"The Busters of Ghosts" Insider Scoop!

Hey folks, Johnson here, taking over for my collaborator Nick as he has some facial boils lanced. This past week I got a chance to sneak a peek on-set of Ghostbusters 3, posing as a fluffer for Tiger Woods, who plays a mad scientist that makes toilet paper out of feces in the film. This was the first in many shocking revelations I recieved vis a vis "The Busters of Ghosts: Third Time's a Charmin" as its being called internally (apparently not everyone is sold on the title, and by that I mean everyone but the somewhat violent director Dagon Hump, who recently received a sizeable surplus of Charmin toilet paper for his agreement to plug the product. This is how things get done in Hollywood.)

Mr. Hump has a well-deserved "artsy-fartsy" anti-commercial reputation, after the Indonesian-born director's first film "Death Stalks the Buffet Line" flopped massively while winning the jury prize at Cannes. The film depicts, in a Bergman-esque contemplative manner, the languor and ennui of a serial rapist who spends every night eating at the Old Country Buffet, only to be raped to death climactically by a professional bowling team. In what has been argued to be a sarcastically scathing review masked as a glowing one, The Luxemborg Post's Rupold Deveritt wrote, of Mr. Hump: "Hey, somebody get this fucking idiot to direct Ghostbusters 3." Apparently, someone took him seriously, producers not being skilled at reading through thick literary irony, as the master of ponderous, existential meloncholy is squarely at the helm of "The Busters of Ghosts."

And what a helm it is! I witnessed the first day of shooting, where a fistfight broke out between actor Vince Vaughn, who plays the ghost of Justice in a society gone wrong, and Dagon Hump when Vince refused to stare directly in the camera, addressing the audience, when he delivers a particularly powerful line: "morality is a ghost, busted by scientists, in a society dying of reason." In a bit of method acting typical of Vaughn, he insisted he actually address the four Ghostbusters, each played by Dane Cook (Vaughn ad-libbed a pretty funny line, "too many Dane Cooks in the kitchen," which made Mr. Hump so angry, he stabbed Vaughn with a fountain pen, calling him with a profound shout "The Fascist of Golgotha.")

In a typically contrarian move, Dagon Hump has introduced constant marketing opportunities for Charmin toilet paper. Sometimes, for no reason at all, characters are holding many rolls of the sanitary napkin in their arms, while they deliver lines that bear out no relevance to the Charmin. I managed to overhear Mr. Hump discussing his reasoning for this choice with Dane Cook: "we are all shit." Dane Cook kept giggling through Hump's solemn philosophizing, saying: "man, wouldn't it be funny if like the Charmin bear just busted through the door, saying like, 'hey, keep wiping your ass with my stuff!'" I'm no expert in psychology, but it seemed like Hump thought Dane Cook was a masterfully ironic figure, as he kept glowing with pride each time Cook would make a cultural reference and saying, "You are a jester in my postmodern court."

Whew! What a scoop! I'm not sure the film's producers like the direction Hump's taking things in, as they took him aside shortly following the Vaughn fight, telling him: "Let Vaughn be Vaughn. His dumbass attitude writes checks." Hump's reaction was simply to vomit on the floor, singing the chorus of "You Only Get What You Give" by the New Radicals as he wretched. We'll have to see how this one plays out!