A. Offer a good time.

— When I was a kid in the ‘90s we had one television (and thankfully no devices) and when it was my mom’s turn to watch something, she would always go to the Turner Classic Movies channel. The first, non-kids movie I can remember sitting through was Some Like It Hot, the 1959 classic directed Billy Wilder, starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. There are numerous references I could list for Bound, and how we’d like to it to play, but if I had to pick one it would be Hot. The movie is the standard of a fun time.

In the story, Lemmon and Curtis play two musicians on the run after witnessing a murder in Chicago. They end up in Florida, where things get more complicated with Monroe. For So Far Bound, the characters aren’t on the run, per se, but they were happy to get away from home and can experience the same sense of displacement (and its hi-jinks) as the characters in Hot. Overall, Hot might have a sillier tone than So Far Bound, which would like to have more moments of drama, quiet and so forth; however, always from a foundation of levity or joy first.

B. Explore, from at large.

— A couple of years ago I finally tackled the beast: 100 Years of Solitude. To be honest, I still don’t know if I like it or not but it’s nonetheless an ambitious and effective (or memorable) book for sure. 100 Years recounts the lives of generations of the Buendia family and of the town of Macondo. In essence, it tracks the discovery, settlement and cycles of a people and their new homeland, pondering about things from the spiritual to the societal along the way. In Bound, though the place they end up is already founded, it’s exotic to the passengers and thus ripe for discovery, and then for building as they stay.

The wide array of characters in 100 Years, observing and contemplating their world, is reference for how we’d like Bound to feel. With characters from different cultures (or at least with roots in different cultures) there would be much opportunity to discover and then explore in both funny and dramatic ways how different people become what they do. Then together, those individuals will find another world (the setting) and get to examine it and consider how things get discovered and settled, now and in the past.