We All Thought It Was A Bad Idea At The Time — Day 10

Genre: Comedy / Mockumentary

Premise: Abstract Artist Becomes Plastic Surgeon; Hilarity (and horror) ensue.

Plot: Told in mockumentary style, this is the tragic-comic story of Traduse Jovik, the world's most famous abstract artist, who at the height of his fame and creative powers decided to apply his craft to a living canvas, and so became the world's most renowned—and then most vilified—plastic surgeon. So loved was T-Jove as a visual artist, that the public welcomed his transition to the medical arts as a natural growth, and never questioned its wisdom. Until, that is, they started living in a world of faces shaped by T-Jove, and became filled with revulsion and regret. Imagine human faces reconstructed to look like a Cubist portrait by Pablo Picasso—living Mr.-Potato-Heads. Or worse... works by Piet Mondrian or Mark Rothko. 

Our story opens with interviews of Traduse's many acolytes from the art world talking about the glorious early days: studio assistants, publicists, museum curators, superstar gallerists, private collectors, fans—all of them gushing with pride while discussing Traduse's meteoric rise to King of All Art. (The curator of painting at MoMA: "He eclipsed all previous definitions of fame in the art world. Damien Hirst was like a pimple on the man's ass, and Jeff Koons, a hair growing out of it. And mine is the most charitable assessment.")  But as the interviewer starts to press each person on how they felt about about T-Jove's transition from artist to plastic surgeon, the subjects begin to fidget, withdraw, dissemble and violently lash out.

Because, you see, by the end of the T-Jove plastic surgery craze, his work was so ubiquitous—and so terrifying—that no one was willing to say they had played a hand in his rise, or had ever agreed it was a good idea. It would be like trying to find a school-days chum of Stalin or Hitler who would be willing to say they still stood by their dear, misunderstood friend, despite everything you might have heard.

Soon, the subversive motivation of every interviewee becomes clear: they are all attempting to use the documentary film to clear their name and distance themselves from the great, preventable evil that was T-Jove. It is an exercise in extreme, society-wide, revisionist history—and it is comedy at its best.