Marcia: Cool, huh? Try it!

Hal: (VO) Ok. It smelled like perfume, it was brown like perfume, she took the bottle from the generic place in the room for toiletries. But I wanted her to like me. And she was being really nice to me. And I was deep in my fix at this point. I was a mosquito that didn’t want to pull out.

Marcia: Ha Ha. Ha

Hal: (VO) My throat burned and my eyes bugged and she just roared. My taste buds were decimated and my ego sputtered with insight. I still managed eye contact with her and she was so happy. I was mindful of the rug and ran to the basin affixed underneath the mirror in the only place it could be in the room. I blew it out whale-like. She doubled over, crying with joy. I sort of staggered back to her. Her arm extended and pointing at me.

Marcia: chortle…chortle…oink…oink.

Hal: (VO) In the next moment her eyes went really wide and kind of sad as I proceeded to barf and wretch up the faux bourbon and everything else I had consumed in the last day or so onto the new proud rug.

Marcia: No…NOOooooo!!!

Hal: (VO) It was a clean rug so it definitely belonged to her roommate. I don’t recall having had a private moment with Marcia after that. I wonder if she ever did like me.

EFX – Year book closes on image of Marcia’s sad image.