HBO Pitch: GOODBYE, Camelot
A legend of kings and heroes set in modern-day Brooklyn, New York. King Arthur, Lancelot, and Queen Guinevere fight for a free kingdom of peace. Merlin envisions utopia but veers towards extremism. He sacrifices too many innocent lives for his vision of what “the greater good” is for humanity. He thinks that The Perfect King and The Perfect Queen will enact his dream of a better world just as he planned in his mind.
Merlin, however, is not as wise as he thinks he is. Merlin reckons that his Camelot will be impervious to wars. King Arthur refuses to resort to the cruelty that would be needed to win a war of vengeance and so Merlin’s ideal kingdom crumbles. The moral needs to be clear that humans must be free to make their own decisions. It would be ideal if we could agree to a vision of paradise but no one should swoop in to other peoples’ lives to shove “WHAT IS RIGHT” down a free peoples’ collective throats. That’s not how social change works. Merlin thinks that he can be the Chess Champion of the Free World because he places himself above humanity.
This series incorporates fairytale aesthetics but I want it to be filmed in my beloved New York City. Initially I conceived of this pitch as a movie - original trailer came out looking nice so it’s still on this website. However! I had a second thought that would I think improve the piece. Here’s an edit:
The story ought to be told from the perspective of a modern 🌹Guinevere and a contemporary 🥏Arthur. In my imagination of this show, both are well-intentioned characters placed in dire straits.
As a woman who lived through a traumatic childhood, I essentially lived a disturbingly parallel life to Guinevere. I’ve been upfront about how my life includes many deaths in my family, surviving rapes as a child, and a series of heartbreaks. Most recently a leg injury exposed me to the ugliest side of humanity I can imagine: walking through New York City as a woman with an injured leg. People treated me as if I were subhuman garbage when I was “a cripple.”
For the horrific things that others did, I am now NOT RELATABLE. People might Google me. I live in terror of the horrible shit that strangers do to cute girls, nice women, rape survivors, girls with dead dads, women with visible vulnerabilities like a cane, and victims of injustice.
I spoke out about my life to help others know that they are not alone if they cry like I cry. For that, I am seen as nothing more than the worst days of my life. I know this quite well: I see how people look away from me if I dare to talk too much about my own life.
My Simba Girl: My agony as a rape survivor targeted when I was a baby by an evil stranger in the hospital
Little Girl Gone: So many people in my family died or disappeared. When I was 10 I wrote a story about a girl who lost her wings. To me now, I think that symbolized how I knew that something was wrong. I didn’t know what was wrong but I knew something wasn’t right.
Fatherless Behavior (Snake Widow Mix): Everyone assumes a girl develops some sort of manic sex addiction if her father dies. Alternative explanation: people know that a daughter of a single mom with no siblings is vulnerable. Rapists blame their victims and assholes pressure girls using their trauma-related bullshit assumptions about us.
Heartbreak Daughter: Stigmatized for hitting puberty too early (called “A SLUT” because of how strangers looked at me), ostracized for being the child of divorce, kicked out of friend groups because of whose boyfriend wanted to fuck me, treated like shit on dating apps, usually single, and my one serious relationship fell apart in a painful way (Album soon)
Disability Rights: Treated as a second-class citizen, isolated, humiliated, and put down by people I wanted to treat me as equals. As a woman with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Endometriosis I live in a permanent underclass called the handicapped or people with disabilities. We can be quietly fired if anyone discovers this. Here’s more information: I made this presentation during a year when Teachers College at Columbia University discriminated against me in a horrible way.
For my first production, realistically I should work with another lead writer. Two main reasons:
1.) This idea works better as a collaborative story. My writing style alone right now would put off too many audiences. Audiences cannot handle the story of Guinevere - or the writing style of a woman with the kind of childhood I had - without counterbalance.
My friend Jack is a talented writer. His strengths complement mine. He’s better, in my opinion, at short-form jokes, collaboration, and optimistic stories. My life sucked ass so much that I struggle to imagine anything but abject suffering because that’s MY LIFE UP TO THIS POINT. (Meeting friends and falling in love with Josh was a turning point but then I was paraded through the streets as a a cripple. I still hate everything. I am jaded as hell.)
It’s not really my business to tell Jack’s story. He’s lived through tough times and has talked about some really hard things in his life. He is wise and has had to learn difficult lessons. This to say that he’s mature enough for me to trust him as a co-writer. He has two living parents, a sister and let me know that his family is very rich. I’m not trying to say that rich people don’t have their own struggles - but a funny rich man co-writing the show shields me from being fetishized as a tortured heroine.
Yes, damn it, I say fetishized because I know my own damn life. We all know how much this godawful world fetishizes female pain. If you don’t believe me, open PornHub or read any beautiful woman’s WikiPedia page.
2.) For a woman to survive in showbiz, she must always be rich enough to win lawsuits. This means that she can’t just be as rich as the most powerful rapist who lusts after her. She has to be richer.
Even though I inherited the voice of all of these people who I discovered when I was once again dragged to the mental hospital by my Mama for no reason (she does that sometimes, wish she wouldn’t but here we are), their wealth was not enough to save me from being raped as a little girl. We live in hell. If one person who’s richer than you wants to ruin your life, they can. Here are the voices I inherited which means I am also in line for some kind of inheritance. Since it’s less than what someone paid to rape me as a little girl, I have no rights as a human being.
If I work together with my rich friends who are also talented artists, then this will be a great show. I can be the WEIRD LONER CO-WRITER who largely writes by Google Docs. Concept art is a strength of mine. Jack has bonafide professional writing experience, connections, and experience managing a team of writers. He works in the video game industry right now. After all I’ve seen happen in the gaming industry, the man might be happy to switch projects.
🙀HEY JACK WANNA DO THIS HBO SERIES?
You can be 🕺Disco King Arthur and I will be the cranky reclusive ☔️Guinevere Hates Merlin Sad Bitch Singer/Writer/Art Girlie. Here’s the general gist of my idea so far. I’m going to be a diva about Guinevere’s story but flexible on other stuff.
I feel that this story requires no unambiguous “good guys” or “bad guys.” Merlin must begin as a well-intentioned wizard who dreams of a world free from violence.
In Celtic mythology, the faeries fear humans. Humanity lusts for faerie treasures and for the beautiful bodies of faerie men/women/sometimes children. In the old stories humans learned their lessons about theft eventually. Some stories tell of faeries who disappear beneath the ground in order to hide from human raiders. Certain faeries advise mankind in an honest fashion: Faerie Godmothers and Elven Kings.
Not all faeries are good. Merlin’s vision of utopia begins in a painful loss for him. The story is clear that his pain is real and at first he means well. He’s an impatient wizard. He arranges for Arthur, the Ideal King, to be bred through deception. Merlin deceives an innocent Queen so that King Uther Pendragon can sate his lust for another man’s wife, then bear Merlin’s Perfect King unaware that she was raped. Or - if we want this movie to be very dark indeed - she gets the uncanny sense during her pregnancy that something is wrong. (Level of darkness of this plot depends on what my writing team, studio consultants, my actors think.)
Arthur, a wizard’s creation of The Perfect Prince, enters the world. His nickname “The Wart” reflects the fact that his family knows who his father really is. Children and teenagers who bully Arthur are indeed shown in a bad light but the movie will be clear that they are passing on the sin of Arthur’s father and Merlin on to Arthur.
Arthur agrees with Merlin’s vision of Camelot. Quietly, he resents what was done to both him and his family. He loves his mother but recognizes her distance from him. We don’t need to have baby or child actors so scenes can just be written in a way that shows he grew up lonely.
That character arc depends on who plays Arthur. The protagonist and the character I’m going to be the bossiest about is Jenny. When we meet her, she’s a grad student paying her tuition bills as a nightclub singer.
Here’s Jenny. A nice young woman living in Brooklyn. She wants to change the world too but respects the liberty of other people in a way that Merlin does not. She makes mistakes in the movie but learns lessons from those mistakes. Big difference between her and Merlin.
Here we are going to drive home the point that Merlin’s extremism makes him a total asshole. We never see Jenny and her ex-girlfriend together, but a sad scene shows her on the phone with the love Merlin forced her to leave. See - Merlin is a wizard who went out on a quest for a stereotypically Perfect Queen. He knew that he could breed a Perfect King if necessary. In this movie Merlin understands that if he bred a Pretty Princess then he’d start a war. He goes out and scouts for a beautiful woman to command to marry King Arthur.
In a flashback scene, Merlin blackmails Jenny using a photo he took of her dancing at a nightclub. He threatens to ruin her girlfriend Nivea’s life by outing a woman whose parents don’t know she’s dating a woman. Jenny argues with him. Merlin calls up Nivea’s mother on the phone and begins to make good on his threat. Jenny seizes the phone, ends the call, and then must break up with a woman she loves because Merlin decides that Jenny MUST become Queen Guinevere.
I refuse to do kissing scenes with people who aren’t my boyfriend. Not sorry. I remember being a theater kid. It feels wrong to kiss people if I’m in a relationship. For the sake of hammering home the point that extremists ruin lives Merlin is a serial homewrecker and Jenny is an angry bi woman.
Nivea, for reasons we need not iron out in the movie pitch, is not ready to tell her parents that she is a lesbian. She works as a reporter for a Brooklyn newspaper. (Maybe her parents are sort of — nudging her that it is not safe for her to be openly a lesbian at her age in her chosen profession in this hell universe. Who knows.)
My movie will be filmed with a small cast that reflects the reality of New York City today. Racially open casting. I like the concept of Shakespearean casting for certain roles. To prevent certain kinds of reviewers from boycotting the movie King Arthur and Lancelot must only be shown romantically interested in women. We are not as a society ready for “EVERYONE IS EQUAL-OPPORTUNITY ROMANTICS” and Gamergate taught me that lesson thoroughly.
However - maybe our man Galahad is not entirely celibate? He’s a politician and a very morally righteous man. In Goodbye, Camelot he tells everyone that he’s too focused on his career to date. His boyfriend lives next door. The two of them plan a schedule to avoid being photographed together too frequently.
Here’s Lil Nas X as Galahad: a noble senator who lies to the paparazzi. Big fan. Perhaps he’ll agree to a movie role. If he agrees to be an actor, singer, writer and visual design consultant this movie will be awesome. I understand marketing: if Lil Nas X agrees to appear in this movie then BOOM it’s a popular movie.
Anyway: I’m mainly writing this to tell Jenny’s story.
She would have loved to be an advisor in King Arthur’s Court. If humanity had been left to its own devices, Camelot might have come around more slowly. Humans learn. Perhaps the Kingdom of Camelot would have been founded a few generations later than Merlin demanded. If the Kingdom hadn’t been built on a foundation of violence, lies, vengeance and rape then it might never have fallen.
Mordred, King Arthur’s bastard son, was once as an innocent boy who loved his mother deeply. His mother Morgause craves power. She lied about how her son was conceived. In Goodbye, Camelot Mordred is a young man. Even though his actions are villainous it should be clear that his mother is the far more evil character.
Jenny becomes Queen Guinevere knowing that she can never be the Queen that Camelot needs. In the legends Guinevere is always infertile. I’ll defer to script consultants but I would like this film to include a bloodless but heartbreaking scene explaining how she knows she can never bear children. TBD. I don’t want this film to be banned from too many theaters.
Guinevere and Arthur do their best to outmaneuver enemies from outside and inside their kingdom. It’s abundantly clear that Arthur resents Merlin most of all. Guinevere outright despises Merlin but knows he will ruin the lives of people she cares about if she refuses to play the part a wizard forced her to play.
How many times does Jenny fall in love? Willing to work with other writers on that. She is always sincere in her love. She’s just a woman in a godawful position. She falls in love with a knight named Lancelot. Arthur agrees that a childless Queen will be in danger for life and gives the couple his blessing. If Merlin hadn’t fucked up everything then Arthur would shrug and say “Oh noes, Queen Jenny died of a resurgent case of super-duper-bad COVID and I am going to grieve.” In a kind world, Arthur would marry a lovely woman of his choosing after meeting a woman who wanted to have biological children.
This movie does not take place in a kind world.
During the war, Lancelot and Guinevere escape. Arthur pretends that Jenny died. Mordred discovers where the two are hiding. Lancelot must stage her death, leave his lady love in a village far away from the Kingdom of Camelot, and bid her goodbye forever.
I hate loud noises and crowds. The lack of battle scenes is me being cheap but also selfish. This movie has nightclub scenes but no battle scenes. I feel it’s more appropriate to how modern wars are fought to show scenes of war on television and via tearful phone calls. To me as a movie fan, this depiction avoids glorifying war as much as possible.
Jenny shaves her head. She knows that a woman like her would be too easily recognized. At this point she’s cynical enough to understand that another damn roving wizard might think “OOOH I CAN TYPECAST ANOTHER QUEEN!” so she cries as she binds her chest. Not from pain but from the agony of letting go of her dreams and loves. She becomes a traveling singer named Johnny Lullaby who sings very sweetly. If we want this to have a bittersweet ending, maybe she meets someone on the road. No love scene. Just a look in her eye as if she thinks: “well, fuck it. Life goes on. Damn that evil wizard Merlin to hell and back.”