Here is the Mr. Peepers screenplay you didn't even know you wanted

By Sean O'Neal | April 18, 2012 | 6:58pm

Aux Features Film

Thanks to the sobering moment of clarity Lorne Michaels experienced after the back-to-back-to-back embarrassments of A Night At The Roxbury, Superstar, and The Ladies Man, the world was likely just narrowly denied a movie based on Mr. Peepers, perhaps the most popular of Chris Kattan’s many characters based on contorting his body in an ostensibly comical manner. But that hasn’t prevented some from dreaming of what might have been, then turning said dream into an elaborate satirical prank: The S.F. Weekly has published excerpts from Peepers, a canticle, a full-length screenplay purported to be written by “C.L. Kattan,” bound copies of which have been popping up in bookstores all across the city. The script (which you can read in its entirety here) reimagines Peter Sellers’ Being There with Mr. Peepers in the idiot savant role, doling out accidental wisdom—via his signature exclamations of “Bah!” and discarding of apple cores—to the social and political elite, including a memorable meeting with President George W. Bush. The film concludes with Peepers similarly strolling across a body of water, only to stop and hump it, thus “having sex with the entire earth.”

Bush’s appearance speaks to the author’s assertion that Peepers was “a work of pure art” ultimately undone by ill timing, with the preface of the book claiming that Kattan finished his screenplay on September 10, 2001, only to discover the very next day that the world had become “a hothouse inhospitable to the rare genus of plant that had taken root in his genius over the last several months," and leaving his film to be "deemed too political by studio executives in the emotionally charged atmosphere of the early aughts." It only gets more hilariously grandiose from there, as the book is supplemented with materials such as a transcript from a supposed panel titled “Peepers and Post-Modernity: Kattan in Conversation” that should also be a real thing. As of now the real mind behind the work has remained anonymous, but that probably won’t last very long. To that writer we say the world demands a Midnight Cowboy starring Mango.