“The Voynich Code” movie…

EXT. Shadow of a European castle. A balding bloke in dark glasses is laying on a gold-plated deckchair next to a gold-plated swimming pool. Behind him, workmen on ladders painstakingly paint gold leaf over the castle’s swallow-tail merlons. A gold-plated mobile trills.

NIC CAGE (picking up phone)
Manny, I’m busy.

AGENT
Hey, Nicky – looked at the proposal yet?

NIC CAGE
You gotta be kidding me – $6m and four points above the line, all for some book nobody can read?

AGENT
It’s “Da Voy-nitch”, Nicky. A real life Da Vinci Code – no joke! Right now it’s a hot cake, everybody wants a slice of it.

CAGE
But I don’t get it: how does this fit my whole “Joe Schmo” schtick?

AGENT
Don’t sweat the small stuff, that’s what I get my 15% for. Just look at your fax machine…

 CAGE pulls page after page of unreadable text from his gold-plated fax machine.

CAGE
Hey, I can’t read a thing – this doesn’t make any sense…

AGENT
So…

CAGE
You mean… I get to make up basically all my lines and nobody cares?

AGENT
Like, bingo. An unreadable script for an unreadable book. Genius high concept. Spielberg loves it. We all love it.

CAGE
Right… and my character’s back story is… what?

AGENT
You play international bookseller and revolutionary man of mystery ‘Wilfrid Voynich’ …

CAGE
So do I finally get to be married to Helena Bonham Carter this time?

AGENT
Do NOT call her “Johnny Depp’s sloppy seconds”, or I’ll haveta call the u-n-i-o-n. But yes, she’s Lily Boole.

CAGE
Boole is cool. Roger Ebert will love it, again. Are there lots of…

AGENT
…implausible action sequences that add nothing to the plot? Check.

CAGE
And…

AGENT
…yes, Wilfrid Voynich is charming, devoted to his wife, yet strangely unsure of his own sexuality.

CAGE
And…

AGENT
…yes, you get to fight against the drone armies of the Conspiracy, both for gold and for glory.

CAGE
I don’t know… can they go to five points? I’m getting a good feeling about this…