Those Wacky Terrorists!

This article in the New York Times today has me filled with awful jealousy.

An excerpt:

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 31 - Here are a few highlights from the hottest Hollywood script you will most likely never see produced on a television or movie screen:

• Abu, Ahmed, Musab and Salar, a cell of Islamic terrorists sent to Chicago by a nefarious network resembling Al Qaeda, are getting chewed out by their murderous boss, just in from Afghanistan. (They have been spending the organization's money like crazy but haven't blown anything up.) Just then, two deliverymen knock on the apartment door, bearing a huge flat-screen TV.

• Ahmed, whose cover is a job as a bike messenger, falls in love with a neighborhood florist - who turns out to be Jewish - but can't get up the nerve to ask her out. "You're bright, you're funny, you're talented," Musab says, urging his comrade on. "Who made the best nail bomb in training camp? You did!"

• Abu blends in by joining a bowling team, and becomes a fanatic: "We will dance in the blood of the losers from Hal's Body and Paint Shop!" he vows. But he is a hapless terrorist. A fertilizer bomb in his trunk accidentally goes off outside when he is bowling for the league championship - toppling his last two pins and clinching victory.

"The Cell," as this exercise in envelope-pushing is titled, has been making its way through Hollywood for more than a year, cracking up development executives and their assistants, being passed from friend to friend like an underground newspaper behind the Iron Curtain, and winning its creators, Mark Jordan Legan and Mark F. Wilding, scores of meetings and three other writing assignments.

It's brilliant. Brilliant. I have no doubt whatsoever that these guys do not think in a million years that this will get produced. But as a calling card or a writing sample, well, it's probably the best thing since Trey Parker and Matt Stone sent around a video called "The Spirit of Christmas" starring a few foul-mouthed 3rd graders as some L.A. playa's Christmas Card.

Yes, I know it's disrespectful. Yes, they are horrible people. But they are working. And remember...they're in L.A. All you redstaters think they're heathens anyway, right?

See, the point is: you can be outrageous and think outside the box. But you also have to be good. This kind of stunt only works if it's really, really funny.

If anyone has this script, and can send me a copy, let me know, please. I won't pay money, but I'll be your boyfriend. For real.