Pitch: “The Big V,” the world’s first vasectomy satire

Attention Hollywood!  I hereby declare that this pitch for an original film (not a remake! not based on a comic strip!) is hereby available for purchase:  “The Big V,” a hilarious satire about pro-life movements!

Location:  A United States very much like our own, with one difference — vasectomies are highly controversial procedures, subject to protests by anti-vasectomy activists.

Opening montage:  Handsome, slightly cocky 40-something Dick (Paul Rudd?  Taye Diggs?  Mark Ruffalo?  Benjamin Bratt?  Think Aaron Eckhart in “Thank You For Smoking”) is feeling good:  he’s driving down city streets in a nifty convertible, music playing.  Women turn to look at him zip by; men feel insecure in the comparison.  He passes a billboard with his own face on it, advertising the local TV morning show he co-hosts with Samantha (Samantha Bee of the “Daily Show,” please say yes!).  He pulls into the parking lot of a family planning clinic and gets out, only to be surrounded by people with signs that say things like ALL YOUR SEED IS HOLY, SPERM IS LIFE!, and ARE YOU STILL A MAN WITHOUT THE SPECIAL SAUCE IN YOUR MAN-JUNK?  Some of the signs have scaremongering photos showing doctors holding enormous scissors or mallets.  A couple of women in the crowd of protesters look at him with dismay.

It’s a blip on the screen to Dick, though, cuz he’s on top of the world — until we cut to one of the clinic’s examination rooms, where he sits with his powerful, pragmatic girlfriend, Jane (Queen Latifah?  Sofia Vergara?  Portia di Rossi?), a doctor.  She’s breaking up with him because, well, he’s just a bad boyfriend.  Dazed, Dick walks out through the clinic doors to have the protesters crowd around him.  They believe he’s considering having a vasectomy, so they pray, shout, and plead with him to change his mind.  “I can’t even say the word,” weeps one of them.  “It’s so wrong in God’s eyes.  But it rhymes with shmesh-sectomy.  Please don’t have a shmesh-sectomy!”  (Hint:  awesome reference to a scene from Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up”!)

Suddenly the sun comes out from behind a cloud to hit Dick right in the face, and his anxieties fade away.  He turns to face the clinic building, with the protesters at his back.  “You’re right!” he cries, recognizing an opportunity to get back at Jane.  Spotting her face in the window, he glares at her briefly, only to wash those emotions from his face when he addresses the protesters again in a full charm offensive.  He declares that he has Post-Vasectomy Syndrome (an idea he invents on the spot, for he has never had a vasectomy) and that it has emasculated him.  Dead set on hitting Jane where it hurts the most, he launches an angry, righteous, aggressive anti-vasectomy campaign in the media, using his own fake story as the heart and soul of the movement, and attacking her as one of those evil vasectomy doctors.  

He enlists eager psychologists who confirm that this is a real syndrome; he finds scientists to produce photographs proving that sperm actually have little babies’ faces and hands on them; he reappropriates the Monty Python tune, “Every Sperm Is Sacred,” for an anti-masturbation campaign among high school and college students.  In the meantime, not only does he become famous, he appears a model of manliness to many men, and a heartthrob to women.  Scarily, some members of the movement use this newfound energy to take it even farther to the fringe, calling for the murder of vasectomy doctors and bombing vasectomy clinics.

Add to this awesome parallel stories of individuals who likewise see Post-Vasectomy Syndrome as an opportunity for personal advancement:  a US senator (Wanda Sykes) argues that men who have vasectomies don’t know what they’re doing and require 24-hour waiting periods, parental consent, and infantilizing descriptions of sonograms taken of their pre-op testicles.  An actor with substance abuse and anger problems (Mel Gibson) reinvigorates his career by starting a daytime talk show, “The Man Show,” to give men the feel-good message that their role in this world is to father babies.  A floundering self-help magazine writer (Michelle Rodriguez) writes a bestselling book claiming that vasectomies give men cancer.

But it turns out that Jane’s pregnant — and therefore has the chance to destroy Dick’s movement and his TV career forever by showing him to be a fraud.  What’s going to happen?!?  Will the entire movement fall apart because it’s built on lies?  Will Dick confess all — and if he does, does he have a chance with Hillary (Patricia Clarkson), the feminist pro-vasectomy activist with the husky voice who’s opposed him during the last couple of months?

I’m telling ya, Hollywood, this one writes itself.  Send contract offers to didion[at]ymail[dot]com.