putting the j in jjosh

I read a news item today that would make a good short story or short film. In San Diego they were preapring to have to kick these seals off a beach that they’ve made their own. This part of the beach is meant to be for swimming, so some swimmers complained about it, and a judge upheld a motion to force the city to clear the beach of seals. Various pro-seal enviros were outraged. And the seals are federally protected, so the city couldn’t kick them out by force.

The city decided they would try and run the seals out of town by having a guy walk the beach with a loudspeaker system blasting the sound of barking dogs. There was this great bit at the end of the story about how they were pretty sure that the pro-seal groups were going to be so angry, they would physically assault the guy.

I started think, who is this guy? He knows the risks, he needs the cash, he’s kind of an odd jobs guy. What makes him decide to do it? How long will the job last? And who are the pro-seal fanatics who are going to beat this guy up? It has a great sort of showdown at high noon tension to it, and there will be seals in it, and a loudspeaker blaring dog barks. Got a great feel to it.

Not sure how it ends, but definitely at some point he gets knocked to the ground and the speaker falls over, breaking a bit so the barking becomes distorted and weird and we go to a wide shot of the beatdown with this crazy noise blaring.

They were going to send cops out with him, so somehow they’ve got to become distracted, maybe the pro-seal folks stage a massive crime diversion that calls the cops away.

There’s also something I love about the idea of a militant pro-seal group.

Schwarzenegger ended up giving the seals a reprieve, sparing us all the drama and the violence, but it’s crying out to be a short film, I swear. Or maybe I’ll write it up as a short story. Hmm.

Read the original story here.

UPDATE – more ideas:

– the guy (our protagonist) ends up doing it because he’s sentenced to community service by a judge

– he got busted on drug charges and at one point has some kind of revelation about how strange it is that he was jailed for love (of drugs) and the protesters beating him up are acting out of hate (even though they are supposedly acting out of love for the seals)

– they try various other methods to get the seals out which don’t work (high pitched bubbles, etc.) before coming up with the dog barking

– maybe the protagonist is a woman? makes the beatdown even more intense