Smoke - The Feature

October 03, 2016

Just finished the first draft of the feature version of "Smoke".

Logline: After an isolated island resort catering to the world’s financial, political and cultural elites has closed for the season, a disparate group of attractive, young people with perfect teeth sit around a campfire and amuse themselves with banter, beer and cannabis, until one of their number suspects the others of not being who they seem to be.

Synopsis:

A palatial resort, owned and operated by a multi-national corporation and catering to various world elites, is closed for the season. Everyone has already left the isolated, tropical island except for nine young men and women on the staff,. Those remaining behind consist of four women and five men, all of whom are attractive young people with perfect teeth, who decide to amuse themselves by sitting around a campfire, smoking weed, drinking beer and reminiscing about their summer, while waiting for their flight the next morning.

Wait…actually, that’s notpreciselytrue. There are four such young women and four such young men, all in the late 20s/early 30s, but there also another male, a little older than the others, whose surfer boy sell-by date has expired. Having convinced himself that the others still on the island with him, are not who they seem to be, but instead are the vanguard of an alien invasion, he's heavily medicated by the resort’s house physician just before the good doctor and the other senior managers board the final charter flight of the day, and so it’s up to their underlings to look after someone who has fallen into the abyss of psychosis until their flight the next morning.

Satisfied that their unfortunate charge, Roger, is so heavily sedated that he might need to be carried comatose onto the airplane, the others simply put him and his illness out of mind, while enjoying their last evening in paradise, and regale themselves with playful insults tossed in one another’s direction and with amusing anecdotes about some of the excesses of the guests. All too soon, however, finding nothing else to talk about, they begin to speak openly about Roger and his madness. After all, even though they're talking behind his back, "It can do no harm, could it really?", they agree, since he’s sound asleep in the hotel and well out of ear shot.

Roger, however, is not asleep and not inside the hotel. Instead, he’s hiding in the shadows and overhearing every single, insulting word they say about him…which doesn’t offend him so much as it convinces him that his misgivings were right on the mark. That is, his eight co-workers are all aliens, or at least most of them. He offers to surrender to them, to assist in their planetary conquest, since he hates his life and despises his kind, but only after he murders (perhaps) one of them, something he deeply regrets since his victim might have been human after all, instead of an alien. But he’s not certain.

Sometimes, words can kill.

One exterior scene at night, seen from the perspective of the hotel, a dune, chairs around a campfire, and the beach.