David Sosnowski's "Buzz Kill"

David Sosnowski has worked as a gag writer, fireworks salesman, telephone pollster, university writing instructor, and environmental protection specialist, while living in cities as varied as Washington, DC; Detroit, Michigan; and Fairbanks, Alaska. He is the author of three previous critically acclaimed novels, Rapture, Vamped, and Happy Doomsday.

Here Sosnowski dreamcasts an adaptation of his latest novel, Buzz Kill:

If Buzz Kill is ever optioned for a movie, I feel sorry for the casting director. Assuming the script stays true to the source material (admittedly a pretty dubious assumption), the poor casting director is going to need to find three actors with some especially rubbery facial skills. That’s because three of the main characters – Roger, Pandora, and Gladys Lynch – all share an inherited condition identified as HEFS: Hyper-expressive Face Syndrome. Or, as one of the characters puts it, “Take Jim Carrey. … He’s like the HEFS poster child.”

Hmmm…

Maybe the casting director would get one freebie in that hard-to-cast trio. Roger, Pandora’s father and Gladys’ son could be played by the actor invoked to describe the syndrome: Jim Carrey, setting the stage for a lot of self-referential, meta-jokes and (dare I say?) sight gags.

Okay, but that still leaves two female equivalents of Jim Carrey to be cast, one young (Pandora, around sixteen) and another old (Gladys, in her early nineties). I’m going to need to take some liberties here because I can’t think of any exact fits for either, but here goes: For Pandora, a much younger Kristin Wiig might do, while for Gladys, a much older Laurie Metcalf or Carol Burnett. I guess I could check to see if Wiig has a daughter or the other two surviving mothers. Or maybe technology might come to the rescue! There are, after all, the age-tailoring CGI techniques recently used in the movie The Irishman with the Robert De Niro of Taxi Driver costarring next to the De Niro of, well, the latter part of The Irishman.

Hmmm…. Maybe I don’t feel so sorry for that casting director after all.

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--Marshal Zeringue