Who and what the hell is Ezekiel 22, and why are the principals of this Atlanta-based company allegedly paying $3.8 million for rights in all media to the story of three not-terribly-brilliant Mexican guys who drifted 5,000 miles across the Pacific, from San Blas to the Marshall Islands, and had to resort to “occasionally” drinking their own urine to stay alive?
Is this some kind of put-on? Has Yahoo Entertainment News been taken over by a team of Onion-styled satirists?
Late this afternoon a story was posted on Yahoo Entertainment News with a headline that read “Movie to make millionaires of lost Mexico fishermen.” The story begins, “Three Mexicans who spent nine months drifting across the Pacific Ocean in a flimsy fishing boat eating raw fish and sea birds are to be paid at least $3.8 million to turn their story into a movie.
“The three — all fishermen who said they were too poor to afford a better boat or modern fishing tackle — have signed a contract to sell their story to an Atlanta- based company [which] negotiated 8-year exclusive rights to market the story to film companies, book publishers and merchandisers, said government official Silverio Aspericueta, adding that the final payment could be even higher. He said the company’s name was Ezekiel 22.”
A company calling itself Ezekiel 22 — a chapter in the Old Testament that has to do with the sins of old Jerusalem — seems to indicate an interest in business ventures with a certain historical-religious slant. Do the principals of Ezekiel 22, if there is such a company, see three guys surviving a long trip across the Pacific as some kind of Biblical tale about God’s benevolence, like God letting Jonah live by having the “big fish” spit him up?
Wikipedia says that the book of Ezekiel contains three distinct sections — judgment on Israel, prophecies against various neighboring nations, and prophecies delivered after the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II. Bible Gateway, a relligious right website, offers the entirety of Ezekiel 22 and at the beginning of the chapter are the words “Jerusalem’s Sins.”
Leaving aside the anti-Israel/Christian-right angle, why would any company prom- ise to pay $3.8 million to three intellectually-challenged Mexican guys for the rights to their story? They could have bought them for a less than that, surely. And who wants to see a movie about Mexican guys who were too dumb to hoist a sail or bring oars on a seafaring journey, and watch them eating fish and seagulls and drinking their own piss?
This is one of the weirdest news stories I’ve ever read.
And by the way, if you want to read some really hot-sounding descriptons of wild sexual abandon by pair of sluts, read Ezekiel 23, which is called “Two Adulterous Sisters.” Some of the language is so graphic and steamy it reads like something out of a 1975 issue of the National Lampoon.
Consider this passage: “Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.”