CLOSING NOTICES - (Four Dramatic one acts - various ages, doubling permitted.)
.jpg)
FERRY ANGEL (Drama 2f, 1m)by Lori Jean SigristSet on the Staten Island Ferry, an angel intervenes in the life of a distraught passenger contemplating suicide.
'CLOSING NOTICES' (Drama, 2m)A disgruntled playwright / actor holds his audience, including the Theatre critic he hates, hostage during opening night of his one man retrospective!
HALRYDER (drama 4m,1f) Based on true events, an inventor who comes up with a device which allows a car to run on tap water is confronted by the government and big oil.
TEN MORE WEDNESDAYS (Drama, 2m, 1 f)Alicia has a secret that is revealed after a visit from her brothers college classmate. Order this play on Amazon books: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1687871698 For licensing inquiries on this title, please contact: Joe Simonelli - jsimonelli2@msn.com 347-355-89891st class Broadway and West End rights thru law office of Gary DaSilva - gary@internationalauthors.com This Book Contains the following one act plays:
CLOSING NOTICES by Joe Simonelli
FERRY ANGEL by Lori Jean Sigrist
HAYRYDER by Joe Simonelli
TEN MORE WEDNESDAYS by Joe Simonelli
HALRYDER
BY
Joe Simonelli
(This play is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to living or deceased persons is strictly coincidental)
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Hal Ryder 55Steve Ryder 55Joe Brown 60 – 70Sara Handly 30Adrian Schwartz 50
SETTING: The den of Hal Ryder. There is a door down left that leads outside. Another door back left leads to the garage. A small round table and two chairs are down right. A shelf on wall next to the table holds three bottled waters A small couch with a coffee table and television set circa the mid seventies are center.
AT RISE: Joe Brown sits at the table stage right looking at his smart phone. He is an older man dressed casually. Lights up stage right on table.
(A knock at the door)
JOE (still looking at the phone) Come in Miss Handly
(Sara enters wearing business attire and carrying a laptop bag)
SARA. Hello Mr. Brown.
JOE. (not getting up) Please..sit. (She sits opposite him)JOE. Can I offer you a bottled water?
SARA. No thank you.
JOE. What’s the matter? Not what you expected?
SARA. Well, not exactly.
JOE. Why not? I’m not dressed in a black suit wearing dark sunglasses? No trench coat? Actually, I have one in my car if you’d like to see it. But I only keep it there in case it rains.
SARA. Well given your credentials one does make assumptions.
JOE. You watch too many movies. This is what I normally wore throughout most of my career. When you work covertly for a government agency you want to be able to blend in, not stick out like a sore thumb.
(Sara removes her lap top and smart phone)
SARA. Do you mind if I record our conversation for the record.
JOE. You know that can’t happen. Take whatever notes you like on your lap top for the record but I can’t allow my voice to be recorded.
SARA. You know I could tell you I’m not recording you and easily just secretly record you.
JOE. Yes, but we both know what would happen if I ever found out a recording surfaced.
SARA. Enough said. I’m a journalist but I’m not paid enough to take those kind of risks.
JOE. You’re taking a big risk right now just by meeting with me. I explained that to the liaison when we made these arrangements. I hope he made it clear to you and your editor.
SARA. He did. And I’m aware of the risk I’m taking in that regard.
JOE. Fine, as long as all is understood.
SARA. Now Mr. Brown….
JOE. No need to be formal. Just call me Joe…or Fred, or Sam.
SARA. Of course, we’ll never know your real name.
JOE. I’ve had so many aliases over the years sometimes I can’t remember my given name.
SARA. How does one even get into this kind of field? I mean, you don’t just walk off the football field your senior year of high school and say to yourself, hey, I think I’ll become a covert operative.
JOE. No, but sometimes you do say I’d like to become a cop or go into the military. That’s usually where people like myself are “recruited.”
SARA. And just what branch of the government were you affiliated with? The C.I.A?
JOE. I started there for a while, we all have to start somewhere. But for the majority of my career I was with a unit that had no official name and I had a security clearance seven levels above the president.
SARA. Seven levels above the president?
JOE. Stop being so naïve Miss Handly. The president is a temporary government employee. Eight years at most. He’s strictly on a need to know basis. That would be like a top brokerage firm hiring a front door receptionist and giving them access to all their top clients. Next you’re going to tell me you think there’s really a two party system in this country.
SARA. Even I’m beginning to see the line blur on that one.
JOE. Exactly. It’s now one party with common economic interests who put on a good show to make it look like there are differences when they’re all just working for us,
SARA. Us being whom….The “Deep State?”
JOE. Call it what you like but as good a name as any.
SARA. I guess next you’ll be telling me about aliens on a secret base in Roswell. New Mexico,
JOE. (starts to laugh)That was a good one wasn’t it? But in my opinion it’s all a bunch of crap. Now I can’t be absolutely certain because I don’t have the highest security clearance but I have been to Roswell and there’s nothing there. Nothing of an extra-terrestrial nature anyway. Think of it logically Miss Handly. An alien civilization has the superior technology to travel through space and visit us then crash lands when they get here? I guess their GPS wasn’t calibrated enough. (laughs again)
SARA. But UFO’s were just declassified. The government even released video.
JOE. Video? Oh, you mean that ‘tic tac’ video that looks like something akin to an Atari video game circa the early nineteen eighties. Any news of alien sightings from the nineteen forties forward was information the government wanted put out there as mis-information. Are alien civilizations possible? Absolutely. Actuality it’s probably a certainty. They could have visited the planet millions of years ago and planted seeds that kick started all life on this planet. But if they did it would no more than you planning a tree in someone’s garden then moving on.
SARA. Then why would the government even want a story about aliens at Roswell in the first place?
JOE. To plant a false flag so that when the technology advanced, as it has, they could send out air planes that look remarkably like flying saucers to panic the people into thinking there’s an actual Alien Invasion.
SARA. For what reason?
JOE. (he rises and starts to pace)The same reason the ‘deep state”, as you call them, does anything. For control of the masses! They control everything. The political system, the media…. You’re young, but when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn there were three major television networks and about four local stations. That’s it. And this was New York City, the media center!. The government controlled everything of major importance that we wanted the citizens to know. Oh, not local stuff like a fire or even local politics. That was of no concern to us. But when Kennedy was assassinated do you think we released the real facts to the three major networks? Forget it. He was killed by a conglomerate including his vice president, the mafia and the CIA,. Why? Because he wanted to end the war in Vietnam, disband the C.I.A. and his brother kept picking fights with the mafia. Do you know who would have lost a ton of money if that war ended suddenly? LBJ and all his political Texan oil men cronies. Do you know how much fuel it takes to run the military industrial complex during war time? Who do you think gets all those military contracts?
SARA. You also mentioned the Mafia?
JOE. Santo Trafficante was a Mafia leader who gave a death bed confession as to his involvement in the Kennedy assassination that no one ever reported. He wasn’t the only one. Witnesses to what really happened that day in Dallas mysteriously died even years after Kennedy was killed.
SARA. So what you’re saying is all this deep state stuff is caused by greed?
JOE. Greed and power. It’s what this country was founded on. A bunch of rich colonial landowners and industrialists didn’t want to pay any more taxes to the crown so they revolted. And guess what, they still don’t want to pay taxes. Even to the government of the country they formed! Do you realize that the highest tax bracket in the United states during President Eisenhower’s administration in the nineteen fifties was 90 percent? What is it now? It was Eisenhower who said “beware the military industrial complex” before he left office. Think of that Miss Handly, a former general! One of their own, sounded the warning and nobody listened. War is big business I’m afraid. Look at current commercials. They trumpet a career in the military like they’re recruiting for a college campus. All rah, rah ziz boom bah. Only on a college campus people usually don’t die. The government makes military combat sound like a football game nowadays. Conventional ground wars have been obsolete since the world went nuclear. Yet they still happen all the time. Too much money to be made from war.
SARA. By whom?
JOE. Think about it. What gets consumed in war? You need vehicles. That’s the U.S. auto industry. Some of whom were also selling trucks to Germany during World War Two before the U.S. entered. You need fuel to run those trucks. That’s big oil. Soldiers get wounded, they need medicine. That’s the pharmaceutical industry. Uniforms, food service…war is an endless cash register for many large corporations. That’s why we keep starting them.
SARA. What about the financial industry?
JOE. What about them? Banks have been financing wars since before our nation was founded. Starting with the house of Rothschild in Europe and spreading over time to their subsidiary banks in the U.S. Why do you think the America entered the second World War? We lent Great Britain a ton of money and stood to lose it all if they lost the war. “To the victor go the spoils.”…Oh, yeah, they pretty much want to control everything. But alas, they slipped up one thing. They were a little late to the game on it and now it’s starting to cost them and that’s why we’re here.
SARA. And where did they slip up?
JOE. The internet Miss Handly. Remember their control of the media? Well as much as they tried to put the ‘genie back in the bottle’ in the nineties they just couldn’t. All the information I related to you is out there. The only thing the deep state has going for them is that information is not easily disseminated on the internet. You have to search for the information you want. It’s not spoon fed to anyone by the media. When you do find something they can easily discredit it as a conspiracy theory or censor it altogether. You really think there is still freedom of speech in this country? They count on you thinking that the Kennedy assignation, or Martin Luther King or yes, even aliens and any others are just a bunch of cranks getting together. That’s the government’s ace in the hole to this day. That level headed middle class citizens have enough on their plate to not care while their government continues to squeeze them with taxes and rob them blind. Do you know how close the entire world financial system came to collapse in two thousand and eight because a few greedy wall street financiers screwed up and not one of them spent a day in jail? Do you know what the definition of a conspiracy is Miss Handly?
SARA. Sure, a group of people conspire to commit something usually nefarious.
JOE. How big a group?
SARA. I don’t really know?
JOE. The dictionary says that it takes two or more people to form a conspiracy. As little as two people, imagine that! Two lovers conspiring to kill a husband or wife to get them out of the way. Actually, that is probably the most common. So given that fact I would venture to say that probably ninety nine percent of conspiracies are probably true. Two people conspired to kill someone, the police find out, prove it in court by forensics or eye witnesses and that’s that. Which brings us to one of the greatest conspiracies perpetrated on the citizenry of not just the United States, but the world, that hardly anyone knows or cares about but if they knew the real story they surely would. For it is a conspiracy of such proportion that it could have benefited mankind for generations. But again, greed got in the way.
SARA. I’m all ears.
JOE. Let me preface the story first. Usually when there are technological break-throughs on some product or device they come to market and replace existing technology. It’s better for everyone, right?
SARA. Absolutely.
JOE. Except when such technology might jeopardize the profits of a huge consortium of powerful industries with huge lobbys such as transportation and oil. In the case of big oil, a technology was invented that rendered them nearly irrelevant.
SARA. Care to expand on that?
JOE. Let’s put it this way. When Henry Ford invented the automobile, why didn’t all the horse and buggy manufacturers try to put him out of business? After all, didn’t his invention threaten their very livelihood?
SARA. I suppose they really didn’t take the automobile seriously at first. And by the time they did it was probably too late to stop it, and progress. And of course the buggy manufacturers weren’t really one large group but probably just many small manufacturers spread across the country.
JOE. Very good. Now you would say the invention of the car was a good thing. People went places more often and much faster.
SARA. Aside from the terrible environmental footprint that cars leave I’d say that’s valid.
JOE. Exactly. The burning and depletion of fossil fuels. The cost to run a car when oil prices sky rocket. Kind of holds the economy hostage, doesn’t it?
SARA. Your point being?
JOE. Suppose someone invented an alternate fuel source for oil that cost practically nothing and left no environmental footprint. Wouldn’t you say that would be a remarkable brake through?
SARA. You mean like electrical cars?
JOE. Close, but that’s an alternative power source, not an alternative fuel source. And how practical is it to have to spend hours re-charging your car when you can fuel up in just a few short minutes. If there’s one thing consumers don’t want, it’s inconvenience. Also, it takes fossil fuel to run the generator plants that recharge these e cars so electric cars aren’t the panacea that people think they are. Otherwise electric cars would have rendered fuel driven cars obsolete by now.
SARA. Plus the fact that you’re up against a very powerful oil consortium.
JOE. Exactly. The oil consortium tolerates electric cars as a way to mollify the energy critics. Make it seem like there is an alternative to their monopoly when in reality there isn’t. But what if I were to posit something to you. Something that was readily available to the public thirty years ago that the oil companies and the government squelched, Something that would have made everyone’s life easier and cost them practically nothing to fuel their automobiles. Something that would have left practically no carbon footprint.
SARA. The only thing that fits that description is a car that runs on water.
JOE. Exactly Miss Handly. A car that runs strictly on water. Any kind of water. Tap, rain, sea water.
SARA. Come on, if that were available we’d have it by now.
JOE. You think so? You think the big oil companies would let that happen? You think the government or military would jeopardize an industry that’s vital to one third of the world’s economy. You see eventually even advances in technology are governed by the law of diminishing returns.
SARA. So you’re saying it is available?
JOE. Some say yes and some debate it. Mostly those whose best interests lie in debunking the technology. But I’m going to let you draw your own conclusions. It all started in the late nineteen seventies. Jimmy Carter was president and a thirty nine year old inventor named Hal Ryder sat in his Illinois living room with his twin brother Stephen, watching some unsettling events transpire in the den of his living room.
(Joe and Sara exit as lights come up on Hal and Stephen Ryder, who sit on sofa watching the television whose screen is facing upstage so only audio is heard by the audience)
“We interrupt your regularly scheduled program with a special bulletin. It has now been confirmed that fifty two American diplomats and citizens have been taken hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran by a group of Iranian college students belonging to the Muslim Student followers of the Imam’s Line, who support the Iranian Revolution. Many conjecture this to be in reaction to the United States granting asylum to the Shah of Iran. More details will follow as they become available. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”
STEVE. (get’s up and turns off television)Can you believe that shit Hal?
Hal. Not only do I believe it but I saw it coming. Ever since the Arab oil embargo. If we don’t find a viable alternative to fossil fuel the whole world economy is going to be held hostage. Or maybe you like the price of gasoline tripling over the last few years.
STEVE. So how’s your work going?
HAL. It’s going.
STEVE. And you still think it’s possible? It can work?
HAL. Theoretically yes. According to all we know so far about thermo dynamics, not so much. You see oil is easily flammable so it burns easily in a car engine. It also depletes itself easily and since it started out as a readily available commodity it really wasn’t an issue. But as we deplete the resource the price goes up. Simple supply and demand. Now water can also be burned, actually, the hydrogen component of water, and much more efficiently than oil.
STEVE. But doesn’t it takes more energy to break water down into it’s hydrogen component then the output that the fuel is providing?
HAL. Exactly, and that’s the rub. To find a cheap and efficient way to burn the hydrogen element in a closed internal combustion system.
STEVE. It would be more akin to a perpetual motion effect. Once the chemical reaction is started it keeps repeating without need for an outside fuel source.
HAL. In layman’s terms, that’s about it.
STEVE. And you think you can achieve this in your garage laboratory when the big auto manufacturers can’t?
HAL. That’s just it Stevey. They’re not even trying. You think they want to cut their own economic throats? Think of the pressure the big oil companies exert..
STEVE. I guess they do have a vested interest in not making cars that run on water.
HAL. Imagine what can be achieved if I can make this happen. Not only would the expense of fueling your car be almost non-existent but think of how the cost of food and other consumer goods would come down because now it would cost almost nothing to transport them by truck!
STEVE. Or airplane or anything else that uses fossil fuel. Sure is a nice thought.
HA. Come on, I’ll show what I’ve got so far.
STEVE. Let’s take a look.
(Hal and Steve exit through garage door as Joe and Sara re-enter and sit at table. Lights up on table)
SARA. So, did it work?
JOE. Let’s fast forward fifteen years. It’s now nineteen ninety five and Hal Ryder comes out with a patent on a fuel cell capacitor. A device that separates the molecule of water into it’s hydrogen component and burns it efficiently within the car engine. He retrofits a Volkswagen bug and claims it can run from New York to California on just twenty two gallons of water! Various local news outlets pick up the story. The video of the car running can be seen on you tube.
SARA. I’m sure, but can you tell from the video what’s fueling the car?
JOE. Not really, but I do know that he was approached by the U.S. government as well as representatives of OPEC who wanted to buy out his patent. So that being the case I’m going on the assumption that maybe he had something there. I had occasion to pay him a visit that year. Here’s how it went.
(Lights down on table stage right and up on living room as Stan sits on couch, some papers spread on the coffee table. Steve stands nearby. Joe has exited state and now knocks at door.)
HAL. That’s him.
STEVE. I’ll get it.
(Steve opens the door and Joe enters)
JOE. You must be the brother.
STEVE. That’s correct. And your name.
JOE. Mobil. Joe Mobil. Or Joe Exxon, or Shell. I represent them all. As well as the pentagon.
HAL. I’m Hal Ryder.
JOE. I know who you are. I thought you were told we were meeting alone.
HAL. My brother’s my partner. He can hear anything you have to say.
JOE. Suit yourself. Are those the plans?
HAL. Yes. The schematic. The patents are in my safe. Although I don’t know what you plan to accomplish here. You people have been chasing me for the past five years. And the closer I’ve gotten to success the more intensive it’s been. I’m not interested in selling. For any price. JOE. Why not. Why not become a very wealthy man and retire someplace warm…..and safe.
STEVE. Because we know you will squelch the technology and a car that runs on water will never make it to the market place. And since you’ll own the patent on the technology no competitor will ever be able to duplicate it. There is no duplicating this technology. There are no alternate methods, no slight variations that will produce the same results.
JOE. (amused)Oh wait, now I get it. I had it all wrong. What we have here are a couple of patriots! Benevolent patriots out to help and advance mankind.
HAL. Not totally. We’ll still get rich.
JOE. How? You going to open your own car dealership. A factory to manufacture new cars. That takes backers. And lots of money.
HAL. Which we have. We’ve even spoken to some former executives of American Motors about this.
JOE. American Motors? (laughs) AMC? The mickey mouse outfit that made the Gremlin? Listen to me pal, and listen good. No American or foreign auto manufacturer is going to do anything that we don’t want them to.
HAL. I have investors outside of oil and the auto industry lined up.
JOE. Really? Good luck.
HAL. I think this meeting is over.
JOE. You mean you don’t want to even hear my offer? (to Steve) I think your brother is being a little short sighted and naïve, don’t you? I don’t think he understands the ramifications of what tragic circumstances can occur in cases like this. Cases where a lot of important people and entities stand to lose a lot of money if a reasonable solution isn’t found.
STEVE. Maybe we should listen to his offer Stan.
HAL. Why? What’s he gonna do? Kill me? Make me disappear? The technology is there and the patent is done. You get rid of me, someone else replaces me. How long do you think you can keep this secret from the American public? Imagine their outrage when they find out that their own government is standing in the way of progress and keeping them from an alternative way of fueling their car that would cost them practically nothing. Are you going to kill everyone Mr. Mobil? Every U.S. citizen? They’ll be nobody left to purchase your oil, will there.
JOE. One thing I have to say Hal, you certainly are passionate… I’m going to whisper a figure into your brother’s ear. I think you should seriously consider it. Carefully. The figure is non-negotiable unless you want to take less. You could divide it by a thousand and still be a very wealthy man.
(he whispers in Steve’s ear)
Thank you for your time gentleman. You know how to get in touch with me. I await your decision. The offer is good for one week from today. If I don’t hear from you by then, it’s out of my hands.
(Joe exits)
STEVE. You want to know the figure?
HAL. No.
STEVE. I think you should hear it.
HAL. I’m not interested in seeing twenty years of work never coming to fruition.
STEVE. Stan, it’s a lot of money. And you know these guys are dangerous. Who cares if it doesn’t come to market through you. Eventually, when the time is right, someone else will get it done.
HAL. When the time is right? (He stands) Stan, remember when we were kids, back in sixty nine when we watched the moon landing? Remember how we thought, wow, I wonder what space travel will look like in, twenty, thirty, fifty years? We could be going to Mars, Jupiter…maybe another solar system. And we’d live to see it. With all the technological resources and money America has? Well it’s been twenty five years and how far have we gotten? A space station. A shuttle? We’re never going deeper into space and you know why? There’s no money in it. The government is not going to do shit to improve things if there’s no money in it. It’s up to individuals to get it done. Individual entrepreneurs like us. Like the Wright brothers, and Tesla and Henry Ford.
STEVE. Especially in light of the fact that everyone said that what you’ve done is impossible because it violates the first two law’s of thermodynamics.
HAL. If there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that everything is impossible until man or nature finds a way. Electricity was impossible. Splitting the atom was impossible. Damn, a microwave oven was impossible.
STEVE. A hundred million dollars Hal. That was his offer. That buys an awful lot of microwave ovens. You need to think about this. Hal, are you listening to me?
HAL. Yes, I’m listening. I’ll seriously consider it.
STEVE. You better. Especially when you consider the alternative. And what if you can’t raise anymore money?
HAL. I’ve still got the American motors guys. And two guys from Italy.
STEVE. Italy? What part?
HAL. Palermo.
STEVE. Palermo?! Yeah, I’d stick with the AMC guys.
HAL. Come on. You hungry? You want to take the bug out for a joyride?
STEVE. Sure. You got enough water in the tank to make it to Cracker Barrell?
(Lights down as Hal exits and Steve remains on the couch. Lights up on table right)
SARA. So what did he decide? What happened?
JOE. Let’s fast forward three years and find out.
(Lights up on couch. A voice off stage can be heard)
VOICE OFF. Okay Mr. Ryder. You are being recorded. This statement is for the record concerning the death of your brother, Hal Ryder. You can begin in five…four thee…two..one
STEVE. (he reads from a type written paper)My name is Steven Ryder. I was born and reside in the state of Illinois. Approximately three days ago, March 21st , 1998, my brother Hal and I were at lunch in a local restaurant with two Italian Investors when Hal took a drink of iced tea, started choking and ran from the restaurant. I followed him out the front door where he exclaimed “I’ve been poisoned, Stevie, they poisoned me” and collapsed to the ground. The paramedics arrived but were unable to revive him. He was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital. The official coroner’s report declared that my brother died from a brain aneurism but I believe that diagnosis to be incorrect. I believe, in light of the following facts, that my brother was murdered. The facts are as follows. My brother, since nineteen seventy five, had been working on a viable system for an alternative fuel source, namely, H2O or common water, in it’s native component of hydrogen, to fuel auto mobiles. As his work proved successful he was approached on separate occasions by representatives of U.S. and foreign oil companies, the pentagon and the U.S. government. Monetary remuneration was offered to him on many occasions in exchange for his patents but in each case and against my advice and the advice of others, he refused all offers. On the day of his death the two French investors who were present showed neither remorse, or surprise after he collapsed outside the restaurant. Prior to today and I’m sure long after, many people have tried and will continue to discredit my brother as a crank and a fraud. But I’m here to tell you that Hal Ryder was an American patriot. A true patriot who refused large sums of money and an easy way out to try to lighten the burden of working class people by providing them with a cheap energy source. This my statement, this 23rd day of March nineteen hundred and ninety eight.
(Lights down on Steve as he exits stage. Lights up on table)
SARA. So that’s what happened?
JOE. That’s what happened.
SARA. You haven’t answered one question.
JOE. And what’s that?
SARA. Why? Why are you telling me all this?
JOE. I’m getting old. Sometimes a person wants to purge himself. Get things off his chest. For whatever reason. Remember I told you of the mafia Don’s and their death bed confessions about the Kennedy assassination?
SARA. And so ends the Hal Ryder story and cars that run on water.
JOE. Actually, that’s not quite the end.
SARA. How so?
JOE. There have been other inventors whose ideas were either purchased or squelched. Someone retro fitted a nineteen forty six Buick Roadmaster with a water injected system that got one hundred miles per gallon. The gas was humidified and the pressure increased to get better mileage. Big oil bought this idea and buried it. In 1977 the book Fuel Economy of the Gas Engine by Shell scientists states that they got 150 miles per gallon in a 1947 Studebaker. On May 1, 1977, The El Paso Times ran a front page article with the headline "200 Miles on 2 Gallons of Gas". Tom Ogle, the subject of the article, was found in the desert, dead from a drug overdose, and his car disappeared.
SARA. Wow.
JOE. Oh, and I almost forgot. Rockstar Neil Young retrofitted his car to make it run on vegetable oil. Oh yeah, it works. There was even a small chain of service stations that used to over vegetable oil based gas for diesel engines! Care to guess what happened to them?
SARA. Bought out by big oil?
JOE. You do catch on fast.
SARA. So I guess now all your problems are solved?
JOE. Not quite. Let’s just say that here are some residual effects.
SARA. What kind of residual effects?
JOE. Residual effects like this idiot who I had to deal with just last year. Remember what I told you, the Hal Ryder story is floating around the internet. Sometimes people find it.
(Lights down stage right and up center as Joe sits on couch and there is a knock at the door)
Come in.
(Adrian Schwartz, about fifty years old, enters)
You’re Schwartz?
ADRIAN. I am, Adrian Schwartz.
(He puts his hand out to shakes Joe’s but Joe doesn’t return the gesture)
JOE. (he smiles)Adrian Schwartz, the Hollywood writer.
ADRIAN. One and the same. I take it you’ve read the screenplay?
JOE. We have.
ADRIAN. And you know my figure. How much I’m looking for? I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.
JOE. You don’t need to know my name. And for the record, we are not particularly fond of people trying to extort money from us by writing the kind of conspiracy bullshit that you’ve written.
(he picks up screenplay)
“HALRYDER, THE CAR THAT RUNS ON WATER.”
ADRIAN. Let’s not be coy. You wouldn’t even be seeing me if you thought the idea was bullshit. You’d just let me go ahead and let my agent sell the rights to the studio. But you and your people don’t want this story out there in the mainstream even if it is bullshit. So I’m doing the smart thing. I’m playing it smart and coming to you first. You know my price. I know what it’s worth to you. And it’s a pretty small amount to guys like you but it’s enough for me to pay off some debts and buy a boat in Marina Del Ray so I can write some other screenplays in peace.
JOE. We know all about your debts. They’re gambling debts in Vegas. We know those people very well. Why don’t we just give you nothing and let the casino people deal with you?
ADRIAN. Because the casino people know that I have a track record and I stand to make much more money if I get the movie made. Then they get paid off and I probably keep losing money to them for years to come so they’re willing to wait. Now you have my offer, what’s it gonna be?
JOE. We’ll let you know. Thanks for coming.
ADRIAN. When?
JOE. By Friday.
ADRIAN. Great, you can find me through my agent.
JOE. Oh we’ll find you alright.
(lights down center as Arian exits and up as Joe sits at table )
SARA. So what happened to Schwartz?
JOE. We bought the rights to his screenplay for a million dollars and burned it.
SARA. What if somebody else writes one?
JOE. Depends.
SARA. On what?
JOE. How good it is and how much money they want for it.
SARA. I don’t follow you.
JOE. Mr. Schwartz wasn’t the first screenwriter, studio exec or literary agent to approach us with the same basic storyline.. There were several before them.
SARA. So what happened to them?
JOE. Like I said, it depends. For two million or less we usually pay them off.
SARA. But Schwartz only got one million.
JOE. He was a bad negotiator. That’s all he asked for. Besides, I wasn’t crazy about his ending.
SARA. So you paid them all of?
JOE. Not all of them. Some didn’t want to negotiate a price so we dealt with them… differently.
SARA. How so?
JOE. Come on Miss Handly. Do I really need to spell that out?
SARA. So you’ll just keep paying anyone who approaches you to go away?
JOE. Don’t forget, we were willing to pay Mr. Ryder a hundred million, but he was the inventor. A major motion picture release, even if it’s taken as fiction, gets the public to thinking. “Hey, why can’t the government dedicate more money and research to cars than run on water rather than oil. Shit, they spend enough money on new weapons to kill people…how about helping out the middle class a little.” No one wants that kind of headache. So keeping the whole thing quiet is better. Like I said before, some information is available on the internet and there are a lot of scammers out there trying to sell a product similar to Ryder’s but they just plain don’t work so that makes it a lot easier to discredit Hal Ryder as a scam artist.
SARA. And you think Hal Ryder’s car did work? It ran on water?
JOE. What’s the difference? Even if it didn’t he came very close. And very close is too close for us. It means if some corporation actually did devote research and money to the idea they might actually come up with something and we can’t have that now can we?
SARA. Still, paying anyone who approaches you three million each still seems like a costly way to do business to me..
JOE. There’s not as many people as you think Miss Handly. We don’t just negotiate with anyone coming in off the street with a script. They have to have an agent, a track record or a producer backing them. Schwartz had a track record and an agent. A bit of a hack but he did sell some low budget screenplays. And as to the one million dollars? You see it’s all a matter of economics to us, dollars and cents. There is sometimes more money involved in dealing with someone differently that paying them off. Depending on who the person is and the amount of family and contacts they had. That’s a lot of money to spread around to have to keep people quiet. In most cases it’s more cost effective to just pay the one person off then ten others who might ask questions if a sudden accident befell one of their loved ones. We took care of Steven Ryder well enough. You won’t be hearing from him again.
SARA. You mean…
JOE. Oh no, Steven is resting comfortably in a nice warm climate. He was well compensated and he’s not saying another word on the subject. He’s nobodies fool. And as to paying anyone else three million.
(he takes out a penny and puts it on the table)
You see this?
SARA. A penny.
JOE. That’s correct. Multiply it buy five million before a million would even feel like a penny to the oil companies. When the five thousandth jerk with a screenplay approaches’ we’ll worry about it.
SARA. When you put it that way….yes, I guess paying them off would be better than……
JOE. Dealing with them ‘differently?” Why of course it would, after all, we’re reasonable people.
SARA. (She rises)One last Question. What ever happened to Hal Ryder’s Volkswagen?
JOE. Oh, it’s in good hands.(He rises and picks up the three bottled waters)Well, I have a five hour drive back to Virginia.
SARA. In case you get thirsty on the way?
JOE. I told you it’s a long drive. And I’m almost out of fuel. (walks to door) I always did want to own a Volkswagen. (Joe exits)
BLACK OUT
'CLOSING NOTICES' (Drama, 2m)A disgruntled playwright / actor holds his audience, including the Theatre critic he hates, hostage during opening night of his one man retrospective!
HALRYDER (drama 4m,1f) Based on true events, an inventor who comes up with a device which allows a car to run on tap water is confronted by the government and big oil.
TEN MORE WEDNESDAYS (Drama, 2m, 1 f)Alicia has a secret that is revealed after a visit from her brothers college classmate. Order this play on Amazon books: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1687871698 For licensing inquiries on this title, please contact: Joe Simonelli - jsimonelli2@msn.com 347-355-89891st class Broadway and West End rights thru law office of Gary DaSilva - gary@internationalauthors.com This Book Contains the following one act plays:
CLOSING NOTICES by Joe Simonelli
FERRY ANGEL by Lori Jean Sigrist
HAYRYDER by Joe Simonelli
TEN MORE WEDNESDAYS by Joe Simonelli
HALRYDER
BY
Joe Simonelli
(This play is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to living or deceased persons is strictly coincidental)
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Hal Ryder 55Steve Ryder 55Joe Brown 60 – 70Sara Handly 30Adrian Schwartz 50
SETTING: The den of Hal Ryder. There is a door down left that leads outside. Another door back left leads to the garage. A small round table and two chairs are down right. A shelf on wall next to the table holds three bottled waters A small couch with a coffee table and television set circa the mid seventies are center.
AT RISE: Joe Brown sits at the table stage right looking at his smart phone. He is an older man dressed casually. Lights up stage right on table.
(A knock at the door)
JOE (still looking at the phone) Come in Miss Handly
(Sara enters wearing business attire and carrying a laptop bag)
SARA. Hello Mr. Brown.
JOE. (not getting up) Please..sit. (She sits opposite him)JOE. Can I offer you a bottled water?
SARA. No thank you.
JOE. What’s the matter? Not what you expected?
SARA. Well, not exactly.
JOE. Why not? I’m not dressed in a black suit wearing dark sunglasses? No trench coat? Actually, I have one in my car if you’d like to see it. But I only keep it there in case it rains.
SARA. Well given your credentials one does make assumptions.
JOE. You watch too many movies. This is what I normally wore throughout most of my career. When you work covertly for a government agency you want to be able to blend in, not stick out like a sore thumb.
(Sara removes her lap top and smart phone)
SARA. Do you mind if I record our conversation for the record.
JOE. You know that can’t happen. Take whatever notes you like on your lap top for the record but I can’t allow my voice to be recorded.
SARA. You know I could tell you I’m not recording you and easily just secretly record you.
JOE. Yes, but we both know what would happen if I ever found out a recording surfaced.
SARA. Enough said. I’m a journalist but I’m not paid enough to take those kind of risks.
JOE. You’re taking a big risk right now just by meeting with me. I explained that to the liaison when we made these arrangements. I hope he made it clear to you and your editor.
SARA. He did. And I’m aware of the risk I’m taking in that regard.
JOE. Fine, as long as all is understood.
SARA. Now Mr. Brown….
JOE. No need to be formal. Just call me Joe…or Fred, or Sam.
SARA. Of course, we’ll never know your real name.
JOE. I’ve had so many aliases over the years sometimes I can’t remember my given name.
SARA. How does one even get into this kind of field? I mean, you don’t just walk off the football field your senior year of high school and say to yourself, hey, I think I’ll become a covert operative.
JOE. No, but sometimes you do say I’d like to become a cop or go into the military. That’s usually where people like myself are “recruited.”
SARA. And just what branch of the government were you affiliated with? The C.I.A?
JOE. I started there for a while, we all have to start somewhere. But for the majority of my career I was with a unit that had no official name and I had a security clearance seven levels above the president.
SARA. Seven levels above the president?
JOE. Stop being so naïve Miss Handly. The president is a temporary government employee. Eight years at most. He’s strictly on a need to know basis. That would be like a top brokerage firm hiring a front door receptionist and giving them access to all their top clients. Next you’re going to tell me you think there’s really a two party system in this country.
SARA. Even I’m beginning to see the line blur on that one.
JOE. Exactly. It’s now one party with common economic interests who put on a good show to make it look like there are differences when they’re all just working for us,
SARA. Us being whom….The “Deep State?”
JOE. Call it what you like but as good a name as any.
SARA. I guess next you’ll be telling me about aliens on a secret base in Roswell. New Mexico,
JOE. (starts to laugh)That was a good one wasn’t it? But in my opinion it’s all a bunch of crap. Now I can’t be absolutely certain because I don’t have the highest security clearance but I have been to Roswell and there’s nothing there. Nothing of an extra-terrestrial nature anyway. Think of it logically Miss Handly. An alien civilization has the superior technology to travel through space and visit us then crash lands when they get here? I guess their GPS wasn’t calibrated enough. (laughs again)
SARA. But UFO’s were just declassified. The government even released video.
JOE. Video? Oh, you mean that ‘tic tac’ video that looks like something akin to an Atari video game circa the early nineteen eighties. Any news of alien sightings from the nineteen forties forward was information the government wanted put out there as mis-information. Are alien civilizations possible? Absolutely. Actuality it’s probably a certainty. They could have visited the planet millions of years ago and planted seeds that kick started all life on this planet. But if they did it would no more than you planning a tree in someone’s garden then moving on.
SARA. Then why would the government even want a story about aliens at Roswell in the first place?
JOE. To plant a false flag so that when the technology advanced, as it has, they could send out air planes that look remarkably like flying saucers to panic the people into thinking there’s an actual Alien Invasion.
SARA. For what reason?
JOE. (he rises and starts to pace)The same reason the ‘deep state”, as you call them, does anything. For control of the masses! They control everything. The political system, the media…. You’re young, but when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn there were three major television networks and about four local stations. That’s it. And this was New York City, the media center!. The government controlled everything of major importance that we wanted the citizens to know. Oh, not local stuff like a fire or even local politics. That was of no concern to us. But when Kennedy was assassinated do you think we released the real facts to the three major networks? Forget it. He was killed by a conglomerate including his vice president, the mafia and the CIA,. Why? Because he wanted to end the war in Vietnam, disband the C.I.A. and his brother kept picking fights with the mafia. Do you know who would have lost a ton of money if that war ended suddenly? LBJ and all his political Texan oil men cronies. Do you know how much fuel it takes to run the military industrial complex during war time? Who do you think gets all those military contracts?
SARA. You also mentioned the Mafia?
JOE. Santo Trafficante was a Mafia leader who gave a death bed confession as to his involvement in the Kennedy assassination that no one ever reported. He wasn’t the only one. Witnesses to what really happened that day in Dallas mysteriously died even years after Kennedy was killed.
SARA. So what you’re saying is all this deep state stuff is caused by greed?
JOE. Greed and power. It’s what this country was founded on. A bunch of rich colonial landowners and industrialists didn’t want to pay any more taxes to the crown so they revolted. And guess what, they still don’t want to pay taxes. Even to the government of the country they formed! Do you realize that the highest tax bracket in the United states during President Eisenhower’s administration in the nineteen fifties was 90 percent? What is it now? It was Eisenhower who said “beware the military industrial complex” before he left office. Think of that Miss Handly, a former general! One of their own, sounded the warning and nobody listened. War is big business I’m afraid. Look at current commercials. They trumpet a career in the military like they’re recruiting for a college campus. All rah, rah ziz boom bah. Only on a college campus people usually don’t die. The government makes military combat sound like a football game nowadays. Conventional ground wars have been obsolete since the world went nuclear. Yet they still happen all the time. Too much money to be made from war.
SARA. By whom?
JOE. Think about it. What gets consumed in war? You need vehicles. That’s the U.S. auto industry. Some of whom were also selling trucks to Germany during World War Two before the U.S. entered. You need fuel to run those trucks. That’s big oil. Soldiers get wounded, they need medicine. That’s the pharmaceutical industry. Uniforms, food service…war is an endless cash register for many large corporations. That’s why we keep starting them.
SARA. What about the financial industry?
JOE. What about them? Banks have been financing wars since before our nation was founded. Starting with the house of Rothschild in Europe and spreading over time to their subsidiary banks in the U.S. Why do you think the America entered the second World War? We lent Great Britain a ton of money and stood to lose it all if they lost the war. “To the victor go the spoils.”…Oh, yeah, they pretty much want to control everything. But alas, they slipped up one thing. They were a little late to the game on it and now it’s starting to cost them and that’s why we’re here.
SARA. And where did they slip up?
JOE. The internet Miss Handly. Remember their control of the media? Well as much as they tried to put the ‘genie back in the bottle’ in the nineties they just couldn’t. All the information I related to you is out there. The only thing the deep state has going for them is that information is not easily disseminated on the internet. You have to search for the information you want. It’s not spoon fed to anyone by the media. When you do find something they can easily discredit it as a conspiracy theory or censor it altogether. You really think there is still freedom of speech in this country? They count on you thinking that the Kennedy assignation, or Martin Luther King or yes, even aliens and any others are just a bunch of cranks getting together. That’s the government’s ace in the hole to this day. That level headed middle class citizens have enough on their plate to not care while their government continues to squeeze them with taxes and rob them blind. Do you know how close the entire world financial system came to collapse in two thousand and eight because a few greedy wall street financiers screwed up and not one of them spent a day in jail? Do you know what the definition of a conspiracy is Miss Handly?
SARA. Sure, a group of people conspire to commit something usually nefarious.
JOE. How big a group?
SARA. I don’t really know?
JOE. The dictionary says that it takes two or more people to form a conspiracy. As little as two people, imagine that! Two lovers conspiring to kill a husband or wife to get them out of the way. Actually, that is probably the most common. So given that fact I would venture to say that probably ninety nine percent of conspiracies are probably true. Two people conspired to kill someone, the police find out, prove it in court by forensics or eye witnesses and that’s that. Which brings us to one of the greatest conspiracies perpetrated on the citizenry of not just the United States, but the world, that hardly anyone knows or cares about but if they knew the real story they surely would. For it is a conspiracy of such proportion that it could have benefited mankind for generations. But again, greed got in the way.
SARA. I’m all ears.
JOE. Let me preface the story first. Usually when there are technological break-throughs on some product or device they come to market and replace existing technology. It’s better for everyone, right?
SARA. Absolutely.
JOE. Except when such technology might jeopardize the profits of a huge consortium of powerful industries with huge lobbys such as transportation and oil. In the case of big oil, a technology was invented that rendered them nearly irrelevant.
SARA. Care to expand on that?
JOE. Let’s put it this way. When Henry Ford invented the automobile, why didn’t all the horse and buggy manufacturers try to put him out of business? After all, didn’t his invention threaten their very livelihood?
SARA. I suppose they really didn’t take the automobile seriously at first. And by the time they did it was probably too late to stop it, and progress. And of course the buggy manufacturers weren’t really one large group but probably just many small manufacturers spread across the country.
JOE. Very good. Now you would say the invention of the car was a good thing. People went places more often and much faster.
SARA. Aside from the terrible environmental footprint that cars leave I’d say that’s valid.
JOE. Exactly. The burning and depletion of fossil fuels. The cost to run a car when oil prices sky rocket. Kind of holds the economy hostage, doesn’t it?
SARA. Your point being?
JOE. Suppose someone invented an alternate fuel source for oil that cost practically nothing and left no environmental footprint. Wouldn’t you say that would be a remarkable brake through?
SARA. You mean like electrical cars?
JOE. Close, but that’s an alternative power source, not an alternative fuel source. And how practical is it to have to spend hours re-charging your car when you can fuel up in just a few short minutes. If there’s one thing consumers don’t want, it’s inconvenience. Also, it takes fossil fuel to run the generator plants that recharge these e cars so electric cars aren’t the panacea that people think they are. Otherwise electric cars would have rendered fuel driven cars obsolete by now.
SARA. Plus the fact that you’re up against a very powerful oil consortium.
JOE. Exactly. The oil consortium tolerates electric cars as a way to mollify the energy critics. Make it seem like there is an alternative to their monopoly when in reality there isn’t. But what if I were to posit something to you. Something that was readily available to the public thirty years ago that the oil companies and the government squelched, Something that would have made everyone’s life easier and cost them practically nothing to fuel their automobiles. Something that would have left practically no carbon footprint.
SARA. The only thing that fits that description is a car that runs on water.
JOE. Exactly Miss Handly. A car that runs strictly on water. Any kind of water. Tap, rain, sea water.
SARA. Come on, if that were available we’d have it by now.
JOE. You think so? You think the big oil companies would let that happen? You think the government or military would jeopardize an industry that’s vital to one third of the world’s economy. You see eventually even advances in technology are governed by the law of diminishing returns.
SARA. So you’re saying it is available?
JOE. Some say yes and some debate it. Mostly those whose best interests lie in debunking the technology. But I’m going to let you draw your own conclusions. It all started in the late nineteen seventies. Jimmy Carter was president and a thirty nine year old inventor named Hal Ryder sat in his Illinois living room with his twin brother Stephen, watching some unsettling events transpire in the den of his living room.
(Joe and Sara exit as lights come up on Hal and Stephen Ryder, who sit on sofa watching the television whose screen is facing upstage so only audio is heard by the audience)
“We interrupt your regularly scheduled program with a special bulletin. It has now been confirmed that fifty two American diplomats and citizens have been taken hostage in the U.S. embassy in Tehran by a group of Iranian college students belonging to the Muslim Student followers of the Imam’s Line, who support the Iranian Revolution. Many conjecture this to be in reaction to the United States granting asylum to the Shah of Iran. More details will follow as they become available. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”
STEVE. (get’s up and turns off television)Can you believe that shit Hal?
Hal. Not only do I believe it but I saw it coming. Ever since the Arab oil embargo. If we don’t find a viable alternative to fossil fuel the whole world economy is going to be held hostage. Or maybe you like the price of gasoline tripling over the last few years.
STEVE. So how’s your work going?
HAL. It’s going.
STEVE. And you still think it’s possible? It can work?
HAL. Theoretically yes. According to all we know so far about thermo dynamics, not so much. You see oil is easily flammable so it burns easily in a car engine. It also depletes itself easily and since it started out as a readily available commodity it really wasn’t an issue. But as we deplete the resource the price goes up. Simple supply and demand. Now water can also be burned, actually, the hydrogen component of water, and much more efficiently than oil.
STEVE. But doesn’t it takes more energy to break water down into it’s hydrogen component then the output that the fuel is providing?
HAL. Exactly, and that’s the rub. To find a cheap and efficient way to burn the hydrogen element in a closed internal combustion system.
STEVE. It would be more akin to a perpetual motion effect. Once the chemical reaction is started it keeps repeating without need for an outside fuel source.
HAL. In layman’s terms, that’s about it.
STEVE. And you think you can achieve this in your garage laboratory when the big auto manufacturers can’t?
HAL. That’s just it Stevey. They’re not even trying. You think they want to cut their own economic throats? Think of the pressure the big oil companies exert..
STEVE. I guess they do have a vested interest in not making cars that run on water.
HAL. Imagine what can be achieved if I can make this happen. Not only would the expense of fueling your car be almost non-existent but think of how the cost of food and other consumer goods would come down because now it would cost almost nothing to transport them by truck!
STEVE. Or airplane or anything else that uses fossil fuel. Sure is a nice thought.
HA. Come on, I’ll show what I’ve got so far.
STEVE. Let’s take a look.
(Hal and Steve exit through garage door as Joe and Sara re-enter and sit at table. Lights up on table)
SARA. So, did it work?
JOE. Let’s fast forward fifteen years. It’s now nineteen ninety five and Hal Ryder comes out with a patent on a fuel cell capacitor. A device that separates the molecule of water into it’s hydrogen component and burns it efficiently within the car engine. He retrofits a Volkswagen bug and claims it can run from New York to California on just twenty two gallons of water! Various local news outlets pick up the story. The video of the car running can be seen on you tube.
SARA. I’m sure, but can you tell from the video what’s fueling the car?
JOE. Not really, but I do know that he was approached by the U.S. government as well as representatives of OPEC who wanted to buy out his patent. So that being the case I’m going on the assumption that maybe he had something there. I had occasion to pay him a visit that year. Here’s how it went.
(Lights down on table stage right and up on living room as Stan sits on couch, some papers spread on the coffee table. Steve stands nearby. Joe has exited state and now knocks at door.)
HAL. That’s him.
STEVE. I’ll get it.
(Steve opens the door and Joe enters)
JOE. You must be the brother.
STEVE. That’s correct. And your name.
JOE. Mobil. Joe Mobil. Or Joe Exxon, or Shell. I represent them all. As well as the pentagon.
HAL. I’m Hal Ryder.
JOE. I know who you are. I thought you were told we were meeting alone.
HAL. My brother’s my partner. He can hear anything you have to say.
JOE. Suit yourself. Are those the plans?
HAL. Yes. The schematic. The patents are in my safe. Although I don’t know what you plan to accomplish here. You people have been chasing me for the past five years. And the closer I’ve gotten to success the more intensive it’s been. I’m not interested in selling. For any price. JOE. Why not. Why not become a very wealthy man and retire someplace warm…..and safe.
STEVE. Because we know you will squelch the technology and a car that runs on water will never make it to the market place. And since you’ll own the patent on the technology no competitor will ever be able to duplicate it. There is no duplicating this technology. There are no alternate methods, no slight variations that will produce the same results.
JOE. (amused)Oh wait, now I get it. I had it all wrong. What we have here are a couple of patriots! Benevolent patriots out to help and advance mankind.
HAL. Not totally. We’ll still get rich.
JOE. How? You going to open your own car dealership. A factory to manufacture new cars. That takes backers. And lots of money.
HAL. Which we have. We’ve even spoken to some former executives of American Motors about this.
JOE. American Motors? (laughs) AMC? The mickey mouse outfit that made the Gremlin? Listen to me pal, and listen good. No American or foreign auto manufacturer is going to do anything that we don’t want them to.
HAL. I have investors outside of oil and the auto industry lined up.
JOE. Really? Good luck.
HAL. I think this meeting is over.
JOE. You mean you don’t want to even hear my offer? (to Steve) I think your brother is being a little short sighted and naïve, don’t you? I don’t think he understands the ramifications of what tragic circumstances can occur in cases like this. Cases where a lot of important people and entities stand to lose a lot of money if a reasonable solution isn’t found.
STEVE. Maybe we should listen to his offer Stan.
HAL. Why? What’s he gonna do? Kill me? Make me disappear? The technology is there and the patent is done. You get rid of me, someone else replaces me. How long do you think you can keep this secret from the American public? Imagine their outrage when they find out that their own government is standing in the way of progress and keeping them from an alternative way of fueling their car that would cost them practically nothing. Are you going to kill everyone Mr. Mobil? Every U.S. citizen? They’ll be nobody left to purchase your oil, will there.
JOE. One thing I have to say Hal, you certainly are passionate… I’m going to whisper a figure into your brother’s ear. I think you should seriously consider it. Carefully. The figure is non-negotiable unless you want to take less. You could divide it by a thousand and still be a very wealthy man.
(he whispers in Steve’s ear)
Thank you for your time gentleman. You know how to get in touch with me. I await your decision. The offer is good for one week from today. If I don’t hear from you by then, it’s out of my hands.
(Joe exits)
STEVE. You want to know the figure?
HAL. No.
STEVE. I think you should hear it.
HAL. I’m not interested in seeing twenty years of work never coming to fruition.
STEVE. Stan, it’s a lot of money. And you know these guys are dangerous. Who cares if it doesn’t come to market through you. Eventually, when the time is right, someone else will get it done.
HAL. When the time is right? (He stands) Stan, remember when we were kids, back in sixty nine when we watched the moon landing? Remember how we thought, wow, I wonder what space travel will look like in, twenty, thirty, fifty years? We could be going to Mars, Jupiter…maybe another solar system. And we’d live to see it. With all the technological resources and money America has? Well it’s been twenty five years and how far have we gotten? A space station. A shuttle? We’re never going deeper into space and you know why? There’s no money in it. The government is not going to do shit to improve things if there’s no money in it. It’s up to individuals to get it done. Individual entrepreneurs like us. Like the Wright brothers, and Tesla and Henry Ford.
STEVE. Especially in light of the fact that everyone said that what you’ve done is impossible because it violates the first two law’s of thermodynamics.
HAL. If there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that everything is impossible until man or nature finds a way. Electricity was impossible. Splitting the atom was impossible. Damn, a microwave oven was impossible.
STEVE. A hundred million dollars Hal. That was his offer. That buys an awful lot of microwave ovens. You need to think about this. Hal, are you listening to me?
HAL. Yes, I’m listening. I’ll seriously consider it.
STEVE. You better. Especially when you consider the alternative. And what if you can’t raise anymore money?
HAL. I’ve still got the American motors guys. And two guys from Italy.
STEVE. Italy? What part?
HAL. Palermo.
STEVE. Palermo?! Yeah, I’d stick with the AMC guys.
HAL. Come on. You hungry? You want to take the bug out for a joyride?
STEVE. Sure. You got enough water in the tank to make it to Cracker Barrell?
(Lights down as Hal exits and Steve remains on the couch. Lights up on table right)
SARA. So what did he decide? What happened?
JOE. Let’s fast forward three years and find out.
(Lights up on couch. A voice off stage can be heard)
VOICE OFF. Okay Mr. Ryder. You are being recorded. This statement is for the record concerning the death of your brother, Hal Ryder. You can begin in five…four thee…two..one
STEVE. (he reads from a type written paper)My name is Steven Ryder. I was born and reside in the state of Illinois. Approximately three days ago, March 21st , 1998, my brother Hal and I were at lunch in a local restaurant with two Italian Investors when Hal took a drink of iced tea, started choking and ran from the restaurant. I followed him out the front door where he exclaimed “I’ve been poisoned, Stevie, they poisoned me” and collapsed to the ground. The paramedics arrived but were unable to revive him. He was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital. The official coroner’s report declared that my brother died from a brain aneurism but I believe that diagnosis to be incorrect. I believe, in light of the following facts, that my brother was murdered. The facts are as follows. My brother, since nineteen seventy five, had been working on a viable system for an alternative fuel source, namely, H2O or common water, in it’s native component of hydrogen, to fuel auto mobiles. As his work proved successful he was approached on separate occasions by representatives of U.S. and foreign oil companies, the pentagon and the U.S. government. Monetary remuneration was offered to him on many occasions in exchange for his patents but in each case and against my advice and the advice of others, he refused all offers. On the day of his death the two French investors who were present showed neither remorse, or surprise after he collapsed outside the restaurant. Prior to today and I’m sure long after, many people have tried and will continue to discredit my brother as a crank and a fraud. But I’m here to tell you that Hal Ryder was an American patriot. A true patriot who refused large sums of money and an easy way out to try to lighten the burden of working class people by providing them with a cheap energy source. This my statement, this 23rd day of March nineteen hundred and ninety eight.
(Lights down on Steve as he exits stage. Lights up on table)
SARA. So that’s what happened?
JOE. That’s what happened.
SARA. You haven’t answered one question.
JOE. And what’s that?
SARA. Why? Why are you telling me all this?
JOE. I’m getting old. Sometimes a person wants to purge himself. Get things off his chest. For whatever reason. Remember I told you of the mafia Don’s and their death bed confessions about the Kennedy assassination?
SARA. And so ends the Hal Ryder story and cars that run on water.
JOE. Actually, that’s not quite the end.
SARA. How so?
JOE. There have been other inventors whose ideas were either purchased or squelched. Someone retro fitted a nineteen forty six Buick Roadmaster with a water injected system that got one hundred miles per gallon. The gas was humidified and the pressure increased to get better mileage. Big oil bought this idea and buried it. In 1977 the book Fuel Economy of the Gas Engine by Shell scientists states that they got 150 miles per gallon in a 1947 Studebaker. On May 1, 1977, The El Paso Times ran a front page article with the headline "200 Miles on 2 Gallons of Gas". Tom Ogle, the subject of the article, was found in the desert, dead from a drug overdose, and his car disappeared.
SARA. Wow.
JOE. Oh, and I almost forgot. Rockstar Neil Young retrofitted his car to make it run on vegetable oil. Oh yeah, it works. There was even a small chain of service stations that used to over vegetable oil based gas for diesel engines! Care to guess what happened to them?
SARA. Bought out by big oil?
JOE. You do catch on fast.
SARA. So I guess now all your problems are solved?
JOE. Not quite. Let’s just say that here are some residual effects.
SARA. What kind of residual effects?
JOE. Residual effects like this idiot who I had to deal with just last year. Remember what I told you, the Hal Ryder story is floating around the internet. Sometimes people find it.
(Lights down stage right and up center as Joe sits on couch and there is a knock at the door)
Come in.
(Adrian Schwartz, about fifty years old, enters)
You’re Schwartz?
ADRIAN. I am, Adrian Schwartz.
(He puts his hand out to shakes Joe’s but Joe doesn’t return the gesture)
JOE. (he smiles)Adrian Schwartz, the Hollywood writer.
ADRIAN. One and the same. I take it you’ve read the screenplay?
JOE. We have.
ADRIAN. And you know my figure. How much I’m looking for? I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.
JOE. You don’t need to know my name. And for the record, we are not particularly fond of people trying to extort money from us by writing the kind of conspiracy bullshit that you’ve written.
(he picks up screenplay)
“HALRYDER, THE CAR THAT RUNS ON WATER.”
ADRIAN. Let’s not be coy. You wouldn’t even be seeing me if you thought the idea was bullshit. You’d just let me go ahead and let my agent sell the rights to the studio. But you and your people don’t want this story out there in the mainstream even if it is bullshit. So I’m doing the smart thing. I’m playing it smart and coming to you first. You know my price. I know what it’s worth to you. And it’s a pretty small amount to guys like you but it’s enough for me to pay off some debts and buy a boat in Marina Del Ray so I can write some other screenplays in peace.
JOE. We know all about your debts. They’re gambling debts in Vegas. We know those people very well. Why don’t we just give you nothing and let the casino people deal with you?
ADRIAN. Because the casino people know that I have a track record and I stand to make much more money if I get the movie made. Then they get paid off and I probably keep losing money to them for years to come so they’re willing to wait. Now you have my offer, what’s it gonna be?
JOE. We’ll let you know. Thanks for coming.
ADRIAN. When?
JOE. By Friday.
ADRIAN. Great, you can find me through my agent.
JOE. Oh we’ll find you alright.
(lights down center as Arian exits and up as Joe sits at table )
SARA. So what happened to Schwartz?
JOE. We bought the rights to his screenplay for a million dollars and burned it.
SARA. What if somebody else writes one?
JOE. Depends.
SARA. On what?
JOE. How good it is and how much money they want for it.
SARA. I don’t follow you.
JOE. Mr. Schwartz wasn’t the first screenwriter, studio exec or literary agent to approach us with the same basic storyline.. There were several before them.
SARA. So what happened to them?
JOE. Like I said, it depends. For two million or less we usually pay them off.
SARA. But Schwartz only got one million.
JOE. He was a bad negotiator. That’s all he asked for. Besides, I wasn’t crazy about his ending.
SARA. So you paid them all of?
JOE. Not all of them. Some didn’t want to negotiate a price so we dealt with them… differently.
SARA. How so?
JOE. Come on Miss Handly. Do I really need to spell that out?
SARA. So you’ll just keep paying anyone who approaches you to go away?
JOE. Don’t forget, we were willing to pay Mr. Ryder a hundred million, but he was the inventor. A major motion picture release, even if it’s taken as fiction, gets the public to thinking. “Hey, why can’t the government dedicate more money and research to cars than run on water rather than oil. Shit, they spend enough money on new weapons to kill people…how about helping out the middle class a little.” No one wants that kind of headache. So keeping the whole thing quiet is better. Like I said before, some information is available on the internet and there are a lot of scammers out there trying to sell a product similar to Ryder’s but they just plain don’t work so that makes it a lot easier to discredit Hal Ryder as a scam artist.
SARA. And you think Hal Ryder’s car did work? It ran on water?
JOE. What’s the difference? Even if it didn’t he came very close. And very close is too close for us. It means if some corporation actually did devote research and money to the idea they might actually come up with something and we can’t have that now can we?
SARA. Still, paying anyone who approaches you three million each still seems like a costly way to do business to me..
JOE. There’s not as many people as you think Miss Handly. We don’t just negotiate with anyone coming in off the street with a script. They have to have an agent, a track record or a producer backing them. Schwartz had a track record and an agent. A bit of a hack but he did sell some low budget screenplays. And as to the one million dollars? You see it’s all a matter of economics to us, dollars and cents. There is sometimes more money involved in dealing with someone differently that paying them off. Depending on who the person is and the amount of family and contacts they had. That’s a lot of money to spread around to have to keep people quiet. In most cases it’s more cost effective to just pay the one person off then ten others who might ask questions if a sudden accident befell one of their loved ones. We took care of Steven Ryder well enough. You won’t be hearing from him again.
SARA. You mean…
JOE. Oh no, Steven is resting comfortably in a nice warm climate. He was well compensated and he’s not saying another word on the subject. He’s nobodies fool. And as to paying anyone else three million.
(he takes out a penny and puts it on the table)
You see this?
SARA. A penny.
JOE. That’s correct. Multiply it buy five million before a million would even feel like a penny to the oil companies. When the five thousandth jerk with a screenplay approaches’ we’ll worry about it.
SARA. When you put it that way….yes, I guess paying them off would be better than……
JOE. Dealing with them ‘differently?” Why of course it would, after all, we’re reasonable people.
SARA. (She rises)One last Question. What ever happened to Hal Ryder’s Volkswagen?
JOE. Oh, it’s in good hands.(He rises and picks up the three bottled waters)Well, I have a five hour drive back to Virginia.
SARA. In case you get thirsty on the way?
JOE. I told you it’s a long drive. And I’m almost out of fuel. (walks to door) I always did want to own a Volkswagen. (Joe exits)
BLACK OUT