Romancing the Ruins, a Film Treatment Read online

centerpiece of the Four Corners.

  To begin with, Anna concocts a wild plan to elicit from Dusty something compromising about Worthington that she could then use to stop her adversary. She wrestles with whether or not she wants to beguile Dusty into thinking he is sexually attractive to her. But, she decides, instigating her plan of action does promise the evening’s intrigue. So, over dinner in the hotel’s Quorum Room, a flirtatious Anna succeeds in extracting a promise from Dusty to reveal skeletons in their family closet in return for a romp in bed. An eager, blustering Dusty tells her she is safe because he’s had a vasectomy.

  Back in her hotel room, Anna ties Dusty’s wrists to the headboard and jumps on top of him and, for a moment, loses herself in her own gratification. After her climax, Anna refuses to untie Dusty until he reveals the bargained-for-nasty-item about Worthington.

  Dusty, still festering from Worthington’s refusal to follow a father’s career advice, tells Anna he tried to blackmail his son into going to Northwestern to study archaeology and not to follow Aunt Hattie’s advice to go to Bowdoin for a liberal arts degree. Dusty says he threatened to tell the admissions officer at Bowdoin about Worthington’s involvement in his Uncle Bill’s death. Anna presses him for details.

  Dusty explains that after his wife died in childbirth, and while he was off pursuing his archaeological career in Greece, he left Worthington to be raised by Uncle Bill and Aunt Hattie up in Maine. “My brother, Bill, was a fine lobsterman.” Dusty says that one day Worthington deliberately removed the radio and radar equipment from Bill’s boat, knowing full well his uncle planned to take the small craft out in foul weather. An oil tanker demolished the little boat, and Dusty says the authorities covered up Worthington’s involvement. Dusty gives a sinister ring to the word involvement.

  A skeptical Anna doesn’t believe him, but Dusty insists, “You just ask his Aunt Hattie up there in Maine...she’ll tell you the truth...the whole story.”

  Still dismissing his story, Anna regards her evening mission as a waste of time.

  Scene Five:

  Worthington’s plush Washington, D.C. offices are decorated with 1930’s advertising posters of famous American passenger trains, including the sleek Burlington Zephyr, the Twentieth Century Limited and the Santa Fe Chief.

  Congressman Orlando DeBaca Roybal (from a Four Corners state)—head of the House Appropriations Committee, which is scheduled to vote the Congressional funds for construction of The Windjammer—and his comely press aide, Native American Silver-Bell-in-the-Night from the Taos Pueblo, arrive for a private presentation from Worthington himself on the merits of The Windjammer. They are greeted by Worthington’s assistant, Charlene, who escorts them into Worthington’s theater.

  With train songs playing in the background—Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga Choo Choo, Arlo Guthrie’s City of New Orleans and Judy Garland’s Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe—Worthington shows slides describing the bullet train’s magnetically-powered technology. From time to time, in his baritone voice, Worthington harmonizes with the melodic refrains.

  Conducting his dog and pony show, Worthington points out the bullet train’s sleek, wide-bodied design and shows a map of the proposed North American transportation system. Several huge new cities are to be built along the arrow-straight route from New York to Los Angeles.

  Worthington justifies The Windjammer’s cost and the wide swath of its right-of-way by saying the system is designed to provide for the nation’s transportation needs for the next two centuries.

  Congressman Roybal says he is anxious to vote in favor of the train, especially since he’s been promised he’ll be the one to lay out the plans for the big new city that will lie within his Congressional district.

  But, quoting her college mentor, Anna Ardmore, Silver Bell decries the train’s intrusions into Indian reservations and the havoc it will bring to sacred Indian sites in the Southwest. In her strategic position as Roybal’s press aide, she poses a formidable obstacle to The Windjammer’s final approval, leaving Worthington determined to find out more about her.

  Scene Six:

  Across town, Quentin Ford IV escorts Anna into the walnut paneled library of his hundred-year-old restored Washington mansion. Ranting and raving with evangelical fervor, he laments the thousands of irreplaceable archaeological sites that will be obliterated by the wide cut of The Windjammer’s right-of-way. Red-faced, he rails on about saving America’s heritage. Looking straight into Anna’s eyes, he pronounces that Worthington Rhodes must be stopped permanently.

  Anna is shocked that Quentin is planning an assassination of Worthington. As much as she wants to stop The Windjammer, she doesn’t want Worthington to suffer a brutal death at the hands of an assassin. To Anna, Worthington’s drive, his determination and devotion to career, to cause and to family is something to behold. Stop him, yes! Kill him, no!

  She pleads with Quentin to wait, to allow her time so that she may convince Worthington to abort his project. Quentin finally relents, agreeing to postpone his diabolical plan—but only for 48 hours—allowing Anna an opportunity to come up with her own scheme to stop Worthington. Dusty’s story might well be worth her investigation, after all.

  Scene Seven:

  At another Washington location, Brenda Turner, whom we first met at the Four Season reception, ascends in the elevator to media mogul Henry DeCamp’s penthouse office. From their demeanor, it is apparent they are having an affair. He shows her a Four Corners map mounted on his wall outlining the borders of his vast 50,000-acre cattle ranch, the Bar 8. He tells her his ranch is to be the site of the new Four Corners city located along The Windjammer’s route. They tour the heart-center of his worldwide news empire. Henry offers to buy her Four Corners weekly newspaper, and seeing the dollar amount, Brenda accepts Henry’s generous offer.

  As he embraces her, Henry says he can now put another pin into the North American map on his wall that shows his media holdings—for her little weekly newspaper...and for her.

  Scene Eight:

  That evening, during the hubbub of Father-Student Night at Emily’s school, Henry DeCamp and his pudgy son, Teddy, meet Worthington and Emily in her homeroom. Against a backdrop of student drawings of Conestoga wagon trains, puffing engines meeting at Promontory Point and maps showing the thousands of early habitation sites of Native Americans, Henry reiterates the clout Silver-Bell-in-the-Night has with Congressman Roybal, describing her as politically astute and fluent in all seven Pueblo languages. He says her grandfather was a code talker for the Marines in World War II; her father is a highly respected medicine man at the Taos Pueblo; her brother is chief of tribal police there; and at thirteen she was qualified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a midwife.

  Worthington is visibly distressed with Henry’s verbal dossier on Silver Bell because he now realizes the breadth of her power base.

  Henry also worries that some reporter, yearning to satisfy a hunger for muckraking, will counter-act the favorable public image he has built for Worthington in feature articles. Henry decries how journalism and television have changed from straightforward reporting of news to uncovering dirt on every public figure. Anymore, he comments, members of the press are interested only in advancing their own careers and writing their own books. And while he is the headman of a media empire, he reluctantly admits he no longer can control everything that is printed or aired.

  As an unconcerned Worthington assures Henry there is nothing hidden in his past that will tarnish his public image, he is interrupted by Emily’s teacher, prim Mrs. Carson, who informs Worthington he has an urgent telephone call in her office. “The news is not good,” a concerned Mrs. Carson tells a perplexed Worthington.

  Scene Nine:

  Early the next morning, in the morgue of Henry DeCamp’s media headquarters, we see a determined Anna searching through old newspaper files for the story of Uncle Bill’s death. Having found his obituary in the Portland Press-Herald and another article about Aunt Hattie’s seventieth birthday celebrati
on in a Camden, Maine nursing home, Anna rushes from the building, hails a taxi and instructs the driver to take her to Reagan National.

  Scene Ten:

  From a commuter turboprop airplane flying at low altitude above the rugged coastline of Maine—in contrast with our opening scene above the dry, high desert of the Four Corners—Anna looks down upon this never-never world of rivers, lakes, bays, and the vast Atlantic Ocean.

  Leaving the Camden airport in the local taxi, whose driver points out to Anna the marina with its lobster boats, sailboats and yachts as they pass through the picturesque New England village, they arrive at the Chickawaukie Nursing Home.

  Inside, Anna is engulfed by a room full of old people who stare at her curiously. She asks head nurse McGuire for Hattie Rhodes.

  Anna is told by resident Mrs. Mittens that Hattie passed away last night. Dismayed, Anna hears nurse McGuire confirm Hattie’s death. Suddenly Anna wonders what in the hell she is doing there. She is shocked to see Worthington Rhodes appear in the doorway of nurse McGuire’s office. His mourning countenance changes into perplexity as he asks, “What are you doing here, Dr. Ardmore?”

  Anna is speechless. She stammers, “Dusty sent me.”

  Hearing Dusty’s name, Worthington’s