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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
She is brazen and wild, an untamed, sensual creature perfect for TV.
Oct 5, 2000 | Dear Lifetime Television, Cinemax, Showtime and HBO:
After seeing the dramatic Svetlana Khorkina competing at the recent Sydney Olympic Games, it struck me that such a brazen, athletic female star for the '00s should have her story told, with a kind of "Valley of the Dolls" sensibility I'm sure would really go over with women ages 17 to 38 (or your target demographic). The following is my pitch for "Golden Heat: The Svetlana Khorkina Story," loosely based on the Russian gymnast's actual biography.
Fade-in: The middle of Red Square in Moscow, 1983. Sveta, a tiny, 4-year-old girl wearing a red coat with black fur trim, is happily doing cartwheels while her biological father, Vassily, a friendly, lovable Gerard Depardieu type who makes wooden toys and sells them from his modest cart, looks on proudly.
"Here Sveta, for you," he says, handing her a wooden doll with yellow yarn hair. The young girl is delighted.
"I'm sorry it cannot be the expensive Barbie toy from the America," he adds apologetically.
"No, Papa! She is beautiful! I name her Olivia Newton-John!"
A group of black-clad secret police watches the youngster twirl with joy. "Yuri," says one of them. "The little one, she is strong and brave. Let us take her to the camp."
The black-clad men seize the child. "Papa!" she cries, as Olivia Newton-John falls to the ground and her head breaks like an egg, the onion-domed turrets of the Kremlin looming in the background.
"Sveta!" Vassily cries hopelessly, watching with communist angst as his whole life is stolen away by the KGB.
Cut to the camp: Svetlana is scrubbed mercilessly with Boraxo by rough-looking matrons and presented in her underpants, crying, to coach-for-life Boris Pilkin.
"She could grow too tall," says Boris to his wife later that night.
"Take her, Boris. Make her a champion," says his wife. "Perhaps since she is too tall, she will suffer even more gratefully."
Montage: Other girls laughing and throwing frozen manure clods at Sveta, jeering at her for being too tall. Sveta, with the other girls in the camp, being force-fed huge horse pills by matrons firing them down their throats with a primitive blowgun apparatus.
Boris punching the little girls as hard as he can in the stomach, one by one. Boris putting C-clamps on Sveta's shins so they don't grow any longer. Sveta being shoved head first by Boris into the ice that has formed on a trough of water. Sveta picking fleas out of her borscht. Sveta being pursued by wolves in the snow while wearing nothing but a string of kielbasi, Boris laughing in the background.
The little girls tending to one another's black and yellow wounds in their makeshift, "Little Rascals"-esque infirmary -- applying chicken fat and old, torn sheets to their foot gashes, skinless hands, snapped ligaments and broken ribs, while singing mournful Russian folk songs for comfort. It should be clear by the end of the montage that Sveta has become the leader of the pack of sad, strong little girls.
Cut to later: The 1999 World Championship gymnastics competition. The 20-year-old Sveta (think Calista Flockhart with a crew cut) is wearing a long, red, backless ball gown, and hoisting a martini in the air.
"Olives," she says, spitting vodka into Boris' face. "More goddamned olives. I said to you I wanted my vodka very dirty."
"Dirty like your men, Sveta?" asks the wizened coach/father figure.
