mgroves

From time to time, Jonny, a regular reader of mgroves.com and a friend & coworker of mine regales his fellow coworkers with tales of the old days at a dot-com he worked at in the not-to-distant past.

One of the many interesting tales is that of budding writer, artist, and abuser of exclamation points, Jeffrey Marzi.

The story goes something like this:

An action figure company receives an envelope from Jeffrey Marzi which contains a cover letter, a script, and several illustrations. Marzi has penned a handful of scripts, but the most common one in our tale is Prehistoric Park.

Reading the cover letter, it’s discovered that Prehistoric Park is a copyrighted sequel to Jurassic Park, which was created before Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World. As you might guess, Prehistoric Park–and Marzi’s other works, Pterodactyloid Man’s Flight to Paris and Pterodactyloid Man Goes Around the World in 76 Days–involve dinosaurs, mainly cyborg dinosaurs.

I guess that in the case of the action figure company, Marzi wanted them to make action figures of Prehistoric Park or Pterodactyloid Man.

If the story were to end there, it would be a relatively normal tale of thousands of writers who cold-send their stuff to everyone they can, in the hopes that they are noticed/find a producer/etc.

But it certainly does not end there.

It turns out that Jeffrey Marzi’s works are somewhat of a shibboleth among the action figure/comics/entertainment world. Upon going to a convention and speaking with others in similar businesses, Jonny soon realized that almost everyone had received a similar packet from Marzi, and everyone was equally baffled by it.

Not much is known about Jeffrey Marzi beyond what he writes about himself in his cover letters and what we can infer about him in his stories. According to one documentary, his father says that he was involved in an accident very early in his life and that has caused some sort of brain damage or mental problems. He lives with his father and is not employed. He’s on social security, which he uses mostly to pay for postage and writing supplies. He resents Michael Crichton for coming out with Jurassic Park 2 because of his “lust for money.” He talks about his “suicidal caving [craving]” and that his writing is the best “mantle [mental] therapy.” While his cover letter is rambling, poorly spelled, and even brings up that he wants to open some sort of dinosaur-themed restaurant, his actual stories appear to be much more proofread.

You can find all his stories at this Geocities site: The Old Dinosaur Park. I’ve attached a zip file containing image scans of his cover letter for posterity. They are all full of plot holes, non-sequitors, and are all endlessly fascinating.

Oh, there is just one more thing. In 2003, a TV series called The AMC Project featured a brief documentary called “Malkovich’s Mail”, in which they explored the piles and piles of pitch letters and spec scripts submitted to John Malkovich’s production company, Mr. Mudd. The documentary crew picked out a handful of scripts and travelled to meet and interview the writers. Jonny told me that he saw this episode and was astounded that they featured Jeffrey Marzi.

I searched everywhere to see if I could find this show: torrents, YouTube, Amazon, future TV schedules. In the end, I found and purchased an advanced press copy VHS tape of the episode on eBay. This is an mgroves.com exclusive, as I couldn’t find the show being offered anywhere else.

Thanks go out to Joe for ripping it from VHS to a digital format, and of course to Jonny for sparking my interest in Marzi to begin with.

Watching Marzi and his father watch Malkovich as Pterodactyloid Man near the end of the show was both touching and inspirational. It’s easy to dismiss Marzi as just another nut with pie-in-the-sky dreams, but it’s truly a great thing when one’s dreams are realized, even if they aren’t realized in exactly the way they were dreamed. Maybe that’s a metaphor for life.

If nothing else, the video “rejections” show that Malkovich is a great, great actor and an extremely caring man. While perhaps at the behest of the documentary crew, he and his company took waaaay too much time out of their busy schedule to slap together very impressive mini-productions. Malkovich’s rendition of Pterodactyloid Man shone through the ridiculous absurdity of the story and showed me that perhaps there’s a little bit of Jeffrey Marzi in each one of us. It makes me wonder if the writing that does make it into production isn’t but a marginal fraction better than Marzi’s writing.