I found a script

Apparently, I wrote a script in 1997. I found it while cleaning out some storage today. It has ‘An original screenplay by [me]’, © by [me], and a Writers Guild of America West number on it.

It’s 30 pages. The first 28 pages are in script format. The last two pages are the rest of the story, single-spaced. The story is about a hapless girl whose dreams, while she is dreaming them, become reality. She is lured into a secret government project that is trying to enhance people’s psychic abilities so that they can carry out espionage and assassinations in corpus, while the dreamer is safely locked away in a research facility. (IOW, the dreamer is in two places at once.) There’s a guy who breaks into a secure data library to steal information on the project. (In a previous life, I worked for a government contractor so I knew the kind of security involved in… certain projects.) The guy sells information to a hacker whose mission is to expose secret government projects he finds immoral. It would be nice if I had written the rest of the script, the description of which is on the last two pages. But the story is there, anyway.

Since I have no idea how to sell it, get an agent, or any of that, and since it’s not the kind of film my friends would make, I guess it will wind up back in a box. Too bad I didn’t do anything with it 20 years ago. ISTR there’s a recent movie where agents get into people’s dreams, and the Hacker With A Mission sounds a bit like Wikileaks.

I dunno man, sounds pretty current. Just call it The Chelsea Manning Story.

That’s the problem. In 1997 it would have been interesting. Now it’s just current events. (Well, except for the astral projection part.)

Take comfort in that most scripts don’t get finished, most scripts that do get finished don’t get made, and most scripts that do get made don’t make any money.

Sorry, even in 1997 it would have looked like a rip-off of Dreamscape.

And, well before that, The Lathe of Heaven.