I had a movie dream about a manic ex-lawyer, played by Robin Williams, who kills himself by jumping off a tower. It was a musical.
The avuncular Williams, as the down-and-out high-rise attorney McDrab, just runs around with a gang of kids in the basement of a tower. They sing songs. He plays these theremins that jut out of the walls like faucets. And there are all these ovens underneath the faucet-theremins with white dough balls in them.
McDrab and the gang ride the elevator up to his swank law firm on the top floor, which I guess he still owns because all his stuff is still in his office. At this point, I’m unsure if the shell-of-a-man McDrab is trustworthy and ultimately has the boys’ best interests in mind, he could be a greedy, soulless attorney.
There’s a cardboard cut out of his partner beside a picture of his wife because I guess they married or something when McDrab went crazy. The secretaries can’t get them out of the office fast enough. Somebody yells PIZZA! and they go back downstairs.
McDrab foils a bank robbery. The kids help or something. They stop bad guys with guns. Someone plays a steel drum. Everything seems resolved. The building workers suddenly act real nice to McDrab. Seven women in cop uniforms ruffle the kids’ hair like good job, or something. Then they’re naked and they dogpile a mailman. Everyone’s covered in iguana tattoos.
Billy rides the elevator up with McDrab because he forgot something in the office. It’s a long elevator ride—almost slow motion. McDrab is talking on his cellphone, which is a Motorola flip phone from the early 90s, and Billy realizes McDrab is crazy because old flip phones don’t work in elevators and because he’s yelling about a salad really intensely. And Billy doesn’t realize that McDrab is actually talking to his psychiatrist who is desperately asking whether McDrab had the yellow pepper or the red one, and McDrab won’t answer her.
They get to the top floor, and McDrab walks at a deliberate pace into his office, out to his garden, and off the ledge, splat.
I watched the last part from the balcony in an out-of-body experience.
—Jean McLarney, second-year English.
