ACT I
37 year-old, radio talk show host Satch Drake knows precisely when he and his wife Molly will retire: thirteen years, six months, five days, and two hours from...now.
What a plan they’ve made! As a syndicated financial advisor to the upwardly mobile, coast-to-coast, Satch invests...saves...just like he tells his listeners to do.
The Drakes can’t wait for the day they can officially do nothing. As he says at sign-off each day: “Do it now, so you don’t have to do anything then!”
This morning, The Satch Drake Show was canceled (“Nobody all that upwardly mobile these days, Satch...”). And their “nest egg” of savings has been lost in a ponzi scheme run by the head of the broadcast syndicate.
Satch and Molly have only one asset left: a dilapidated condo in a Florida retirement village...investment property that couldn’t be liquidated.
Act II
ReplyDeleteBecause they've never actually seen the condo and have plenty of free time on their hands all of a sudden, they drive to Florida to inspect their investment.
After a comic relief encounter with the activities director, who's just been laid off herself, they take the cranky elevator up to their unit where they find the unit occupied by an elderly couple who happen to be huge fans of the radio show.
Problem is, the elderly couple isn't supposed to be there. They're squatters ... evicted the previous year from another unit in the same building. And they're not the only people living under false pretenses in the highrise. In fact, the building isn't at all what it appears to be.
Ah-ha! Well done, Mr. B. May I share my Act II (and revised Act I) with you? I'm pretty sure that I have your e-mail address. Yes?
ReplyDeleteGot the screenplay. What a fun read!
ReplyDeleteBecause I'm a romantic whore, however, I wanted a more visceral resolution. It absolutely works as an indy script, I think. The Hollywood version (the one my emotions were angling for) would have had the hurricane sequence either pull something up from the sea or dig something up out of the ground of great value. Maybe the least among the residents could foreshadow this with tales of ... I don't know ... pirates ... Vikings ... something. I'm imaging King Lear coming to his senses after the storm to find that he's on top of the valuable thing, whatever it is. He mutters something fitting from the play, then wipe to: The denouement (probably one year later, rather than six months) ... We see that the community has been beautifully rebuilt. The sequence that reveals this could end with Granny Cass receiving the ukelele, then handing it off to Max (who did not escape his legal troubles ... this would have been left hanging earlier). We discover at the last moment that Max is on work-release and assigned to work for Cass as her yard boy or something. The baddest baddy brought low. A particular conflict between them would have been established earlier somehow ... maybe something Max says about her in absentia ... maybe she's black and he makes a comment about "blue gums." That sort of thing. We hate him. We love her.
Anyway, that's my riff. I really do think that this would make an excellent indy film, though, just the way it is.
(P.S. Use tbrosnan@gmail.com for me. Much better address.)
Just wait to read the final beat sheet...
ReplyDelete