Spielberg was only Researching Madoff for Film Project

HOLLYWOOD – Ponzi schemer and Fonzi Dreamer, Bernard Madoff, may have hoodwinked Jewish philanthropists such as Elie Wiesel and Mortimer Zuckerman, but now Steven Spielberg is saying “not so fast” in claiming that he, too, was one of the Judaic victims in the greatest con since Jaws III tried to make plausible the idea of a shark the size of the Titanic being piloted by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet dressed as pirates.

Spielberg says that he forked over a Disney World of cash from his Wunderkinder Foundation to Madoff only as a way to research his next film, Get Bernie. He met the now infamous Wall Street hustler numerous times in the men’s room of the Hollywood Bowl where they conducted business in adjacent stalls, with Spielberg sliding a gym bag full of money over to Madoff, who then reached under the partition to hand back a receipt written on one unit of toilet paper, telling the great director that to use more Charmin would be harmful to the environment – that is, immoral. Then they would talk through a four-inch-diameter glory hole about their personal lives and other assorted topics, with Madoff confessing that just once he would like to have coffee with Elie Wiesel and not have to hear for the umpteenth time about the darkness that lurks in the souls of men. “C’mon, Steve, Elie is a great guy and all, but why can’t he talk about baseball or broads or something once in a while? Always with the Nazis.”

The plot of Get Bernie is still a work in progress, as Spielberg sits at his home computer and combs his beard and waits for his DreamWorks special effects crew to get his hands to start typing the words. But the basic premise has to do with a guy, Bernardino, who just happens to be related to all the major Italian crime families in America because his mother had borne forty-six other children, all of whom married into each of the aforementioned syndicates until doctors removed her womb, which she afterward converted into a pillowcase. The families trust him enough to launder all their money, only one day he uses too much detergent and, poof, monetary green becomes cat-litter-box gray. Spielberg is unsure of the ending, except that it will not involve two shovels and a cornfield in Kansas, or anything to do with an equine as bedmate.

Spielberg estimates that it required over four hundred gym bags passing beneath the restroom stalls at the Hollywood Bowl to add up to the $300 million he invested with Madoff. But that’s no problem, he says, for the money has already been factored into the production budget as research needed to help him get acquainted with the details of in-house Jewish betrayal, hair plugs and a last name just begging to be made into a book of bad puns. Of course, Spielberg will now be pressured to forgo casting big, expensive names as the lead actors. He is considering himself playing the Bernardino character, saying it will be fun to revisit his young carefree days in film school when he starred as a walking shark in his senior thesis project, Jaws 0.1: Man-Eater with a Mullet.

“Again, to reiterate my point,” announced the longtime genius of Hollywood, “Elie and Mortimer were the chumps, not me, as I expect Get Bernie to gross over six billion worldwide, though I will not be taking any of it to the restroom of the Hollywood Bowl.”