Lady Bird’s California sequels

Here’s the good news in Sacramento: Lady Bird, a coming-of-age film set in Sacramento and written and directed by the California capital’s own Greta Gerwig, has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture.

Here’s the better news: Gerwig could make three more films about her hometown.

“I would like to make a quartet of films in Sacramento,” Gerwig told the Sacramento Bee. “I have three more before the quartet is done.”

What will they be about? Who knows? Here’s hoping Gerwig explores other civic challenges, from housing prices to a weak jobs market, just as Lady Bird takes on Sacramento’s relatively low levels of college graduates. The title character—a teenager named Lady Bird—is so disappointed with Sacramento’s second-tier cultural and higher-education offerings, that she departs for private college in New York. (Sacramento ranks 58th out of 102 American metro areas in educational attainment.)

So here — in the spirit of artistic inspiration and civic renewal — I offer the Oscar-nominated director treatments for four sequels.

Lady Bird Gets Her Tree

A homesick Lady Bird moves back and visits coffee shops for six months before deciding that Old Soul best fits her aura. She and her artist boyfriend (Michael B. Jordan) fall behind on the $1,500 monthly rent on an Oak Park one-bedroom, because their only steady jobs are driving for Lyft.

After their landlord evicts them so he can rent to richer Bay Area arrivals, Lady Bird is forced into the American River homeless encampment. But then, inspired by the region’s beautiful tree canopy, she builds a treehouse in West Sacramento, and the housing-friendly council lets her keep it.

Lady Bird Returns: Hired Liar

In this black comedy, Lady Bird returns from the East to lobby for children’s groups. She quickly discovers that the legislature keeps millions of children in a secret, offbudget city beneath the Capitol.

The diminished media won’t write the story, and Lady Bird falls into despair. But then she meets a wealthy British-born telecommunications lobbyist (Tom Hiddleston). They carry out a love affair in his San Francisco pied-àterre and his Tahoe chateau. She decides she likes the fine life, and becomes a lobbyist for developer Angelo Tsakopoulos.

In a luxury box at the Kings arena, her beau drops to one knee to propose. Lady Bird replies: “Yes, on one condition. Promise me we’ll never have children. Because the schools here suck.”

Lady Bird in the Swamp

After eating a deep-fried, baconwrapped peanut-butter cup at the State Fair, Lady Bird becomes disoriented and drives into a Delta slough. She’s rescued by an improbably handsome seventh-generation pear farmer (Chris Pine), who makes her his wife. The film becomes a climate change pastoral, as Lady Bird struggles with the worsening cycles of flood and drought in the Delta, and takes on the DIY job of putting her home on stilts.

But then mysterious engineers appear on the property. Powerful water agencies are secretly drilling an underground water tunnel that was abandoned after a court fight long ago.

In an Erin Brockovich-style finale, Lady Bird investigates— and throws her body in front of the tunneling machine. She is killed, but so is the tunnel project.

Sacramento Film 4: Lady Bird v. Apocalypse

In 2050, new technology brings Lady Bird back to life as a parthuman-part-machine cyborg. She lives in Sacramento—until a Pineapple Express rain system deluges the city, collapsing levees and flooding the town.

Searching for higher ground, she heads to the Foothills, but gun-toting locals shoot at city refugees, because they vote too Democratic. So, she heads to Davis where NIMBYs express sympathy but refuse to accept refugees, because they would bring new development.

The floodwaters carry an exhausted Lady Bird south to Stockton, where she encounters a buttkicking fellow cyborg (Harrison Ford). He takes her by catamran to Sacramento, where they restore order.

After that, everything is OK in California’s capital.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.