Do you know who works at 6:00 a.m. on Sundays? A policeman, a taxi driver, a doctor, and a poor screenwriter who has to write a script for a B-movie by three o'clock in the afternoon so he could buy his car back from the bailiffs and wouldn't have to take the tram to go shopping.
But the poor screenwriter can't think of anything, because there are a couple of drunken teenagers hanging around under his window and the idiot next door is listening to his radio on maximum volume. So the screenwriter throws away his computer, takes a gun out of the drawer and blows the brain out of his head.
Here's your fucking cheesy movie.
THE END
Arnošt Veselý, a desperate forty-three year old scriptwriter/director of B-movies, angrily deleted the last few sentences of his latest blockbuster and with a sigh turned away from the computer towards the window under which the local youths were happily hanging out, letting the piercing white rays of the summer sun blind him for a moment.
But, let's be honest, at that moment he would have liked to be permanently blinded. Blindness was much nicer to him than the sight of a blank computer screen, which should have long ago been the screenplay for a two-hour movie.
But what can you do when the Muses are silent? Then all the reproachful glances from executors and investors are useless. In that case, all you can do is wait...
But of course, if, like Arnošt, you have to present your bosses with a finished, checked and edited (though not necessarily perfect, you are not writing a novel. The actors will read it even with the typos) version of the script that day, on which a low-budget film is to be made the next week, you have no choice but to point a gun at the Muse's forehead and take the inspiration that belongs to you by force.
However, Arnošt was prevented from carrying out this literary massacre firstly by the drunks under his window, secondly by his very self-centred neighbour who thought that playing Metallica at full volume at six in the morning on a Sunday was a good idea, and thirdly by a general lack of life energy.
So Arnošt just combed his greying black hair and looked at the phantom that was staring at him from the silver waves of the mirror behind his desk. The job of a failed filmmaker was a curse. Years ago, he might have been a professional model if it hadn't been for the broad scar on his forehead that would forever remind him of his youth spent in pubs, and now? Now they wouldn't cast him in a horror movie.
Arnošt's tar-yellowed fingernails instinctively reached for the flask that stood open next to the unfortunate computer with the unfinished/unstarted script. That's the only advantage of having your car confiscated by the revenue service-you can drink right away from the morning.
Ding! Dong!
The gong-like bell at Arnošt's door rang.
"Come in! It's open!" Arnošt barked, wiping vodka from his lips.
It seemed he would write nothing more that morning.
But it didn't matter, the semi-autobiographical story about the suicidal screenwriter was all he could think of anyway.
"You shouldn't leave it unlocked." A deep voice with a strong Russian accent came from the hallway, followed by the thump of a door. "You live in a dangerous neighborhood."
"Bullshit! I'll be the only dangerous one in here if the freak next door doesn't turn down that horrible music!" Arnošt sputtered, standing up to greet his guest.
"Hello, I'm Arnošt Veselý, was it you I spoke to on the phone yesterday?" Arnošt said absently, while trying to put his paper-strewn desk in a bit of order.
"Da, I applied for the ad". the man replied, opening the door to the living room where Arnošt was desperately trying to create the illusion that this apartment was regularly cleaned once a week... or at least once a month...
When the visitor emerged from the darkness of the hallway, however, Arnošt stopped his cleaning, which only made the overall impression of the room worse, and laughed in surprise.
"Wow! You don't look at all as I imagined you!" He exclaimed, rising from the floor from where he had been trying to scrape up the remains of last week's lunch. He was quite surprised, when he saw that the man he had hired as his personal bodyguard was, contrary to his imagination, not a tall bodybuilder with firm tattooed muscles towering over his arms, but a thin, frail man in his fifties, with a mop of unkempt light brown hair flowing around his stern face.
"Why?" the strange man asked coldly, placing his suspicious black briefcase on Arnošt's desk, somewhere between an empty box of cask wine and a stack of unopened envelopes bearing the address of the revenue service.
"Nothing." Arnošt corrected himself quickly, seeing that his new friend didn't have much of a sense of humor. "Then we'd better get started. What's your name?"
"Láďa." The man replied with his unwavering calm and opened the briefcase in one swift motion.
"Yeah, well..." muttered Arnošt, who no longer had the courage to make any remark on Láďa's name or to inquire about his surname. "So you have everything you need for the job? I have a pepper spray hidden somewhere, so I could lend it to you."
Láďa fixed his black eyes on Arnošt in a look of utmost disbelief. For a moment he wondered if this was another joke he didn't get, but then he quickly moved on to something he was much better at- the frighteningly graphic display of his pocket arsenal.
"Everything I need is in that suitcase. First, the gun..." Láďa pulled a small silver pistol from the suitcase, loaded it, pointed it at the mirror, and then handed it to Arnošt with the same casualness with which they hand you a glass of water in a restaurant.
Arnošt's hands froze when he felt the cold touch of the bloody iron on his skin, and the pistol almost fell through his fingers.
"Careful!" Láďa shouted at him. "It cost a lot of money. But you can try to shoot with it."
"No, thanks. That's all right..." smiled Arnošt nervously and put the pistol on the table, where it could cause damage to at most one expensive-looking but in fact worthless elephant statue.
"Good. Then I have a garotte here..." continued Láďa, pulling a long metal wire from his briefcase, the purpose of which Arnošt preferred not to try guessing.
Nor did he have to guess. Láďa gladly explained to him what the garotte was used for.
"A handy tool. For example, if I'm guarding a politician who urgently needs to make a speech, and someone attacks him on his way to the podium, I simply grab the attacker from behind and strangle him. Easily. Silently. The politician then proceeds to the podium while I dispose of the body." Láďa, with a concentrated expression, demonstrated to Arnošt a move that would disarm a possible assassin.
"But you're only talking theoretically now, aren't you?" Arnošt said nervously as Láďa handed him the Garotta.
"Da, yasno. Theoretically." Láďa nodded, but soon added: "But practically it works too."
Arnošt just bulged his eyes in concern and very carefully placed the garotte, the edges of which were too suspiciously redish for his taste, on the table next to the gun.
Then he leaned over the lid of the open suitcase to get a closer look at the rest of Láďa's tools (everything is much scarier if you don't know it... yeah, I guess this rule doesn't apply to torture instruments...). When his eyes finally fell on a certain very strange jagged object that insistently attracted his attention, Arnošt asked in alarm, "And what is this for?"
"Eto?" Láďa pointed to the object that had caused Arnošt such concern. Arnošt just nodded silently, hoping that the answer to his question would be 'For opening tins.'
Láďa very willingly picked up the heavy, bristly piece of metal from the trunk and said: "I'll use this if someone kills you. I'll get the culprit to tell me the names of his accomplices and I'll find them all."
"You're kidding, right?" Arnošt stammered, beginning to regret not having chosen an albeit slightly more expensive but surely less frightening alternative to this bodyguard.
"Da, yasno." Láďa nodded, but when Arnošt started to feel safer again, he added: "You could be killed by one assassin alone, no need for accomplices."
The smile on Arnošt's face froze.
He was beginning to wonder who he had actually paid for. A guard or a mafia henchman?
Fortunately, the doorbell rang at that moment, freeing Arnošt from the grip of Láďa's frosty gaze.
"Ah, that'll be Lola!" Arnošt exclaimed with joy that his annoying colleague had never aroused in him before. "She's your client, you'll be protecting her, so save some stories about politicians and tortured assassins for her."
Excited to be away from the suitcase full of death for at least a moment, Arnošt ran out into the hallway and opened the door with a smile.
But the smile immediately disappeared from his face again when he saw Lola, the nineteen-year-old actress who was to play the lead in his B-movie, clutching a long half-smoked marijuana joint between two long blue fingernails.
"Damn, girl!" Arnošt shouted, knocking the cigarette out of her hand. "At this pace, you won't live to see our movie premiere!"
"So what? It's gonna be shit anyway, no shame in not seeing it." Lola snapped, flipping a ponytail of unhealthily dry brown hair with bleached ends.
"Look, kitty..." Arnošt tugged at her fluffy, sparkly pink sweatshirt. " I'm responsible for you until opening night. If you smoke yourself to death in the next few weeks, it's on me, so you'll be behaving. When the credits roll on our shit-movie, feel free to snort all the cocaine in Prague, but until then, don't touch that shit, you got it?"
"Good! All right! You know I don't do cocaine, that would be stupid!" Lola defended herself, trying to jerk out of Arnošt's grip. "I have the marijuana for medical reasons! The movie business is so stressful!"
"Tell me about it..." sighed Arnošt, taking his hand off Lola's hairy garment. "But you'll have to leave it for a few weeks. I need you to walk out of the cinema alive after the premiere, that's all I ask of you. Is it that so hard?"
"It is." Lola replied stubbornly. But then she smiled and patted Arnošt's cheek teasingly. "But I'll do it for you, darling."
"Very well. Good that we understand each other so well." Arnošt clapped his hands together and quickly pulled away from Lola. The last thing he needed with all his money, alcohol and depression problems was an accusation of sexual harassment. No one would probably pay attention to it, her being a former porn actress, but why risk it, right?
"And why did you invite me here anyway?" Lola said, placing a piece of chewing gum between her pink-painted lips.
"There's someone I'd like you to meet." Arnošt said, pulling Lola by the hand into the living room, where Láďa had packed up his tools in the meantime.
"Lola, this is Láďa. Láďa, Lola, your client." Arnošt introduced the dubious bodyguard to the even more dubious actress. However, no further introductions were necessary. The two of them were already lost in each other's eyes, as if they suddenly found themselves in their own world where nothing existed but them and their filthy delusions.
"Kakaya krasivaya devushka..." gushed Láďa softly, throwing a quick glance in the mirror to adjust his wild hairstyle into a somewhat more acceptable form and cavalierly kissed Lola's hand with the words: "Good day, fair Lola. It will be an honor to kill anyone who even thinks of harming you."
"Glad to hear that, handsome." Lola pouted her kitschy pink lips and fluttered her long fake eyelashes. "If anyone's going to haunt me like some creepy ghost for weeks, I'm glad it's you."
"Well, I'm glad you get on so well..." sighed Arnošt, asking the deities he didn't believe in what he had done so terrible in his life to deserve such punishment.
But at least he had less to worry about now. If there was one thing he could count on, it was that with Láďa by her side, no one would dare even look at Lola. So, if Láďa could keep the dragoness far away from drugs, the lead actress would most likely survive until filming. Yeah... but what's the point of an actress if there's no script?