benjamin watt - production diary

Final Draft - 11/11/07

A man invents a mouse trap. It consists of a bit of flat wood, with a razor blade on top pointing upwards, and a piece of cheese on one side of the blade. Excited at his new invention, the man hurries to the patent office to make sure nobody can steal his idea before he brings it to market.

Once there he hands his mouse trap to the patent officer, who looks at it baffled. “How is this ever going to catch a mouse?” he asks, scratching his head in bemusement.

“Well” says the man, “The mouse will smell the cheese, run up to the trap, and as it leans over to eat the cheese it will cut its throat on the blade which lies in the way”. As he’s describing this scene, we see the man’s imagination playing out a mouse strolling up to the trap, and running over to the blade, the thought bubble bursting just as the mouse leans over it to grab the cheese.

The patent officer irritated at having his time wasted, throws the mouse trap back at the man telling him this will never work, after all, to cut the mouse’s throat you’d need some kind of cutting action of the blade. The mouse would never be killed by this trap! We briefly see the inventor’s thoughts again, where the unharmed mouse is triumphantly holding the cheese above its head like a trophy. He sends the man away and tells him to rethink his stupid idea, or better still give up inventing mouse traps, and get a proper job.

The inventor works away in his shed, scribbling away on his drawings, throwing out ideas, and looking at his mouse trap from all angles, looking more and more mentally anguished by the whole process.

Unperturbed by the patent officer’s comments though, after another week of working away on his mouse trap idea, the man returns to the patent office with his newly updated mouse trap, so good that he’s covered it with a black cloth so nobody else can see it. As the man joins the short queue, he is clearly excited (albeit with a slightly more mad expression on his face than before), he’s sure he has the perfect invention, and can’t wait to present it. When his turn finally comes, he walks up to the desk, where the same patent officer from the previous week awaits.

The man places his trap on the counter, and quickly pulls the black cloth off. “Ta da!” he says. Recognising him from last time, the patent officer stares at the man for a second, rolls his eyes, and finally looks down at the new trap. This time the trap is made up of the same bit of wood, the same razor blade, in the same place, but this time there’s no piece of cheese. The patent officer looks at the man as though he’s crazy, turns the trap upside down, and looks around it in case he’s missed something obvious, but he spots nothing else. “This is even worse!” he says. “How is this going to do what I told you it would need to? There’s no cheese, let alone a way for the mouse to be killed!”.

“Well”, says the man, “the mouse will run up to the trap, lean over the razor blade”, (we see the mouse in the man’s thoughts running up again, looking rather cocky having previously got away with the cheese, but the thought bubble bursts just as we see the baffled look on the mouse’s face), “and think “Where the hell’s the cheese today?”". As he says this, he motions the action of the mouse leaning its head over the razor blade and looking from right to left, and back again looking for the cheese. Hence providing for itself the cutting action the patent officer had asked for.

The patent officer pauses for thought whilst the man looks on eagerly, feeling he need not say any more, to do so may jinx it. Finally with a sigh, the patent officer shakes his head, stamps the form with a large ‘PATENT APPROVED’ stamp, and waves the man away, hopeful that this means he’ll never meet him ever again.