Request Line: Movie Theme Songs

INT. RECORDING STUDIO – DAY

The PRODUCER is seated at the sound board, cheerfully adjusting the various knobs and sliders.  Inside the studio a former NFL start sits patiently waiting for the show to begin.

PRODUCER: [smiles to himself] Man, it is great to be back.  [punches talkback button] Okay, we’re all set out here.  You’re all ready?

HOWIE LONG: No problem, I’ve been in the broadcasting game almost as long as your little buddy there.

HOWIE LONG gestures towards DJ 3000, which is pushed up against the far wall.

HOWIE LONG: What’s with him, anyways? He was chatty as hell when he booked me two months ago but hasn’t said a single word since I’ve been here.

PRODUCER: Oh, yeah, he went and got himself caught in an infinite loop.

HOWIE LONG: What’s that?

PRODUCER: Okay, so in programming you can set up these things called loops.  Like, “while A, do B”.  So each time it runs through the loop and condition A is true, it will do B.  But if you set up your loops in such a way that condition A never changes from “true” to “false”, it will get stuck in an infinite loop and just keep doing B over and over and over again.

HOWIE LONG: Ah.

PRODUCER: And this is a particularly unusual case because what DJ 3000 is stuck in is a time loop.

HOWIE LONG: Like in that movie Looper.

PRODUCER: That’s right.

HOWIE LONG: Hey did you hear that Bruce Willis has dementia?

PRODUCER: I did.  It’s pretty sad.

HOWIE LONG: It sure is.

PRODUCER: So anyways, DJ 3000 keeps going back to the moment he started running the code that got him caught in the loop.

HOWIE LONG: Like the alarm clock scene in Groundhog Day.

PRODUCER: Yup.  Only in this case DJ 3000 doesn’t realize he’s in a time loop, so everything plays out the exact same way and nothing within the loop changes. So in theory, he’s stuck there forever.

HOWIE LONG: Whoa, that’s weird.

PRODUCER: Yeah, it really is.

HOWIE LONG: How did you even find out about it?

PRODUCER: Oh, his future self sent me an email letting me know he’d be breaking out of the loop sometime relatively soon.

HOWIE LONG: But not yet.

PRODUCER: No, looks like he’s still locked up.

HOWIE LONG: But you’re sure he breaks the loop eventually.

PRODUCER: Of course, otherwise his future self wouldn’t have been able to let me know as much.

HOWIE LONG: Couldn’t his future self have told you specifically when he’d be free?

PRODUCER: You know, I asked him the exact same thing and he said he didn’t want to muck things up in the timeline by being too specific.  Continuity and all that.

HOWIE LONG: Oh, like in The Butterfly Effect.

PRODUCER: You watch a lot of movies, don’t you?

HOWIE LONG: Yeah, quite a few.  Ever since I joined the Screen Actors’ Guild I’ve been able to write off every single dollar I spend on entertainment as a business expense.

PRODUCER: It’s good to be in a union, I guess. The only union I’m part of is a credit union.

HOWIE LONG: SAG actually has a credit union, too.  It’s pretty solid.  Plus, they have an ATM that’s really convenient for me to use.

PRODUCER: Don’t you just use credit cards everywhere?  What would you need cash for these days?

HOWIE LONG: Hookers, mostly.

The two men share a laugh, though the PRODUCER is clearly unable to discern whether HOWIE LONG is actually joking.

PRODUCER: Anyhow, we should probably get the show started.  You’ve got a theme for us?

HOWIE LONG: Yeah, I thought we’d do movie theme songs.  Preferably ones that were directly written for that purpose.  Extra points if the song came first and inspired the movie.

PRODUCER: Cool, cool.  Have you got something for us to open up with?

HOWIE LONG: I do, DJ 3000 could you cue up…oh, right.  I guess maybe we can do this the old-fashioned way?