MISSILE DREAM
                          9/10/90


Sarah's second nightmare, which occurs at Salceda's camp,
was originally more differentiated from the first
nightmare she has while at Pescadero.  While the essence
of the dream and its visceral intent remained intact in
the final film -- including her vision of the innocent
waitress version of herself and her helplessness against
the impending Judgment Day -- the Missile Dream scene
from 9/10/90 draft was only a different version on the
same theme and would have been a complex visual effects
scene to produce, involving bluescreen, many extras,
and very large-scale miniatures.  The luxury of telling
the same nightmare using different imagery was not an
affordable one, either financially or, in the end,
narratively.

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SARAH'S HEAD droops.  She closes her eyes.

TIGHT ON small children playing.  Different ones.
Wider now, to reveal a playground in a park.  Very
idyllic.  A dream playground, crowded with laughing kids
playing on swings, slides, and a jungle gym.  It could be
the playground we saw melted and frozen in the post-
nuclear desolation of 2029.  But here the grass is vibrant
green and the sun is shining.

Sarah, short-haired, looking drab and paramilitary, stands
outside the playground.  An outsider.  Her fingers are
hooked in a chain-linked fence and she is staring through
the fence at the young mothers playing with their kids.  A
grim-faced harbinger.

Some girls play skip-rope.  Their sing-song chant weaves
through the random burbling laughter of the kids.  One of
the young mothers walks her two-year-old son by the hands.
She is wearing a pink waitress uniform.  She turns to us,
laughing.
It is Sarah.  Beautiful.  Radiant.  Sarah from another
life, uncontaminated by the dark future.  She glances at
the strange woman beyond the fence.

Grim-faced Sarah presses against the fence.  She starts
shouting at them in SLOW MOTION.  No sound comes out of
her mouth.  She grabs the fence in frustration, shaking
it.  Screaming soundlessly.
Waitress Sarah's smile falls.  Then returns as her little
boy throws some sand at her.  She laughs, turning away, as
if the woman at the fence were a shadow, a trick of light.

Behind her the earth splits open.
In a wide shot we see everyone stop and stare as the
ground heaves upward all around them.  As far as the eye
can see the monstrous caps of missile silos are hinging
up, ripping up through the grass and soil.  Now the
mothers are screaming, pulling their children to them...
but it is too late to run.  The silo caps open, rows of
them marching to the horizon.  As if a tranquil reality
has split open to reveal another horrible reality which
has always been there, hidden beneath it.

Thunder shakes the earth.  We see the obscene heads of the
missiles thrusting up out of the holes in the ground.
Walls of fire erupt as the fat cylinders rise like
awakened monsters from the earth.

Sarah stares in numb horror as the tail-nozzles clear the
silo rims, and a wall of flame roars out, devouring the
cowering mothers and children.  Incinerating them and
rolling on, toward her.
She screams and we hear it now, shrill and terrifying,
mixing with the thunder as the flames wrap around her,
blasting her apart and she...

Wakes up.