FADE IN:

INT. PAROLE HEARING

Convict GEORGE CLOONEY is meeting with the PAROLE BOARD.

PAROLE BOARD

So Mr. Clooney, you’re a notorious career criminal with no morals or compunction. If we let you go do you pinky swear not to do any more crimes?

GEORGE CLOONEY

Of course!

PAROLE BOARD

You won’t immediately start planning to rob some rich jerk you have a personal grudge against?

GEORGE CLOONEY

I hardly think Steven Soderbergh and I are gonna remake Out of Sight that quickly.

PAROLE BOARD

All right, you’re free to go! Just check in with your parole officer over the phone now and then, I’m sure actual meetings aren’t necessary for an upstanding citizen such as yourself.

GEORGE CLOONEY

Beautiful!

(skips town)

INT. CASINO

GEORGE meets with BRAD PITT.

GEORGE CLOONEY

I want to rob three casinos in one night.

BRAD PITT

THREE casinos in ONE NIGHT? That’s gonna be a crazy elaborate plot, how can we pull it off?

GEORGE CLOONEY

Well they all put their cash in the one vault, see.

BRAD PITT

Ohhh. So you want to rob ONE casino in one night.

GEORGE CLOONEY

Yeah, but saying it my way makes it sound cooler for the trailers.

BRAD PITT

It’s still gonna take a big crew to pull this off. Off the top of my head, you’ll need an inside man, an acrobat, a nerd, an old guy, a couple of jackasses, and a guy doing a terrible Cockney accent, seriously just the worst, we’re talking worse than my Irish accent from The Devil’s Own.

(pause)

Wait, the fact that I seem to have figured out the entire heist in like twelve seconds doesn’t undermine how impossible it supposedly is, does it?

GEORGE CLOONEY

Hopefully not. Come on, let’s recruit these guys.

BRAD PITT

All right. For the bad accent guy I suggest Don Cheadle, although he’s already doing a safe robbery at the moment.

GEORGE CLOONEY

How do you know what crime he’s doing right now?

BRAD PITT

I have no idea. So I’ll have to go rescue him from being arrested.

GEORGE CLOONEY

How do you know he’s going to be arrested?

BRAD PITT

I have no idea. Anyway, I’ll just set off an explosive to distract everyone while we walk away.

GEORGE CLOONEY

How can you possibly guarantee that your explosive won’t kill anybody at the crowded crime scene if you’re not even looking at it when you set it off?

BRAD PITT

I have no idea.

They go and recruit DON CHEADLE, BERNIE MAC, SHAOBO QIN, EDDIE JEMISON, CARL REINER, CASEY AFFLECK and SCOTT CAAN.

GEORGE CLOONEY

There we go, that’s our team! Or do you think that’s enough? Maybe we should throw in another guy, what do you think?

BRAD PITT

What? Adding crew members to a precision heist isn’t like adding pepper to a stew. Either you know how many roles you need to fill or you don’t.

GEORGE CLOONEY

Ahh, I think we’ll add in another guy, what the heck.

BRAD PITT

You clearly don’t know what you’re doing and I’m extremely alarmed. Oh well, who else are we getting then, your sister?

GEORGE CLOONEY

Nah, we haven’t retconned her into existence yet. Let’s just grab Matt Damon.

They DO, then they all get together to PLAN SHIT.

GEORGE CLOONEY

All right everybody, the casinos we’re hitting are all owned by rich jerk Andy Garcia. Bernie has gotten a job as a blackjack dealer in one of them, which has naturally given him access to exhaustive intel on the entire security system, including complete schematics and blueprints and enough detail about the interior of the vault that we can recreate it in minute detail. So here’s the plan.

(pause)

(pause)

(pause)

MATT DAMON

...Isn’t that the point where you tell us the plan?

GEORGE CLOONEY

Shh, I’m waiting for the scene to cut away. We don’t want the audience to be in on the plan, do we? Otherwise the next hour of the movie would be just the bunch of us carrying out the physical labor we said we were going to do, and it’d be really fucking boring. That was Sinatra’s mistake.

DON CHEADLE

But this way aren’t we going to spend the next hour doing a bunch of stuff that the audience won’t even understand the purpose of?

GEORGE CLOONEY

Well yeah. But stylishly!

INT. CASINO

EDDIE, CASEY and SCOTT head into the CASINO that they’re gonna ROB.

GEORGE CLOONEY

Vague preparation number one: Eddie the nerd needs to physically hack into the casino’s servers. Casey and Scott, you block one security camera so that Eddie can sneak in without being spotted.

CASEY AFFLECK

Should we be so loud and obnoxious that we draw a lot of attention to ourselves, creating a much bigger risk of being recognized if we come back later in different disguises?

GEORGE CLOONEY

Absolutely, always do that, it’s your schtick. Eddie, your schtick for this scene is-

EDDIE JEMISON

I know, I know, fuck everything up like a big stupid moron.

(is spotted by guards)

(gets lost)

(loses all his hacker tools)

GEORGE CLOONEY

Excellent! Remember, for every scene where we try to sell our crew’s image as supercompetent megastuds, we have to have a scene where we undermine it by being idiots for cheap laughs.

Later, CARL goes to meet ANDY GARCIA while CASEY and SCOTT play his flunkies.

CARL REINER

I am a fancypants rich guy! I want to put a suitcase in your vault. I could have put it in a safe deposit box at the bank, or just slept with it, but nope, your vault is the SPECIFIC place I want this thing to be for one night.

ANDY GARCIA

You want access to my ultra-secure vault on fight night, the night when the vault is full up with more money than any other night? What a curious, not suspicious at all coincidence.

SCOTT CAAN

Say, is this all Casey and me are gonna be doing? Random bit parts and grunt work? Cause it feels like there really doesn’t need to be two of us, eating up an entire eleven-million-dollar share of the take each.

CASEY AFFLECK

In fact the more I think about it, do you even need one of us? What do we do that couldn’t have been absorbed by one of the other nine heist guys we got running around? Brad barely does anything as it is.

GEORGE CLOONEY

Hey, YOU try thinking up enough different roles for eleven whole guys. Elliot Gould is literally just here to give us money.

ELLIOTT GOULD

After my introductory scene I completely ceased to matter!

(thumbs up)

(leaves)

INT. CASINO DINING ROOM

GEORGE barges in on ANDY’S GIRLFRIEND JULIA ROBERTS while she has DINNER.

GEORGE CLOONEY

Hi, my beloved ex! I’m out of prison! You should dump Andy.

JULIA ROBERTS

(pause)

Okay.

GEORGE CLOONEY

I - what?

JULIA ROBERTS

Yeah, I’ve decided to dump my boyfriend because my ex showed up and asked me to OH WAIT NO I HAVEN’T BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE STUPID, WHAT DID YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN NUMBNUTS

GEORGE CLOONEY

Oh phew! It would have been real awkward if you had said yes, I’m currently balls-deep in this petty revenge thing and it would have been real hard to get out of it now.

JULIA ROBERTS

Why do you think I should ditch Andy anyway?

GEORGE CLOONEY

Because he’s a jerk! You should be with a great guy like me, not a jerk like him!

JULIA ROBERTS

He’s a successful businessman who treats me with affection and respect. You’re a career criminal who lied to me our whole relationship. How is he the jerk?

GEORGE CLOONEY

Because I’m very charming, and he’s not very charming! Therefore I deserve to have whatever the hell I want from life, while he deserves only ignominy and failure, obviously! Do I have to draw you a diagram?

INT. CASINO

After a bunch more VAGUE PREPARATIONS, it is FIGHT NIGHT and time for the HEIST! MATT approaches ANDY.

MATT DAMON

Good evening, I’m from the gaming commission, and I have a serious matter to discuss with you.

ANDY GARCIA

Huh, it’s fight night AND some rich guy wants to put a suitcase in my vault AND my girlfriend’s master thief ex is in town AND now there’s a surprise visit from the gambling commission! Weird that all this stuff is happening at the same time! Oh well.

MATT DAMON

I regret to inform you that your blackjack dealer Craig Robinson has a criminal background and legally can’t work in a casino.

BERNIE MAC

CRAIG FUCKIN’ ROBINSON?! I look nothing like that guy!

MATT DAMON

Oh I’m sorry, I frequently can’t tell you people apart UH I MEAN OVERWEIGHT COMEDIANS OBVIOUSLY EH HEH HEH

BERNIE attacks MATT, who stumbles into ANDY and pickpockets a FOLDER out of his JACKET.

MATT DAMON

Yoink! Now we have the codes to the vault, which Andy carries around with him on a piece of paper for whatever reason!

BERNIE MAC

Yes, we absolutely needed to stage this elaborate bit of play-acting to get that folder. I mean how else could we have possibly explained a guy stumbling, here in an establishment which tries to keep its clientele as liquored up as possible?

MATT sneaks into a restricted ELEVATOR and climbs out the ROOF HATCH to find GEORGE waiting for him.

MATT DAMON

George?! I thought you were removed from vault duty because Andy was having you surveilled?

GEORGE CLOONEY

It’s cool, I arranged it so that he would have a hired thug beat the crap out of me, but it would be a thug I'd already paid off. He’s in an empty room right now, throwing furniture around and pretending to beat up someone who’s not there, it’s suuuper unconvincing.

DON then creates a HUGE BLACKOUT so MATT and GEORGE can get past some SECURITY LASERS.

ANDY GARCIA

An unexplained blackout on top of all that other stuff! This really is one crazy night, huh? STILL NOT SUSPICIOUS!

GEORGE CLOONEY

Meanwhile, Carl made up that whole spiel about a suitcase so that he could be allowed into the control room to watch the suitcase over CCTV, then fake a medical emergency and have Brad show up as a fake doctor, all to cause a brief distraction while we changed the security feed to an innocuous loop, a la Speed!

MATT DAMON

You really think their screens flickering slightly right before a massive power outage would have been more suspicious than all that other convoluted crap?

GEORGE CLOONEY

Look, we had to find stuff for Carl and Brad to do, all right? Now let’s blow open the vault with an explosive which needs to be on both sides of the door at once, thus giving Shaobo something to do!

MATT DAMON

Question: we snuck Shaobo into the vault so he could acrobat all over the room without triggering the floor lasers, right? But when we blow open the vault and debris goes flying every which way, what happens with the floor lasers then?

GEORGE CLOONEY

I presume they will all spontaneously cease to exist.

MATT DAMON

Of course.

INT. CONTROL ROOM

ANDY gets a PHONE CALL.

BRAD PITT

Hey Andy, I’m in ur vault stealin ur bux lol

The SECURITY FEED switches from the DECEPTIVE LOOP over to a COMPLETELY GUTTED CASINO VAULT.

ANDY GARCIA

AW FUCK, IF ONLY THERE HAD BEEN ANY HINT THAT SOMETHING SUSPICIOUS WAS GOING ON!

BRAD PITT

We’re taking half the money and rigging the other half with explosives. If you don’t want us to blow the rest-

ANDY GARCIA

We’ll have to let you walk out of here with the cash and get away?

BRAD PITT

Er, no. We’ll send up the cash by itself, then your guys will have to take it to a waiting van. Meanwhile we’ll just stick around in the vault for no reason, threatening to blow up the money while we’re standing three feet away from it.

ANDY GARCIA

That sounds crazy implausible. But hey, it’s a bit late for me to start questioning anything now.

He has his GUYS take the MONEY to the VAN. Then he has the van TAILED, and sends a SWAT TEAM into the vault.

SWAT LEADER

(heard over radio)

All right, let’s go in and stop those robbers. FREEZE! Oh no, they’re letting off the explosives! KA-BLAMMO!!! Open fire, men! BANG BANG BANG BANG, ARGH, EVERYBODY GET DOWN, BANG BANG PEW PEW!! “Urk, we, the robbers, are now dead!” Yaaayyyy the SWAT guys won yaayyyy

INCREDIBLY GULLIBLE AUDIENCE MEMBER

(sobbing)

Oh nooo, this charming heist comedy has ended with all the heroes abruptly dying off screen!

ANDY GARCIA

Aw yeah, falling for stuff is the bomb, right?

INCREDIBLY GULLIBLE AUDIENCE MEMBER

You know it!

They HIGH-FIVE somehow.

ANDY’S GOON

(on phone)

Mr. Garcia, bad news! We tailed that van but when we caught up with it there was no money or people inside, the so-called money bags were full of strip club flyers!

ANDY GARCIA

(grows a brain)

OHHHH, I get it! They intercepted my call to the cops, the "SWAT team" was THEM and they removed the money while it was disguised as bags of... of SWAT stuff or whatever! The earlier footage wasn’t live, they faked it earlier in their replica of the vault, and they sent up bags of paper rather than bags of money to misdirect us!

ANDY’S GOON

...But how did they get a hundred thousand stripper flyers into the vault in the first place?

ANDY GARCIA

LOOK IT’S A COMPLICATED PLAN ALL RIGHT, WE CAN’T BE EXPECTED TO EXPLAIN EVERY DAMN THING.

He storms off to the ROOM where GEORGE is supposed to be getting beaten up.

GEORGE CLOONEY

And here I am, after a seven-foot-tall thug has spent a solid half an hour beating me senseless. See the one tiny bruise on my cheek? Clearly everything is on the up-and-up.

ANDY GARCIA

Give me my money back!

GEORGE CLOONEY

Do you promise to dump Julia if I do?

ANDY GARCIA

Fine. I mean anything I say now is completely non-binding, even if Julia was listening in she could just use common sense and realize I’m probably bluffing.

JULIA ROBERTS

GUESS AGAIN! We’re through, Andy! And George, since you just committed yet more crimes in an effort to destroy my relationship, I love you now!

GEORGE CLOONEY

Sweet! Unfortunately, now that Andy has a brain he’s sending goons to track my every move, so I guess one day he’ll figure out how to get the money back, then have the goons smash my head with a sledge hammer.

JULIA ROBERTS

Actually instead Ocean’s Twelve happens, in which we find out-

GEORGE CLOONEY

I think I’ll stick with the sledge hammer thanks.

END.