(Transcript of the pilot episode of Jason Wyngarde’s Mysterious World, which was cancelled mid-season 2023.)
The last time Nicolas Cage, the financially-troubled star of the National Treasure franchise, was incontrovertibly among us was late in April 2011. He has not been seen since, nor has his body been found.
Good evening, I am Jason Wyngarde, and this is my mysterious world – our mysterious world.
In the opening months of 2011, Cage was in New Orleans, shooting Simon West’s thriller Stolen, a film which famously could only be completed with groundbreaking synthespian software. Following a street argument with Alice Kim, his third wife and the mother of his youngest son, Kal-El, Cage was arrested on Saturday 16 April on suspicion of domestic abuse, breach of the peace and public drunkenness. He was bailed out by reality TV star Duane ‘Dog the Bounty Hunter’ Chapman, and returned to work the following Monday. Reports from the set that he was becoming increasingly pensive and introspective were initially taken to indicate embarrassment, contrition, perhaps even genuine soul-searching. But when he failed to return home on the eve of his court appearance, scheduled for May 31, his creditors’ suspicions that he was in fact planning to abscond were apparently confirmed.
Chapman, who at the time insisted that posting Cage’s bail was merely part of his day job and had nothing to do with his TV show, was just one of many who took part in the ensuing – and completely unsuccessful – manhunt. The footage he shot was never broadcast, although some of it eventually surfaced in James Franco’s nine-hour documentary about Cage, ninja guru shaman superhero, a decade later.
Reports of Cage’s illegal flight prompted an internet wildfire of rumours, 
speculations and reported sightings. There were at least eight incidents involving a man dressed as a bear punching a nun. In each case, the assailant later claimed in court that ‘Nicolas Cage made me do it’, a phrase that swept the world for a fortnight that summer as the search for the missing star intensified.
As shown in Werner Herzog’s Cage of Forgotten Dreams, at least one Christian sect was thrown into acrimonious disarray – resulting in rifts, suicides and shootings – by the possibility that the Rapture had happened and God had seen fit to take only one man.
All of this was small comfort to Kal-El Cage, who in one of ninja guru shaman superhero’s most poignant sequences revealed to Franco that he grew up pretending that his absent father had just flown away for a few days to the solitude of his arctic Fortress and would be back home tomorrow.
However, sifting through the evidence and hypotheses, a pattern does begin to emerge in the testimony of those who were closest to Cage during the months before his disappearance. Many of their comments indicate that the Oscar-winning star was growing increasingly anxious about his acting. In one of his last interviews, he spoke of being absolutely overwhelmed by Casey Affleck’s pseudo-documentary I’m Still Here, colourfully describing Joaquin Phoenix’s faked breakdown as
the fucking quintessence of Nouveau Shamanic performance. It’s an acting style I’ve been perfecting since I was an extra in Brubaker, and out of nowhere, he’s zen-mastering it like a motherfucker.
Even at the time, this prompted a rumour that the Elvis-loving Cage, who was married to Lisa Marie Presley for 108 days in 2002, dropped out of sight to undertake a secret art project of his own, touring the world incognito, faking Elvis sightings. Implausible as this may seem, the twenty-eight months after his disappearance did coincide with a massive increase in reported sightings of the long-dead King of Rock’n’Roll.
Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, co-directors of the Crank movies and Gamer, spoke of a sense of melancholy that began to affect Cage during the final days of shooting Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance in early 2011. Neveldine at first suspected it was prompted by yet another article on ‘this sequel no-one wants to a film no-one wanted’ and the kinds of movies Cage was making (he had just signed up for National Treasure 3). But Taylor dates Cage’s mood-change to the night the three of them went to see Drive Angry 3D together:
Nic’s always known some pretty way out people, not just comic book fan weird, but really weird: kabalists, chaoticians, numeromancers, edge-scientists. And let’s face it, Nic always acted in 3-D even when the film was in 2-D. He told me he’d taken on Drive Angry just to see what would happen when the technology raised everyone else’s thespian chops to the level of his own multidimensional acting kata. I thought he was joking, but after seeing the film he just went really quiet for a couple of days. One night he wandered off into the hills with a couple of bottles of mescal; and when he came back, he had this crazed look in his eye, like he’d just glimpsed the edge of something, something profound, sublime. He was a little manic and over the top for the last couple of days shooting, constantly on the phone, texting and emailing between takes. But then we were done, and that was that.
Neveldine adds:
He was on fine form at the wrap party, but the next morning was the last time I saw him. Last thing he said to me, was ‘I’ve seen the next step, the way through this, through all this. And I think my guys have cracked it. Could be scary, should be cool’. But he wouldn’t explain what he meant.
On the night of his disappearance, Cage left a message on the phone of his recently-married son Weston, lead singer of Eyes of Noctum, saying only ‘When they ask, tell them “dimensional quadrature”’.
It was while researching this peculiar phrase – it is a mathematical term, concerned with numerical integration – that I met Professor Peter King, and the pieces of the puzzle of Nicolas Cage’s disappearance finally fell into place.
King is the world’s leading authority on incunabula and rejectamentalia. He’d contacted me about archiving my papers at the Miskatonic Institute of Technology.
He explained that the term ‘dimensional quadrature’ is usually attributed to H.G. Wells but actually originates in Charles Eric Maine’s 1955 novel Timeliner: A Story of Time and Space. Maine apparently adopted it to describe a method of time-travel because of the popular misconception, perpetuated by Wells’ 1895 The Time Machine, that time is the fourth dimension. This is not the case, and scientists at MiskaTech have recently demonstrated experimentally that the fourth dimension is a physical plane intersecting our own and a number of other dimensions.
They can tell us little about the nature of the fourth dimension, this phantom zone, other than that it is very different to the world we know. And that once you open up a portal to it, if you listen carefully – very, very carefully – you can just make out what sounds like a single, solitary human voice. Distorted, crying. Shouting and raging. Consuming the very walls that imprison it.
I have now heard it on two occasions.
Is it the voice of Nicolas Cage?
I cannot definitively say.
But could it really be anyone else?
Who else would have pushed so hard? Burned with such intensity? Broken on through to the other side?
Who else could or would have taken acting, literally, to another dimension?
I am Jason Wyngarde, and this is my mysterious world – our mysterious world. Join me again next week, when we hunt, south of the border, for Chupacabra and Peuchen. Thank you and goodnight.
8/5/11
Mark Bould 