By Z.P. Kibbleworth and Pavita Millimuff                February 24, 2090

Some films are like the Fourth of July fireworks show Lucas County puts on over Lake Erie; carefully planned and paced out to steadily build to a grand finale that brings a sense of completion and satisfaction. Some films are like the Fourth of July fireworks show our friend Armando puts on in his back alley; idle and boring until suddenly everything goes off at once in an unintelligible bonanza that leaves all overwhelmed, many confused, and a few injured. In the case of life imitating art, the events of the past week have transpired much like the films that take their structure after Armando’s misadventures with bootleg fireworks. Just this past Monday, we were chatting about the pleasant surprise of the latest milk goblin film actually being halfway decent and anticipating the upcoming weekend of films which included a Venusian rom-com and a documentary about the cult of Ilyucheddazov, the Russian cheese lizard. Now, we are making contingency plans in the case of magnetonuclear strikes and devising strategies for dodging a potential draft. And all this because thousands of miles away, an intoxicated monkey crashed a bat mitzvah. How did we get here, and what does it have to do with the movies?

We have covered for a while now one of the more disturbing trends that we have ever seen take over the American film industry, where major studios excised writers from their filmmaking process altogether and turned to secret in-house “methods” they used to apparently make every creative decision. Companies that had steadily built up a brand over decades through the ingenuity and creativity of thousands of artists now claimed to have found a way to maintain that brand while getting rid of the artists themselves. Needless to say, such a decision produced nothing but pure dreck for those with an interest in cinema, but our opinions of these films hardly mattered to the studios if the profits stayed up. The oddest and most concerning thing about this whole system, however, was that the studios claimed these “methods” they used to make their films as their intellectual property and kept their nature secret. We at The Pondering Cosmo Film Desk have had a running bet going on what these “processes” actually are, with the best odds being some kind of artificial intelligence program. As we have learned in the past week, however, that theory was inaccurate. For these studios, the cat is now out of the bag regarding their patented processes. Or, if we want to be precise, not the cat, but the monkey.

It began last Saturday night when a chimpanzee was spotted skulking underneath the enchilada bar at the bat mitzvah of one Shelly Finkelberg of the San Fernando Valley. Witnesses recount that the chimp had bulging red eyes and staggered around erratically as though drunk, prompting concerns that it was carrying rabies. Various accounts detail the monkey leaping across the shoulders and heads of people on the dance floor, destroying the vampire iguana-themed cake, and letting out crackling screeches that one witness likened to a funkdroid vomiting out uranium maracas. Animal control was immediately called, but arriving instead was a paramilitary team that shot the monkey full of tranquilizers and drove off with it in unmarked cars. While the incident luckily only left a few people with minor injuries, it provoked outraged demand for answers about what was going on with the monkey and who it was that had swept in to recover it. Investigation from journalists at the Los Angeles Truthifyer uncovered that this paramilitary team in fact belonged to Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin Studios, and the revelation soon followed that this monkey was the manifestation of what they called “The Process.”

Here is what we know: the monkey comes from the jungles of Uganda and is named Spuggocles. He was kept in a locked room at Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin headquarters and taught American Sign Language. Several times a day, Spuggocles would be given several doses of erotiselenite, better known as moon meth, and studio employees would transcribe the gesticulations he made while under the influence of the drug and use them as the basis for the studio’s films. While details mapping how this procedure led to specific films are still unavailable, we can imagine that last year’s film Fruitzilla was prompted by a statement like “I see giant banana with big teeth make little children go splat.” We do not know whether other studios like Real Human Not a Robot Pictures which have their own private methods for making films use a similar process, but given that they have all stayed silent following the revelations about Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin, it seems reasonable to assume that their methods are not much better. What we have definitively learned, though, is that for at least one studio, “The Process” is nothing so grandiose as a comprehensive moviemaking algorithm. It’s a monkey locked in a room tripping on moon meth. Honestly, this explains a lot.

Perhaps focusing on the implications of a major studio using a coked-up monkey to make its films seems insignificant given all the other events that have happened in light of that information coming out, but given our occupation as film critics and the amount of time we have spent fixated on the mystery of the major studios’ secret processes, we are going to briefly pontificate about it nonetheless. This result is somehow worse than any of the possibilities for “The Process” that we had imagined, and goes to show just how little regard these studio executives have for the artistry of cinema. If these films were being created by an A.I., that at least would imply that the studio thought the films complex enough to require some sort of intelligence to produce. But no. Apparently the senseless gesticulations of a stoned chimpanzee is what these studios think our money and two hours of our attention are worth. Put simply, what Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin Studios has called the secret ingredient that makes them one of the leading content factories (their words, not ours) in the world is an insult to everyone who cares even the slightest bit about movies. At least we know what we’re being fed now, and perhaps in normal times, this story would generate enough outrage to compel reform within the industry. But these are not normal times, and there are now much bigger crises at hand in the solar system.

Undoubtedly, the shortages of moon meth over the past year or so put a lot of stress on Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin, given their filmmaking operation relied heavily on intoxicating Spuggocles with the drug. This could help explain why several of the studio’s films have been delayed recently, as with a shortage of moon meth, they could not efficiently produce ideas for their films through “The Process.” It might also shed some light onto this month’s release Milk Me Sugar, which was buried underneath the new Hotdog Higgins film and received basically no promotion. Potentially the lack of available moon meth to fuel “The Process” forced the studio to rely on – cover your ears, children – human beings to develop their films, and their confidence in such human beings was so low that they felt the film had to be buried. The great irony is that the involvement of such human artists likely explains why the film ended up being halfway decent, but the studio was unable to capitalize on the film’s quality due to its low-confidence release of the film dooming its box office returns.

While the impact of the moon meth shortage of Pepsi-Huawei-Tampax-Applebee’s-Charmin’s cinematic output is subject to speculation, we do have more concrete details about how the shortage spurred the events of the past week. According to testimony given by studio employees, the studio’s reserve of moon meth finally ran out a couple weeks ago, after months of rationing which led to less frequent doses for Spuggocles. The monkey began experiencing severe withdrawal, which led to a sharp increase in aggressive behavior, which culminated last Saturday night when he attacked an employee entering his room to sedate him and broke out of the studio compound. He was spotted at the bat mitzvah several hours later. After the studio’s paramilitary force recovered the monkey, the decision came from a group of high-ranking studio executives that Spuggocles needed to be put back on moon meth immediately, by any means necessary. The means chosen was to smuggle a shipment of moon meth from the asteroid Agammemnon to Earth through a blockade set up by the Galilean Moon Alliance. This was a clearly reckless decision made in the sole interest of getting moon meth to Earth as quickly as possible with no regard for potential consequences. And what consequences there were: the ship transporting the moon meth was boarded and the moon meth found. When the Galilean Moon Alliance discovered an Earthling ship had trespassed into Galilean space carrying contraband, it was the spark that ignited the powder keg of tensions between Earth and the Galilean Moons that had been building up for years. On Thursday morning, the Galilean Moon Alliance at last declared war on Earth.

This was probably always going to happen one way or another. Tensions between the two powers had been too high for too long, and eventually something was going to happen that set off a war. But the fact that it happened this way is so profoundly dumb. The powers that be in the entertainment industries on Earth would rather risk a war than let artists have creative control over their projects. Hollywood has been on the wrong side of history many times before, but there is something special about this occasion, it seems, that the most reactionary industry in the world ended up being the impetus for this war. Who knows how much destruction it will wreak, how many people will die, how broken the solar system will become. But if we want to look for a silver lining, perhaps the debacle that led to this mess could begin the downfall of these soulless movie studios and their ability to keep artists out of their operations. If the solar system is falling apart, we might at least get better movies out of it.

Editor’s Note: Due to, well, (gestures broadly at everything), there aren’t going to be a whole lot of films getting released for the foreseeable future, and we do not feel it is safe for our writers to continue business as usual. Therefore, readers should not expect regular publications from The Pondering Cosmo Film Desk until such time as it becomes feasible again. Take care of yourselves and your families, and if you have the means, maybe use this time to watch some Glitterganja films.