Brad Pitt will star in the movie. You know the genre: rebel without a cause from the wrong side of the tracks gets mixed up with a bad crowd. Does drugs, does crime. Moment of reckoning. Brad faces the suits. Will he reclaim himself, or become just another clapped-out junkie?
In real time, the boy was Daniel Christian. Dwell on the name's resonance. Think lion's den, with Daniel the Biblical metaphor for courage and masculine daring. Graft on to surname. Danny left school at 15, maybe smoked some spliffs, got hooked on heroin before he was 16.
This week he was sent down for five years for stealing less than £10,000 from a Dundalk building society. He did wrong. Not for the first time, either. Ten grand is a lot of money. Two doors and a back wheel for a new Lexus; a flatpack Shaker kitchen, with appliances thrown in.
Let's make a storyboard. Facts are Danny's life moved towards this day with awful inexorability. You're right, we can't use that word. Think destiny, much better. Destiny meets a Dublin working-class backdrop some time round 1972 when Danny/Brad is born. Think Commitments meets Angela's Ashes. Music? Too soon for Feargal Sharkey.
Fast forward to 1987. Cutbacks, unemployment, rise of drug barons. Charlie Haughey's My Ireland documentary being rerun on the box. Milk and honey drip-drip-dripping, but reality tasting sour. Cue Danny/Brad, a smart kid, could have been a contender anywhere else. Kids at that age, boys at that age, they want action, inspiration, heroes they can dream about becoming. They're gonna love this movie if we do it right.
NO. We've seen it all before. Give it one page, no more. Then cut to Dundalk court. Make Brad unshaven, dishevelled, scared out of his wits. Rain outside, that's good. The courtroom cold and stinking of damp, people huddled at radiators. Backroom scene: judges, one judge fixing his wig just before he makes his entrance. His mobile rings, he turns it off.
Brown colours. Wait, we have to establish this room is two floors up, with a big old window rocking on its sash. Wind sounds would be great. Judge walks to bench six feet from the window. Rattle, rattle, so we know it's open. Order, order. Yeah, let's use a bell.
What would Brad do? Take risks. Seduce a pretty cocktail waitress a few nights before and have her waiting outside with a getaway car. Break for the border. Heck, it's not Mexico. Maybe we should relocate the movie. No, we can solve that one. Think airports. Cocktail waitress has rich other lover whose plane waits at Baldonnel to whisk her away. Sort out the relationships later.
And no, don't interrupt me, we're not going to cut to the AIB boardroom or any other bank and show the chairman writing out a £90 million cheque to the Irish Revenue Commissioners. No, our audience doesn't want to know that what Danny stole represents only a few minutes of any bank's profits in only one day. Each time a banker sneezes, his bank earns 10 grand.
Someone else can try to make something out of DIRT and the dirt they're dishing on Danny. Not us. Courtroom drama is hot. Convince me you can make a good movie about well-off respectable citizens who never have their day in court.
Wall Street kind of did it? OK, good movie, anyone got the speech where Sheen gets back at Gekko? All that stuff about his father, the bluecollar guy working in the airline Gekko was going to take over and asset-strip? I saw that one at college, really opened my head. But so 1980s now, isn't it?
DANNY. Flashback to the building society. Danny shaves that morning, Brad looks better with a naked chin. Walks to the toy shop, remembers how he used to press his nose up against the window watching the middle-class kids stagger out with new toys. Santa never came to him. Buys a toy gun, costs him five pounds. Only had second-hand toy weapons as a kid.
Bursts into the building society. Sticks them up. Back to courtroom. Judge tells him if he keeps doing what he's doing and taking what he's taking, it will be his "total downfall". Sweat marks on Brad's forehead. Liberty, or die.
This is our moment. Brad will be great. Camera zooms in on rattling window, back to reaction shot with Brad. Music, big sounds. Brad leaps for freedom, hurtles towards the window. Breaking glass, as Brad crashes through. The court is frozen. The judge starts to stand up, his mobile pulsing with a message in his pocket. Ignores it. Real-life real-time Danny jumps 18 feet out the window, lands somewhere we don't know, and runs off. But only to hide. They catch him before lunch, and take him back to court, where the real-life, real-time sentence is handed down.
Do you really think we have a movie in this? Let's give it two minutes more. Brad lands on the back of a furniture truck, stuffed with mattresses. Pretty cocktail waitress pulls him out. Baldonnel is shrouded in fog, but the plane takes off for a hot place where Brad makes love to her before doing a hellish two months in rehab.
Movie judge checks his messages. It's "Thunderbirds are go", the Minister for Justice, the man with the fast cars. He tells judge he has taken on board all the reports about sentencing policy and social deprivation. The AIB money is being put straight into rehab, and Danny/Brad will be cured. His Taoiseach is putting all the big tax-defrauding dudes into prison, like he promised when he was minister for finance round the time of the tax amnesty.
The Minister can hardly contain his delight.
You don't believe it. Major credibility deficit, you're right. Bye-bye, Danny Christian. Out of sight, out of mind.
mruane@irish-times.ie