It's done.
My first-ever, first-of-many, ten-years-in-the-making screenplay. And, I'm having my awesome, wonderful screenwriter's group review it tonight. After polishing up the draft based on their comments, I'll have my writer and movie-buff friends review it again on the 21st, bribing them with homemade treats...mmmm....
This latter reading will be "staged," i.e, actors, or "actors" will read the parts aloud so we can see how it all shakes down auditorily.
What's it about, you ask? Here's a log line-plus, and some further explanation:
First Crack
Log Line-plus: Just as Robert Coleman, a hesitant rookie journalist fresh out of the tech world may be about to lose his job, he gets thrust into investigating a psychotherapy cult guru with a taste for his young female acolytes. Robert poses as a leader and masters the group's methods--a little too well for journalistic objectivity. But he's a changed man now. Can he finish the story and save his new career? Or will his credibility vanish as he enters the group's sweet, sticky embrace? Or, will he finally put the errant guru in his place, and risk losing his job, his new community and maybe even life and limb? Or is it already too late?
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First Crack is based on an actual peer counseling group, which is still in existence. The main character and his situation are fictional. The drama of the plot centers around Robert’s struggle to keep a reporter's objectivity while awkwardly wielding a new and powerful self-confidence, which comes almost immediately once he starts using the group's methods. This chutzpah in turn leads him to try to be the first to confront the leader and help him heal using the leader’s own methods, which apparently legions before have failed to do. In a tender subplot, the protagonist's mother, also empowered by the group's methods, heals from a long drug haze and PTSD from years of abuse by Robert’s father. Witnessing this invests Robert further in the group.
Meanwhile, Robert's new journalism career is at stake if he does not produce a saleable story, so he hides his involvement and vigilantism, even as it looks like someone from inside the group may be trying to silence him for good. Tapping into the depths of Robert’s psyche, the group pulls him in ever deeper. This feeds his lust for taking down the wayward leader, and rescuing the members, particularly the younger ones. Family, career, a sense of justice, physical safety, and his own self-esteem compete vigorously for the protagonist's commitment as this psychological thriller ratchets its way up to a multiply twisted climax.
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I can't wait to hear what my cohorts have to say on this. They've been waiting a long time. We've been meeting for over a year, and they've seen dribs and drabs, fifteen pages here, twenty pages there. This is the first time they're reading the script in its entirety.
I have lots more to say on screenwriting, and the writer's strike, but it's gonna have to wait. This underemployed writer needs to go catch the bus!
