Gamers 3

I've never actually written an elevator pitch for a film, let alone a treatment, let alone a screenplay. Still, at the end of the day I'm from Los Angeles, and it's a proverb as old as the the Santa Monica Mountains that everyone in Los Angeles has a film to pitch. Of course, I don't live there currently, and I didn't come up with this idea while living there, and really this post is a terrible pitch and nothing like a treatment but . . . yeah, while, here's the idea:

It's simple really. You start with Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day who are already prominent geek stars, and then you pull together a complementary all star cast of other Hollywood geeks to make a movie about tabletop role-playing games. Now, as the title of this blog post indicates there have actually been two previous movies in the Gamers "series." Both films have been about RPGs. However, both were far from epic and short on super geeks (and high quality production). 

Ultimately, the title of this blog post is misleading because what I'm actually proposing would be more of a Gamers reboot than the sequel to the sort of sequel of a movie that was at best a mediocre mockumentary.  In fairness, Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising is kind of a cult classic, and Dead Gentlemen Productions really did get a lot of things right about one face of the tabletop gaming experience in that flick. Still, it can be done better. In addition, if you look at how much better Gamers 2 was than the original and projected the probable awesomeness of Gamers 3 based on the slope . . . while, just look at the graph. 

 

That's right. A hypothetical Gamers 3 doesn't even fit on the graph . . . hmm, guess I should've drawn a bigger graph. Anyway, enough background, more substance:

The movie starts with the beginning of a gaming session. The players have been in this campaign for months, and it's approaching its climax. And actually, the movie doesn't start around the table, but in the game world. The characters are proceeding down a treacherous mountain path. Turning a corner, they view the dungeon city of the Lich King of fill in oddly spelled name of dungeon city off in the distance. They trudge on, and coming around another bend the whole mountain side begins to tremble. The characters turn their heads to look up the mountain and coming into view is . . . and it cuts to the players and DM in the real world. There's a ruckus from upstairs and the sound of two children arguing (The noise from this has been fading in over the course of the previous segment). The DM gets up from his chair saying, "Insert exclamation, I'm sorry guys I'll be right back. I've got to handle that."

(At this point it should be perfectly clear that I have no experience writing screenplays, let alone trying to pitch them.)

The general arc from here focuses on the attempts of the DM to guide the party to the conclusion of the game through a plague of various interruptions over the course of the night. Interruptions will include the teenagers next door throwing a house party that gets increasingly out of control, and the police showing up to bust an illegal gambling establishment in the house across the street. This probably happens at the climax of the film and leads to the DM getting put in jail over a misunderstanding around the term gaming, or possibly the entire group getting involved in some sort of mass brawl and having to finish the game from a holding cell along with key characters from the neighboring houses . . .

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many thanks to Jeremy The Coppercat Richardson for the conversations that eventually produced this post.