Bad Elevator Pitches

An elevator with a soda fountain that dispenses beverages. Sounds awesome, right? What’s the catch, you ask? All the dispensers contain the one soda you exclusively see in soda fountains and never anywhere else: Pibb Xtra. And you can’t leave the elevator until you drink an entire thirty-two-ounce Styrofoam cup of it (room temp., no ice).

An elevator outfitted with wall-to-wall screens playing an endless loop of all the unaired Quibi pilots.

An elevator that’s held aloft by a baseball pitcher, who heaves it toward home plate. It starts as a punning gimmick, but true to its name, the contraption rises and falls dramatically along its trajectory, proving nearly unhittable by a player with a regulation-size bat. Scrutinizing the rule book, the opposing manager finds no specific prohibition regarding the use of an elevator as the game ball, and the pitcher completes a perfect game. Other pitchers race to build the formidable core and leg strength necessary to lift and fling elevators more than sixty feet as “elevator-pitch mania” sweeps the nation—until the day that the Mets ace Jacob DeGrom, in an attempt to brush back Bryce Harper with a ninety-eight-mile-per-hour inside elevator, accidentally crushes Harper, the catcher, the umpire, and six fans. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration pushes the commissioner to institute a no-elevator rule, but baseball purists insist that the tacitly condoned use of elevators has always been “part of the game,” and elevator pitches remain a tragic staple of the sport, with an average of eighty-seven casualties per season.

An elevator that plays a song titled “Elevator Music,” which samples actual elevator music and remixes it to sound like contemporary club music—but the contemporary club remix turns out to be just as awful as regular elevator music.

An office-building elevator in which your ears always pop when you pass the seventh floor. One in seven hundred and thirty passengers will go on to suffer partially clogged ears for a month—not auditory damage, but it’s still annoying, making people who take the elevator twice a day calculate that, in the course of a year, it’s likely to happen to them once, and question whether they should just walk, or if this is simply the level of everyday workplace risk they have to accept.

An elevator with no “OPEN DOOR” button or sensor to reopen it. If you don’t make it in time? Sorry, bud, should’ve hustled faster! Same thing if your arm gets stuck in the doors.

An elevator in which a uniformed man silently rides up and down, seated in a Louis Quatorze chair. He is purely ornamental, serving no function except to stir up a discomfiting class consciousness as passengers wonder if they should acknowledge his presence or thank him, or what, exactly, his deal is.

An elevator that says “OTIS” on the floor where you enter. Pretty standard, right? But wait—it also says “OTIS” on the button panel. And the walls. And the ceiling. Here’s the twist: by “says,” I mean that these parts of the elevator actually speak aloud the word “OTIS.” Freaked out yet by this talking elevator? Get ready for the second twist: the elevator is manufactured not by Otis, the leading elevator company in the world, but by Schindler, the second biggest. That’s right—this is an elevator that lies about its very identity.

An elevator that’s only an airshaft, and on the subbasement level there’s a large needlepoint that becomes legible just before you crash into it, which reads “ ‘Life’s a journey, not a destination.’—Aerosmith.”

O.K., so the movie’s called “Elevator.” Two crusty misanthropes get stuck in a stalled skyscraper elevator together—I’m thinking De Niro and Pacino, but we can gender-flip with Streep and McDormand, or if we’re going for the we-just-want-memes Gen-Z market, Chalamet and Hedges. It’s filmed in real time, over two hours, as the leads slowly open up about their lives—their disappointments, what they’ve loved and lost, blah-de-fucking-blah—and, when they’re finally rescued, they cry in each other’s arms and vow to have lunch together the next day. (Possible last line: “We’ll take the stairs.”) It’s pretentious and boring, but the critics and cosmopolitan élite pretend they like it for the pseudo-highbrow status affiliation. We pick up a few Oscars, and then we license it to Six Flags as “Elevator: The Ride.”

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