Blue Velvet It Ain't, Although It Could Conceivably Contain Some Severed Ears

I like my movies with a healthy dose of Dennis Hopper. So when "The Madison County Documentary" hits the cinemas, it's possible I'll be disappointed, unless I remember to bring my own oxygen mask.

What's "The Madison County Documentary"? It's the movie version of the tort reform debate, which I first reported about in this post. Though it's being filmed right in my firm's hometown, and I'm one of the town's notorious sharks, I'm still waiting for the production crew to contact my agent. Oh, well. In the meantime, I've been keeping up with the film's progress by reading news articles like one in yesterday's Alton Telegraph: "Lights, cameras, lawsuits," by Josh Stockinger.

"The Madison County Documentary," by the way, is only a working title. I don't think it's very catchy. May I suggest, perhaps, Jaws?

Comments

[Abnu]

Inside Judicial Entertainment says it will be called Hellhole.

Plot Summary:

An unlucky woman's mother is murdered by... Silk, leaving the woman injured, traumatised and suffering from amnesia. She's committed to a mental institution, where Silk follows her.... And Silk's only the beginning of her problems, since the asylum is run by a mad doctor, performing experiments in chemical lobotomies!

Luckily, or unluckily, as the film turns out, she meets up with Sharkey, (a.k.a. "Sammy the Shark") who has become the trial lawyer his father never was. The old Shark is now a trial judge who writes flawed but entertaining reasons for judgment, having failed to sell his first work of fiction. Anyway, old Shark is now a Madison County Judge who fights tort reform legislation from the bench, the last bastion in the balance of power. Sharkey's first Mass Torts case, Jane Dough v. Silk, et al. comes before the old Shark, who refuses to recuse himself to ensure that at least one case in his unremarkable but entertaining career goes to the Supreme Court.

PReview:

This film is not as good as your average Grisham flick but will probably become a bit of a cult classic, particularly among lawyers and law students, because of its unexpected endings; the audience gets to choose from any of three possible endings on separate DVDs in the box set in the Director's Cut Edition. No spoilers here.

[Evan]

At the Schaeffer household, I just found some Silk in our refrigerator! I always knew that stuff was bad news. The Hazmat team is on its way.