ANONYMOUS CONTENT – COVERAGE Title: The Last Taxi Driver
Subm'd To: Anonymous Content
Author: Lee Durkee
Subm'd By: Sophie Baker
Form: Novel
Company: Curtis Brown, ICM
Genre: Dark comedy
Budget: N/A
Setting: Various locations, MS Date: 09/2020 Circa: 2018 Reader: Kiki Prager ____________________________________________________________ LOGLINE: A Mississippi Buddhist cabbie and lapsed novelist riddled with psychological problems tries desperately not to be destroyed by the act of helping people get where they need to be. ____________________________________________________________ COMMENTS SUMMARY: A comedically dark fever-dream homage to a dying American industry, The Last Taxi Driver hosts a cast of strange, sad, and colorful characters that represent the microcosm of American Delta. The disarmingly honest book, loosely modeled after Taxi Driver, sheds light on the racism, addiction, poor healthcare, and prevalence of mental illness that is still present today in Mississippi. Rather than a feature film, the story would do best as an episodic dark comedy anthology series. ____________________________________________________________ EXCELLENT GOOD FAIR POOR PREMISE
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SUMMARY Born in Hawaii, LOU BISHOFF (mid-50s) is a decent man who drives twelve-hour shifts inside 70-hour weeks in a busted Lincoln town car for the Mississippi All Saints Taxi company, the oldest cab company in town. A Syracuse graduate who was later fired from his job as a Shakespeare college professor, Lou is also a Red Bull-loving Buddhist who has deep beliefs about human nature, music, bigfoot, and UFOs. He also suffers from back spasms, OCD, ADD, PTSD, Tourette’s, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. He has multiple delusions, consisting of alien encounters, three-legged deer, and a hallucinatory voice hidden behind the guise of “Goat Boy,” a schizophrenic creation who tries to coerce him to kill his passengers. On the job, Lou has quite literally gone the extra mile, from “helping old people pee to taking out their garbage to chasing after their escaped pets.” He has a down-and-out relationship with the owner of the company and his underpaying boss, STELLA (early 60s), who is an intense, black-haired woman who sends Lou on drives with hospital patients, prisoners, drunks, and “ racist lunatics.” She is the mother of incompetent jailbird TONY (mid-30s), who he describes as an “overgrown chimp” and complete idiot who dons prison attire and a “gangsta” attitude. His supervisor is 350-pound toothless FAT ALBERT, who sends him deep onto dirt roads in the Delta, which is well known for its lack of law enforcement. His poet girlfriend, MIKO, suffers from severe depression whose suicidal thoughts permeate his dreams. Because suicide runs in his family (his grandfather died by suicide), he is desperate to get her out of his house for his own mental health. He and Miko live in a bungalow across from a host of frat boys who Lou despises, trading off middle fingers upon every interaction. Lou fears unemployment and refers to himself as “the last taxi driver,” referencing the encroaching presence of Uber eating up the business in the coming summer. In dark and comical vignettes throughout the novel, Lou tells his perspective of his colorful and strong-smelling collection of fares, including hospital discharges without a family, meth addicts, geriatrics, alcoholics, rehab patients, frat boys, a goth ghost girl/runaway mother, suicidal dentist, a Los Angeles sex addict, and many more. Each passenger comes with a story, most of which stick with and continuously haunt Lou as he drives into the early morning. He keeps his mouth shut when “ferrying bigots” because he assumes they all have a gun. While on hospital runs, he frequently bumps into his crush, ER nurse CHLOE, before whisking the patients who can’t pay their bills to die at home. During a ride with his close friend and frequent fare PENNY, Lou comes across a bookstore that published a perverted fiction novel he wrote about a teenager who has sex with a watermelon and an octopus who molests women. One day, Lou picks us two meth head women he refers to as BLACK LYCRA and TIE DIE from hiding in a seedy motel. The women reveal that they’re headed to a shelter in Memphis while on the run from a stalker named JASON, Black Lyrca’s veteran son who just returned from Iraq with PTSD and just got out of jail for cracking the tie-die woman’s skull open. Lou begins to rehash a memory: In the middle of his semester teaching, his son KEV (age 20 at the time) had a car wreck, and the doctors had no idea if he would ever wake up. Lou admits that it was here where the Tourette’s started. He explains how Kev emerged from his coma as a virtually different person and that it took a long time for him to start acting like himself again.
MOONDOG, a painting biker who was the first cabbie to drive the Town Car before he was fired and Lou inherited it, informs Lou that Tony is in town hiding at the motel because he is wanted for attempted murder in a drug deal. While hanging at Moondog’s apartment, stalker Jason, a jacked mute with a Jaws poster tattooed on his stomach, busts through the door and is introduced formally to Lou. Via notebook paper, Jason asks of the whereabouts of the meth-head women, to which Lou lies, claiming the shelter in Memphis was closed in order to save them. The chapter that follows tells of Lou’s early childhood in Mississippi, where he speaks about being beaten up in his derelict school and explains in detail the rape he witnessed of a scrawny white boy named STEVIE HALCOMB. Through a chaotic mix of exclamatory phrases and random capitalization, Lou provides an extremely graphic and disturbing account of the brutal segregation and violence that took place during integration in the state in the 1970s. Back in present-day, Tony calls and begs Lou to pick him up. In the car, Tony reveals that he has hitchhiked across the country to see his completely normal, attractive lover named CHERYL and express his love for her. When they reach the motel Tony is hiding out at, Tony gives Lou a handgun. Lou is extremely hesitant to accept the weapon due to his family’s history of suicide. Still, it is ultimately left in the Town Car by Tony, who is desperately trying to get rid of it and run away to Vegas. The gun’s presence in his car triggers delusional instances where Goat Boy urges him to use it, but self-aware Lou ignores the voice. Back home, Lou finally breaks up with Miko and tells her that he wants her out for good. Through Miko’s angry words in reaction to the breakup, it is revealed that Lou may have invented the Stevie character whose rape he witnessed and that it was likely he who was raped. The last passenger described is DAVID (mid-60s), a fat, yellow-eyed, decrepit, and shaky-handed man who Lou pick up from a hospital in Memphis. The two bicker for a while, and then David asks Lou about his flying saucer-shaped air freshener and whether or not he believes in aliens. This sends Lou into storytelling mode, as he dramatically describes a UFO encounter he experienced with his good friend VANCE, a diner owner, and his head cook, NAT. Lost in memories of what he claims to have experienced, Lou begins to slip into hallucinations while driving, seeing the UFO, Satanists, the ghosts of murdered Indians, and entire herds of deer that he knows aren’t really there. This causes him to twitch and swerve across the road, curse David out, and repetitively assure himself that it’s just in his mind. Upon finally arriving at David’s house, Lou notices that he is a massive hoarder, owner of multiple starving cats, and collector of first edition fiction. This leads him to wonder if he’s driven into the future of his own death. As the images begin to disappear, Lou drives back to the motel and gets ready to drive himself home from the long night when he notices Tony kicking the Coke machine. Suddenly, he hears a scream followed by a gunshot and sees Jason dragging the meth-head women outside a room near his parked Town Car. A fight ensues between Tony and Jason, and Lou steps in with the gun to stop Tony from being beaten to death. While he’s trying to figure out how to undo the safety, Black Lycra emerges from the hotel room and shoots Lou in the stomach with an identical gun. In the hospital, Lou is wheeled into the ER unit by none other than Chloe. The novel ends when he claims he is dying, and Chloe responds, “Not on my watch, Lou.”
COMMENTS It’d be a shame to lose the creative and outlandish word usage in Lee Durkee’s novel for a picture adaptation. The tiniest details are honed, and every riff is spot-on. An example of this genius prose is at the beginning of the novel when he describes the saints of the service industry as “the poor man’s ambulance, and we are also, sad to say, the poor man’s priest, our cab the confessional in which people litmus test their wildest fears and prejudices.” The entertaining book is told in a very stream-of-consciousness yet refreshingly frank narrative style. It’s also full of quotes and passages from Bill Hicks, which serve to show the dark yet funny side of life. There is no shortage of wacky and original characters, from sex-crazed drunk couple Teddy and Tiff to criminally dumb Tony. The story is told in a chaotic, slow-burn structure that culminates in a violent ending. Yet with fast-paced characterizations, violent descriptions, Tom Segura-like dark humor, and profane language, this author’s style is certainly not for everyone. Regardless, the story also includes instances of romance and has a bittersweet and somewhat positive ending. There is no doubt that real-life former cabbie Durkee is an extremely talented and one-of-a-kind author who loosely based Lou’s experiences on his own. The whole thing is written very erratically in order to express the thousands of things occurring in his protagonist’s head. This writing style could possibly be translated to the screen through various editing techniques such as multiple jump cuts, flashbacks, and sequences appearing as he imagines them. Because the audience is meant to hear the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings, I believe the technique of voiceover would be most effective, not ironically how the film Taxi Driver (also quoted) was told. As for the hallucinatory passages such as when Lou describes a UFO encounter he had with an elderly passenger, delusions should be shown through Japanese animation or Manga-style, which, based on several Japanese cultural references throughout the book, is how I would imagine Lou may visualize his chimera. When talking about wanting his depressed girlfriend out of his house, he writes, “It’s not a relationship we have anymore. We’re hardly even roommates. We are ghosts of different dimensions who happen to overlap in our existentialexistences and only materialize into each other lives to scream and spit at one another beforedisappearing again. Of all the types of loneliness I’ve endured this is by far the worst with none of the solace of solitude and the forever feeling that even the air you exhale disapproves of you.”As this exemplifies, his literary techniques of alliteration and metaphor are strong enough to warrant something extra on-screen, such as the animation and editing described previously. Anexample of a show that utilizes these extra visual elements is Legion, where the protagonist’ sdisorganized thoughts materialize on screen, and the audience is left wondering what is real. Further, the descriptions of instances of mental illness paint a picture for the reader that is raw and emotionally moving. When describing his Tourette’s, Lee writes, “You flip off the red light because you know it’s not really inanimate—it’s possessed—there’s an evil spirit trapped inside every traffic light—and in spite of all your well-meaning resolutions, you once again find yourself pounding the steering wheel and cursing the endless taunts of traffic.” Throughout the novel, Lou’s schizophrenia manifests in a voice in his head called “goat boy,” he has frequent delusions and hallucinations, and he even experiences missing time. There comes a point in the plot where the reader begins to doubt the character’s reliability in terms of what is real, imagined, and which memories occurred to whom. While the vignettes and overall style of the
piece could be a shade too dark for some audiences, I do believe there is a large percentage of people who will be able to connect with, if not empathize with this on a personal level. Beneath the eccentric language and style lies the truth about the lack of mental health resources in Mississippi, Lou being the epitome of someone who develops multiple comorbidities after being neglected and untreated by professionals. In addition, Lou addresses issues of education, racism, violence, abuse, addiction, and more. The story itself gives off A24 vibes and specifically resembles the tone of the company’s indie film Under the Silver Lake in that the protagonist is a brooding, curious lurker who watches and analyzes people intently. In terms of distribution, I trust that an episodic anthology TV series (a type of show fairly common on Netflix) would do best for these memorable characters, each episode consisting of a comedic vignette in Lee’s cab. As the show progresses, the audience will learn more and more about Lou and his history told through flashbacks and voiceovers. With appropriate trigger warnings, this novel has the potential to be an episodic anthology series that mirrors the stylistic choices of an FX show like Legion, delving deep into the sanity of a troubled man.