Remember The Ring? Various unfortunate Japanese people watch a video, hang around for a bit then die? I have a reboot I think we can get off the ground in time for the 2014 Oscar season. Okay. Pitch face. So: Instead of a video, there's this song. And instead of playing it, the unfortunates forget to play it. And instead of it killing them, it ruins their marriage. And the song - wait for it - is Like A Prayer.
I know what you're thinking. Fantasy-horror niche, midnight previews, drive word-of-mouth from the die-hards and score a crossover hit. That's obvious. That's vanilla. Let me blow your mind: we're turning this into a serious, issue-led documentary, Michael Moore style. There's the twist. The Ring was fiction. This bad boy is for real. We're about to expose the single biggest threat to marriage in the modern world.
We're not, of course. That was just as close as my creative powers can come to how seriously Lucy and her pal Cathy take Like A Prayer. After years of half-arsed data-crunching they're convinced that a wedding reception without it spells doom. If I told them Shakespeare cut a reference out of Romeo and Juliet for fear of Madonna's legal team, they'd laugh, but they'd also want to believe me so much that somewhere, in some small and terrifying corner of the human brain devoted to ladies' superstitions, they actually would.
Weddings activate that portion of the brain, as people with shares in old, new, borrowed and blue stuff have known for centuries. And this superstition is a big one. Just as in The Ring, there's no silver bullet once you've been exposed - prevention is the only option. Cathy arrived at her own reception with the track cued up on her mobile, saved to a USB drive and burnt to a CD, just in case the DJ veered from his brief. (I found that out in the course of writing this, and laughed so hard I had to give up for the evening).
Back in film mogul mode, I'm wondering whether we can get Madonna's backing. I doubt Like A Prayer made the playlist when she tied the knot with Guy Ritchie, and look what happened there. He made Revolver, a film that made everyone who saw it wish they were dead, and divorce swiftly followed. She knows the score. We get her on board, make it a journey of pilgrimage and repentance, finish with a shot of Madge literally 'down on her knees' while the track plays at my wedding. That'd get me into Lucy's good books for life. Anyone know a gullible financier?
Copyright WED Magazine 2012
