Smoke - The Feature (Revised)

October 05, 2016

Just registered this script with WGA and posted it on Inktip.com.

As of now, I've written 14 spec feature scripts and five shorts. Three of the features have been optioned and one of them (retitled “Illusions of Cyn”) is currently in post-production. Most of them have won at least one award, e.g., American Zoetrope Finalist and Semi-Finalist, Austin Film Festival Semi-Finalist, CinemaSpoke Winner (twice), and IFP Emerging Narrative (twice). My best work, however, is yet to come. I write every day.

(“Illusions of Cyn” is athttps://www.facebook.com/IllusionsofCyn/?fref=photoon Facebook and athttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt4916914/?ref=fnaltt1on IMDb.)

I've revised, slightly, both theLoglineand theSynopsisof "Smoke" as follows:

Logline: When an isolated island resort, which caters to the world’s financial, political and cultural elites, closes for the season, a disparate group of attractive young people sit around a campfire and amuse themselves with banter, beer and cannabis, until one of their number becomes convinced that at least some of the others are not 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 home the next morning.

Wait…actually, that’s not precisely true.There are four such young women and four such young men, all in the late 20s/early 30s. There’s also another male, a little older than the others, whose surfer boy sell-by date has long since expired and who contends that his co-workers, some of them anyway, are not who they seem to be, but instead are the vanguard of an alien invasion. As a result of his rantings, this unfortunate is heavily medicated by the resort’s house physician, just before he and the other senior managers board the last flight of the day, leaving their much younger underlings to look after someone who has fallen into the abyss of psychosis.

Satisfied that their charge, Roger, is so heavily sedated that he might need to be carried onto the airplane the next day, the others simply put him and his malady out of mind. Relishing in their last evening in paradise, they regale themselves with playful insults tossed in one another’s direction and 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 and unkindly about Roger and his mental condition, but where’s the harm in that? After all, even though they are cruelly disparaging him, he’s sound asleep in his hotel room some several hundred yards away and, thus, well out of ear shot.

Roger, however, is not incapacitated 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’s not certain about one of them, as her accent seems fake. 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 (maybe) one of them, something he deeply regrets since his victim might have been human after all. But he’s not certain. And not that it matters.

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.