[SCENE: The interior of a dimly lit office. Books and papers are scattered about. MIKE sits in a chair at the desk staring at a computer screen. His wife LAURA stands behind him. MIKE is in the middle of a rant.]
MIKE: …Coen Brothers movie? How the hell am I supposed to write this in the style of a Coen Brother’s movie?
LAURA: Well, what movies have you seen?
MIKE: (thinks) Well… Raising Arizona. Hm, and Oh Brother Where Art Thou?
LAURA: That’s it?
MIKE: I don’t get out much.
LAURA: So the last time you saw a Coen Brothers movie was in 2000, about nine years ago… What are you going to do?
Closeup on a hand clicking a mouse button.
MIKE: Don’t worry. I have a plan.
BLACKOUT. TITLES.
Six Harvests
Mike as MIKE
John as JOHN
Laura as LAURA
Rebecca as REBECCA
[SCENE: Midwestern farm. Two men are leaning against a fence, surveying vast expanses of wheat. There is no soundtrack.]
Norm: Good harvest this time.
Gund: Yep.
[time passes]
Norm: Still living with that cow in your kitchen?
Gund: Yep.
[time passes]
Norm: I think, if I had the chance, I would remove every wooden slat from my house and replace it with a brick. That’d make my house as red as the sun, and that’d make it a fine place to return and lay to were I of the mind to lay.
Gund: Huh.
[camera pans out, surveys fields of wheat in an allegory of ‘30’s Soviet propaganda movies]
FADE TO BLACK. VOICEOVER
MIKE: John, what are you doing?
JOHN: Well, you said you wanted Agricola in the style of a Coen Brothers’ movie. I’m helping. It’s very simple. The keys to parodying the Coen Brothers are: One. Use distinctive regional accents such as the southern accents in O Brother, or the Minnesota talk in Fargo. Two. Reference other movies in running homages. Three. Be existential and occasionally bleak. Four.
MIKE: (interrupting) But… But this is my writing project! Besides, you know you can’t build a stone house until you’ve upgraded to clay first.
LIGHTS UP. [We are in a suburban dining room. Agricola is set up at the table. MIKE, and JOHN have sat down to play. It is MIKE’s turn. He places a red wooden token on a space on the board and plays a card. The scene shifts and blurs. We now see MIKE dressed as a medieval farmer welcoming a stranger to his two room wooden hut. The stranger has a cart with a number of building resources stacked vertically upon it. He is the RESOURCE SELLER and he will remain with MIKE for the rest of the film.]
MIKE: I think you’ll come in handy, sir.
RESOURCE SELLER: Not if JOHN keeps taking the wood and reed.
[The camera pans over to an identical farm where JOHN has just gathered some WOOD and laid out some sort of device to catch fish. He is talking to another man, dressed as a medieval scholar.]
JOHN: So, it just ain’t fair that MIKE seems to get all the visitors. That’s why I asked you over.
TUTOR: Don’t you worry none. Thanks to me, you’ll be seeing all sorts of visitors. And I’ll make it worth your while, too.
[JOHN goes back to his hobby of collecting all the wood and reed. It is harvest time. A subtitle on the screen reads The First Harvest. MIKE has come over to JOHN’s farm.]
MIKE: So, I see you’ve caught a mess of fish for to feed your family, were you of the mind to feed your family.
JOHN: It’s ok. You don’t really have to talk like that.
MIKE: Just following your lead, man.
JOHN: I can’t help but notice that you let your wife go hungry this harvest.
MIKE: Yup, we’re going begging.
JOHN: That’s mighty surprising.
MIKE: Well, I have this MENDICANT friend who will do the begging for me. I’m sure it will all work out ok.
JOHN: Lucky you. All I have is this Landing Net to use with my Fish Trap.
MIKE: Looks like it will be mutton for me next harvest.
[A montage of work. MIKE builds an oven. JOHN gathers more fish. MIKE adds two rooms to his house. MIKE collects some sheep and cooks all but one of them. JOHN adds a room to his house. The action stops on MIKE’s house where the subtitle reads The Second Harvest. MIKE and JOHN are just about to sit down to eat.]
REBECCA (in voiceover): And then Lasagna falls from the sky.
[Immediate flash back to the suburban dining room. LAURA is serving plates of lasagna to MIKE and JOHN as they play Agricola. ]
LAURA: Here you go. It’s still hot.
MIKE (eating Lasagna as he pays four food tokens): Mmm, this is good.
JOHN (doing much the same): Yes, thanks Laura.
[Crossfade back to the farm. MIKE is running up to JOHN excitedly.]
MIKE: Hey… John… You know how I built those two rooms on my house?
JOHN: Yeah?
MIKE: Well, we just had a little one. We named him Third Family Member.
JOHN: Really? We hope to have a son of our own too, now that we have a third room and all.
MIKE: Yeah, we’d like to have a fourth, but that room is taken by our Guest Worker.
JOHN: Guest Worker?
MIKE: Yeah, we’re using the Ö Deck, too. Remember?
JOHN: The Ö Deck… Yeah. Your Guest Worker seems a little unbalanced though.
MIKE: No, I’m sure he’ll be a handy addition to our household. I’ll feed him at the next harvest just like he was one of my own.
JOHN: Speaking of that.
[Subtitle: The Third Harvest.]
MIKE: I saw how well your fishing experiments had gone, so I caught some fish of my own this time with my Fishing Rod.
JOHN: Yeah, my friend the Baker came by and baked me these delicious loafs of bread using my new Stone Oven and my own fields of wheat. Your farm is looking a little barren though.
MIKE: I’ll be building some fences soon, don’t you worry.
[Montage of MIKE building fences and collecting sheep and boars. JOHN comes to visit MIKE’s house. It is now made of clay. Subtitle: The Fourth Harvest.]
JOHN: I’m still baking bread, but you’re eating a lot of meat these days.
MIKE: Nothing so wrong with that.
JOHN: Yeah, you may have more mouths to feed, but that will change. I’ve got a much bigger house than this, and it’s also clay, to boot. Plus, all the friends my Tutor helped with brought their own lunch.
MIKE: Oh yeah, got any animals?
JOHN: Nope.
[Crossfade to JOHN building a well. Mike walks up.]
MIKE: Isn’t it a little late in the season to be building a well? You’ll barely get any food out of it.
JOHN: Oh, this isn’t just any well, it’s a Village Well. Plus my Well Builder makes it really easy for me.
MIKE: Ah, well, um, so you may have noticed we had two more kids.
JOHN: Yeah, I was wondering how you did that with such a small house.
MIKE: Well, as it turns out, I had a kid with my wife and then my Guest Worker had a kid as well.
JOHN: He can do that?
MIKE: Yeah, as long as it is the current round card.
JOHN: I really think that Guest Worker of yours is just not right.
MIKE: C’mon we’re nearly at the fifth harvest.
[As he says those words, the subtitle Fifth Harvest appears]
JOHN: Mmmm, bread, delicious bread.
MIKE: Mmmm, meat, delicious meat.
GUEST WORKER: Mmmm, Mike’s sheep. Mike’s delicious sheep.
[We fade away from the farms and back to the dining room table, where John has just played another occupation. Mike places his guest token and changes his house from clay to stone and builds another pasture.]
JOHN: Dammit. You’ve got this one in the bag. I don’t have any animals, and you have a stone house.
MIKE: I’m not so sure. You got a lot of bonus points with that tutor and the village well.
JOHN: I had to take a begging card.
MIKE: I took TWO begging cards.
JOHN: You had a Mendicant. I don’t want to do the final tally. You do it.]
[John leaves the dining room table and flops petulantly down on the couch. The subtitle flashes: The Final Harvest]
MIKE: OK, let’s see. I have animals. You don’t. You have fields, but I only have one. Thanks to your tutor and your path, you have 8 bonus points. I don’t have any. OK, adding things up. I have 30. You have 36.
JOHN: What? No way! I couldn’t have won. Let me check your math.
MIKE: OK, I can make mistakes. Let’s go over it together. Animals. Fields. Empty village spaces. Four room stone house vs. five room clay hut. Something like 13 points from cards vs. 2 points from cards. Oh, wait, I did make a mistake.
JOHN: See, I knew it.
MIKE: I forgot to take your begging card into account. You only won by three points not six.
JOHN: Damn. Wow. OK, I’m sorry I was a jerk about scoring and about your Guest Worker.
MIKE: No problem, but let’s play something else, ok?
[Fade to black. Voiceover]
VOICEOVER: All told, John won both games of Agricola that night, but then Mike went on to kick his ass in Stone Age. But that’s a tale for another day.
ROLL CREDITS while indy music plays in the background.
Last edited on 2009-10-25 20:25:05 CST (Total Number of Edits: 2)
Posted Sun Oct 25, 2009 2:02 pm
