Empress Imaginary
A Female Antichrist rises to power with help from an “Imaginary” Friend
As a child, Lisa Romadi endured endless lectures about the end times from a mother obsessed with religion and the rapture. Needless to say, this filled little Lisa with irrational fears. She would cope by escaping into an imaginary world with an imaginary friend.
However, as an adult, things hadn’t really changed. The imaginary friend never left, nor did Lisa’s fear of the end times and particularly the antichrist.
In the name of religion, Lisa climbs the political ladder, rallying the armies of the world to resist a global threat. Along the way, she avenges those who have suffered and punishes those who have made her family suffer.
Eventually, she abandons the love of forgiveness that a follower of Christ should have and instead embraces a love of judgement… blurring the lines between justice and mere revenge.
As Lisa becomes more ruthless, she also becomes more beautiful and more powerful, unwittingly leading the world into a conflict that could spell out the end of days. Meanwhile, her every step is influenced by the fantastical imaginary friend of her childhood.
A guardian angel, perhaps?
Or the emissary of a much darker force, transforming her into what she fears most?
The screenplay is 169 pages with 4 pages of production notes explaining how it could be expanded into a 9 episode series. If the feature film format is kept, the film could have a 2 to 2 1/2 hour length despite the number of script pages, as some of the action lines are rather detailed and descriptive in some parts.
There are 90 characters, most of which have only a few lines (such as news reporters). 24 of them would have minor to major status. Out of that, less than 10 would be major characters.
The screenplay has about 40 individual scenes, but half of those scenes could easily be filmed in one location if it were a moderate to large city with restaurants, a museum, etc. And all of the exotic scenes could easily be filmed on a green screen. So if filming is in a city with a green screen… a single location shoot could be possible.
The finished version of this screenplay was submitted for copyright in 2023, while a rough draft was copyrighted in 2022. It has also been registered with the Writers Guild Association. It is available to be optioned. Any interested parties are more than welcome to reach out.
This was photoshopped from images on Pinterest and meant only for pitching purposes.
Existence
The marital fighting of “A Marriage Story” meets the extraterrestrial intrigue of “Arrival”…
Husband and wife team, Jack and Miranda, spearhead the creation of an observatory that uses subatomic particles to map out deep space objects in realtime. However, after the tragic death of Miranda’s three year old nephew, she steps away from the project in order to help her sister cope with the loss of this child.
Meanwhile, Jack and billionaire Darian Lear take things into a new direction after witnessing a deep space event of extraterrestrial origin. Depression sets in as Miranda watches her husband follow Darian’s ego.
Jack dismisses her concerns as the temptation of exploring another world becomes too great to resist. Their arguments grow more and more intense.
Deep down, Miranda can’t help but wonder how insignificant her life would seem to this faraway interstellar civilization that her husband is observing, and how much more insignificant the existence of her precious nephew would seem to them. Driven to alcohol, she finds it impossible to express her feelings to Jack without fits of rage.
Pushed away from his wife emotionally, Jack presses forward with plans to eventually communicate with this interstellar society. And so he takes a mobile version of the telescope by boat to the South Pacific, plugging in to a state-of-the-art underwater research facility.
There, he makes a terrible discovery as a fleet of these alien vessels ravage an earth-like planet. Jack watches through his telescope and realizes that the existence of the entire human race will be at risk if his team back home continues to send out these subspace signals. However, before he can warn anyone, a freak storm destroys the boat and sweeps him into unknown waters.
Eventually, Jack is washed up onto a remote tropical island where he is forced to live like a castaway, unable to communicate with the rest of the world. All he can do is wait for earth’s inevitable destruction, wishing that he had listened to his wife.
Sure, she may have been unpredictably emotional and unhinged, but her instincts weren’t wrong. Neither Jack nor Miranda were completely innocent in this dispute or completely guilty. What they needed was a compromise, and because they never found one, the fate of the planet is at risk.
”Existence” could be filmed in 3 main locations-
1. A California / Nevada desert location for the observatory scenes; and Jack & Miranda’s Home scenes.
2. Hawaii for the remote island scenes.
3. An L.A. type city for the hospital scene & memorial service scene.
Despite its sci-fi twist, there would be very little special FX. The images Jack sees through the telescope could be grainy. There would only be a few seconds of high quality effects when Jack has fateful visions of earth’s demise while he’s on the island. But all in all, this is a drama about the relationship of a husband and wife and wouldn’t require a ridiculous budget.
The screenplay is 107 pages long.
There are 33 characters, 7 of which are main characters.
"Existence" was copyrighted in 2022.
This was photoshopped from images on Pinterest and is meant only for pitching purposes.
For the Love of Stark
The "Barbie" movie meets “Oppenheimer” in a WWII epic.
Like Belle from “Beauty & the Beast”, a young woman reads a book while she glides down the cobblestone streets of a storybook town. It could be a scene straight from a Disney film… until we realize that she’s reading “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler.
This is our heroine, Emma Andere.
The screenplay (written with the help of my wife) takes a look at Nazi Germany through the eyes of a naïve eighteen-year-old. Emma's misguided beliefs are driven by the loss of her mother and father. With her inheritance quickly gone, Emma is forced to get a job in a Nazi-owned mansion, where she hopes to bond with fellow patriots. Instead, she bonds with an unusual dog mistreated by these so-called patriots. Stark (part German Shepherd and part jackal) is kept there because of his incredible sense of smell. However, Stark's lack of obedience when ordered to kill, means that he's outlived his usefulness and is about to be euthanized.
Confused and frustrated, Emma rescues the dog. She quickly discovers that a spy had been planning to do the same thing- a spy that would use the dog’s sense of super smell to sniff out and then destroy canisters of heavy water needed for Hitler's hydrogen bomb. The Nazis realize this a moment too late. When they try to hunt down the dog and kill all involved, Emma vows to protect Stark. But by protecting him, she hinders her country’s efforts to build the hydrogen bomb.
From a car chase, to a narrow escape by airplane, and every imaginable danger in between, Emma is swept off with new compatriots who would soon become true friends. Along the way, she discovers that her mother and father died trying to stop Hitler’s nationalism from cannibalizing their country.
Thus begins the shift in her perspective.
Sadly, Emma’s new comrades are killed one by one, before they can destroy the heavy water that Stark has found. Now it’s all up to Emma to warn England of Hitler’s plan and to get the location of the heavy water to Winston Churchill.
Although, she has many doubts along the way. At her lowest point, she even wonders if she’s become an enemy of God, since she has aided the enemies of Hitler. After all, “Gott mit uns” (or “God with us”) is the Persian battle cry that so many Nazis have adopted.
Now all alone, with Stark as her only friend, Emma worries that Hitler might be God’s chosen weapon of judgement against heathens.
That is when the words of William Blake come to her: “And so we love the human form in Heathen, Turk, or Jew. Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, there God is dwelling too.”
It was a poem her mother often recited when Emma was just a little girl. It now has new meaning and becomes her guiding light.
With Mercy and Pity for a race of people unfairly persecuted and with Love for a half-breed dog that is now her best friend, Emma Andere pushes forward. She presses on in the face of self-doubt until she finds herself on the beaches of Dunkirk in June of 1940 where escape might just be possible.
Needless to say, this sort of historical epic would require an epic budget. There’s no point in breaking down the number of locations it would need because it would need a lot... and take a better producer than me to size it up for a projected budget. However, on the flip side, a story that speaks from the heart (like this) and still has a dazzling level of action, is very re-watchable.
Another view is another dollar.
The finished version of this screenplay was submitted for copyright in 2023, while a rough draft was copyrighted in 2022. It is available to be optioned.
This image is contains a screenshot from "The Exception", and is meant only for pitching purposes.