THE WRONGFULLY ACCUSED
Based heavily on the case of the Central Park Five. — Five teens are detained by the police and forced to confess to a crime (the rape and assault of a jogger) that happened the night before, though none of them knew anything about it. Two were arrested in the area that night and three others were recognized by locals as having been in the general area at some point that night. The police are hostile, brutal, and fierce, and force the five to confess while in a lengthy and lonely detainment—and they're only kids, so they say whatever the cops want them to on the promise they can go home; meanwhile the police invented and controlled the story throughout, simply to net five easy collars. The five each give a distinctly separate confession crafted to implicate the others more than themselves. The media gets wind of this bombastic story and—without caring whether or not it’s true—turn the city against the five for the sake of getting attention. Before the trial of the five begin, a serial rapist (early twenties) is caught and confesses to the rape in question—but the media, police, and city altogether have their minds made-up and wouldn't dare look like fools for the sake of the truth. State prosecutors portray the boys as animalistic sadists, despite actually being mostly timid and kind. The victim recovered enough to take the stand but the concussion she suffered during the even caused her to not remember the perpetrator(s), which was detrimental to the boys' case. The timelines didn't add up, and her insistence that it was definitely not five perpetrators (“I think it was only one, but no more than two”) is disregarded by the state as misremembering; the courts don't care. The boys had stuck together when they realized that they'd all be going down for this together, and they didn't want to take pleas (and falsely incriminate one another to lessen their own punishment). During deliberation, Juror #5 believes they’re innocent but the other 11 argue "they confessed so obviously they did it," even though there’s no evidence at all to support that claim; they harass her until she concedes. All five are convicted. The three youngest were tried together, and one is shot to death by an angry citizen while leaving the courthouse; the surviving two are later incarcerated in juvenile detention. The older two, also tried together (as adults), are incarcerated; as convicted “rapists” the other inmates make life for them truly miserable. Years later, the one of them—still in prison—meets the real rapist when they’re transferred to the same block, and the real rapist feels guilty; he contacts the justice system and confesses (again) and the case is reopened, and the real rapist admits details that were previously unknown or unexplained… and, eventually, the next generation—being not as easily convinced by news media—elect to exonerate the five.
NOTE: Ava DuVernay’s gut-wrenching, heart-breaking 2019 Netflix miniseries When They See Us accomplished all that I would have attempted to invoke with this idea—so scrap it.
THE TWELVE-MONTH AGENCY
Eleven specialized assassins begin inducting and training the twelfth that will complete their calendar-themed racket, allowing them to begin an elaborate plan to assassinate the man who trained the 11 before defecting to Soviet Russia. (This defector was their original 12th.) The year is 1965.
The defector was a CIA agent who built a team of 12 agents and then used their combined skills and efforts to "infiltrate a Russian combine" when, in actuality, he wanted a team that could infiltrate it and then be killed, so that the CIA would presume he was among the dead—but the 11 were trained too well and survived the ambush expertly, escaping with great injury but nonetheless alive. The defector walked away, casually, with Soviet envoys. That was in 1963.
In 1961, when the 11 were chosen and inducted into the team, the defector had their military and civilian records legally destroyed, to make them "ghosts", untraceable to any country. This meant that the government would send the team directly into Soviet land and not expect them to come back or ever call for rescue; they were expected to be successful—and, if they weren't, an international incident wouldn't occur. This meant that when the 11 escaped and wanted to get back into America, they couldn't because there was no record of them having citizenship, and they couldn't reach anyone high enough in the government who would believe them, because only three men knew: JFK, RFK, and McNamara, and one was dead, one was in the thresher with the common man, and the other was holed-up coordinating a war. All three had initially thought the mission failed and that all 12 died, but actually all 12 lived and the mission had been sabotaged—designed to fail. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 resulted in RFK urging JFK to fast-track this project, and the President went to his grave thinking he pushed them too soon into readiness.
Two of the earliest considered candidates for the team were Charles Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald—two decorated Marine snipers—but both failed the preliminary psych evaluation, for different reasons. Russia later did acquire Lee Harvey Oswald's services (on the defector’s recommendation) and used him not only as the instrument for the assassination of JFK but the patsy for the “reasoning”. (Elsewhere in Texas, Charles Whitman went on to kill 16 people on his college campus, using a clocktower as a sniper’s roost.)
The defector, after erasing the identities of his 11 subordinates, gave them each a unique codename corresponding to a month of the year:
January: the defector, a CIA agent who was in special ops since the end of WWII; honed his team-building skills as an operator for Operation Paperclip; during this endeavor, he crossed paths with Soviet operators with whom he negotiated for an eventual cushy early retirement in exchange for selling gov’t secrets for the next 20 years.
February: former WWII Army Engineer-turned-government researcher for nuclear and bioweapons.
March: American double-agent, having previously "defected" to the Soviet Union from 1948-1959, passing Soviet information back to the US; fluent in Russian dialects and customs.
April: military advisor and savvy tactician, stationed in Vietnam from 1955 to 1961; "died" in combat rather than had his identity scrubbed.
May: police detective from Chicago who hunted-down a supposed racist serial killer (white man killing people of color) but was actually a Soviet agent tasked with stoking fear, anger, and unrest in the black community.
June: tech specialist; former Navy test pilot and former Mercury Program candidate.
July: investigator in the House Congress of Un-American Activities (from 1945 to 1959) who both confirmed and cleared various citizens of the accusations against them, and is a specialist on Communism and the Soviet ideology.
August: former US Marine, veteran of the Korean War, who—in 1951—defended his wounded comrades single-handedly; first, with a rifle, until it was empty; then a sidearm, then all available grenades, then an entrenching shovel. He tossed a live frag grenade back at the enemy, received multiple wounds from bayonets, bullets, and shrapnel, and was ultimately taken prisoner. He was privately awarded the Medal of Honor and, when finally exchanged for and returned home, he elected to be declared dead—to remain a ghost, for future covert missions.
September: US Army Captain stationed in West Berlin during the 1948 Berlin Blockade; attempted to forge a path out of Berlin, through confidence and choreography, and succeeded in rescuing 34 high-value assets with three trucks through East Germany and various Soviet checkpoints.
October: went undercover as a Cuban in 1959 to aid Castro in overthrowing Batista's regime (because, at the time, Castro had sought US aid and was presumed to want democracy, but later chose communism and sided with the Soviets); then became a mole in the Castro regime.
November: forger, con artist, and escape artist who was finally captured by the FBI in 1960 and imprisoned before agreeing to exchange life in prison for twenty-five years’ servitude to the US government.
December: piloted a stealth submarine armed with a single nuclear warhead, perpetually trained on Moscow, in 1956 [in response to Soviet threats about nuclear war after the Suez Canal Crisis], patrolling the Mediterranean Sea while waiting in radio silence, surrounded by a throng of proto-Navy Seals ready to be dispatched into Turkey at a moment’s notice.
And, after sneaking back into the United States using fake documentation, the 11 found their new 12th:
January II: US special ops agent who went into Laos in 1962 but was ultimately injured and unable to be rescued, becoming a POW for two years before he was exchanged for; the politics of “peacekeeping by lying” kept the US gov’t from going back for him and later from admitting he was theirs; by the time he returned home, all trust in the US gov’t was gone… He decided to lay low and live-out the rest of his life as a ‘hired gun’ in the city... until he was found by May and July, and was convinced to put his skills to use and "possibly earn restitution from the US gov’t by completing an unfathomably important and yet-privy-to task on their behalf”. The first time they tried, the plan had been designed to fail—but this time the Soviets don't know what’s coming, and neither does the defector.
THE STARS SEND THEIR OWN
A friend group of five self-conscious young adults take a midnight trip to the beach, as they are wont to do. Devon is lethargic and apathetic; Henry hates crowds and public presentation; Rick is an unadventurous homebody; Sarah has oft-crippling anxiety; Jane is a sheepish wallflower. Sitting beachside they notice something zooming across the sky; they believe it to be a shooting star until they realize it's falling—towards them. It skips along the water and crashes into the sand before them: a glittery metal ball. One of them touches it, and the ball dissolves, dropping its contents onto the sand: five small orbs (of distinct colors of the visible light spectrum) that immediately begin vibrating. The orbs each seek out a life force as they zip upward into the air, zeroing-in on each of the five friends; they try to evade and swat them away, but the orbs supernaturally embed themselves in the protagonists via the nearest part of the body. They all topple over, in pain, as the orbs imbue them with superpowers…
Carmine Red: “Reaction” — Devon — basically now catlike, with great flexibility, quick reflexes, sharp fangs and fingernails, night vision, advanced senses, and a regenerative healing factor.
Canary Yellow: “Light” — Henry — can create own light, whether radiating it, emanating firefly-like wisps, producing ribbon-like tendrils with the capabilities of tentacles, hurling explosive white-hot balls, and blasting from a linear distance with a plasmatic beam.
Spring Green: “Reach” — Rick — the powers of supersonic flight, telekinesis (anything within sight), and localized teleportation (limited to areas within sight).
Picton Blue: “Respite” — Sarah — can slow-down her perception of time to 10% and move ably within this extrapolated period (essentially giving her the ability of super-speed) and can divine the answer to any question, in addition to having a precognitive instinct, which allows for inexplicable evasion and astounding accuracy.
English Violet: “Shadow” — Jane — can become intangible (phase through things), transform into a gaseous form, levitate, and can craft tendrils of shadow that absorb light and smother life.
Unbeknownst to them, these orbs were sent through space by their protectors, after the protectors had been overrun by a malevolent force bent on absorbing the powers in addition to their own, so that they may better invade a stronghold of a planet and launch a coup, thereby becoming the rulers of the most formidable planet and de facto the rulers of the universe. (The current rulers are a benevolent and just race of beings on the verge of becoming fifth-dimensional.)
A total five metal spheres of five colorful orbs each were sent hurtling toward the nearest planet with advanced life—Terra, aka Earth—and the other four spheres landed elsewhere, in urban and remote locations, being discovered at a wide variety of times but ultimately imbuing a total twenty-five people with the varied powers of the universe. (Ex: a sphere crashed into a rice paddy in Southern China and the orbs attached themselves to five random sleeping villagers.) These other powers include the manipulations of fire, ice, water, plants, air, electricity, rock/earth, metal and magnetics, sound (vibrations), time, matter, space, and energy; interdimensional teleportation; strength and indefatigability; self-replication; ghost summoning and companionship; inertia and momentum; psionics (incl. telepathy); impermeability and a rubber-like body; astral projection and illusion-creation; density/gravity; invisibility; necromancy and immortality; and at least one other, but likely more given that these will often be combined with others.
THE TRAVELER
A man wrapped and bundled in robes and scarves, to shield himself from the beating sun and the sand-whipping winds, scours the desert in search of a place of sanctuary, after having been cast out of his "post-apocalyptic" tribe and sent into exile. He was recently waylaid at an oasis village for refugees until it was sacked by plundering marauders. — This story is told mostly through flashbacks, as it ranges from his life before exile (in a semi-prosperous farming community on a plateau, with his three sons Tybalt, Mercutio, and Benvolio (people generally have names that stood the test of time, like in the works of Shakespeare), to being framed for the theft of group resources and, after a council trial, ejected from the community) to his fleeing the oasis for new sanctuary. Perhaps, in the end, he sees a glimmer across the dunes and discerns that a new community in the deep horizon awaits him—only, as he nears, he realizes it’s the remnants of skyscrapers, and the only people living here are scavengers like the marauders he encountered earlier…
THE STORY BEHIND THE SCAR
“How'd you get that scar?” a customer asks his waitress, pointing to the long scar on the inside of her forearm. She stares back at him, setting his meal in front of him. The restaurant is closing soon, so she pulls up a chair and joins the guy and his girlfriend, and she begins her story...
Tumultuous upbringing; domestic abuse; ran away from home. Learned to get by on the streets, through wiles and scams; learned deception and sleight of hand, and how to handle guns; concocted alibis for lifted IDs; met other thieves and criminals, and got off the street; joined in heists and smuggling; had connections and currency, and eventually got her alias on the same FBI list as the others in her group.
Fled the country; did international jobs in Europe and Asia Minor; earned the attention of Italian, French, and German police as well as an Interpol “Red Notice” (bounty); then, to kill two birds with one stone, an int’l arms smuggler that she trusted used her as a patsy to take the heat off of a big deal. She was imprisoned, then extradited to the US where she eventually took a plea deal to help catch the kingpin of her former operation; succeeding, she only served seven years. Barred from working in certain fields, and not wanted by most others, she now waits tables.
The couple doesn’t quite believe her, thinking this just a spontaneous story told for kicks; she shrugs it off and fakes a lie, saying, “You’re right—it's really from a pitchfork accident on my grandparents' farm when I was a kid.” The couple nod, accepting this answer; they appreciated the story, tip her well, and leave. She sighs and gets back to closing up shop.
THE GAS STATION ATTENDANT
While asking for $10 to be put on his pump, a guy complains to the gas station cashier about how shitty his day was, and how nothing in his life has gone right, and how he can count over a hundred shitty things that have ruined him thus far. The gas station cashier (a gnomish oaf with wrinkled ears) tells him he'll grant the guy one "do over," like a checkpoint in life, where he can go back in time to that moment and change whatever he wants in his life—in the span of one day—and then return to the present-day of his life following that decision. After some convincing [that this opportunity is no joke, as the cashier is an elf wizard from the future or something] the guy recounts a number of events that he'd like to change, eventually settling on one of the earliest. He returns home, wary and nervous, and goes to bed; when he wakes up, it’s that one day he mentioned—way back in elementary school—and his parents are still alive, and he’s only eight years old; at school, later, he kisses a girl he was too nervous to kiss the first time, which he always deeply regretted because he felt they really had a connection and could've been great together. He returns home, plays outside, does homework, engages with his parents, has dinner, and goes to bed—happy. He awakes in the present-day and looks around, examining his situation at home and on social media; distraught to find that nothing changed, he rushes-off to the gas station to speak to the cashier, angry and feeling gypped. The cashier says that he must not have chosen a point that would’ve been truly impactful if it didn't change his life in any way whatsoever; the moral, don't ruminate on the past or cling to regrets, because generally you're overhyping them and your life won't be all too different.
THE OTHER SIDES OF THE WALL
Two films that take place at the same time, and take place on either side of the Berlin Wall during the middle years of the Cold War. At the beginning of each is the paralleled shot of the protagonist staring across a checkpoint at the other film’s protagonist; the Western one casually stopping to stare, and the Eastern one lingering with mournful desire. Once they wave to each other—slowly, briefly—the perspective pulls away and follows them on the rest of their day. (In both cases, the camera doesn't physically pass the wall or zoom-in, to emphasize the physical and emotional distance between our protagonist and other.)
The Westerner was a resident of Berlin who quietly resisted the Nazis since Hitler first rose to power, and survived the Russian onslaught and the conquering of Berlin. He helped to evict the Nazis and welcomed the Americans; embraced reconstruction, Eisenhower and JFK, ads and commerce and Coca-Cola, and the democratic ideology of the West—all the while, however, he laments the diminishment of the German culture he grew-up with, which was pretty much overwritten by the Third Reich and hasn’t been seen since. His reward for overcoming Hitler’s tyranny was prosperity and freedom. His drama on this day is interpersonal and tied-up with business, as familial issues hang heavy while his bosses investigate the source of recent embezzlements. Tension and interrogation; anger and accusations; the fatigue of overbearing commercialism and profit-focused enterprise. On his way home that night, passing that same checkpoint, he joins a throng that’s gathered by its gate: an older woman (the other protagonist) had tried to run across the gap and was quickly shot-down, and now lies dead on the asphalt.
The Easterner was a Polish farmer whose farm was razed by the Nazis in 1939; she starved as she endured the Germans rolling-out in Barbarossa—forced to cater to them, and was twice raped. She had her farm razed again when the Russians came through on their mission of vengeance, when the tanks toppled her barn and their fires killed her cattle; again, forced to cater to the soldiers, and was repeatedly raped. She again lost her farm—this time permanently—to the Kolkhoz, when the USSR seized Poland, so she left for Berlin to petition to leave to the West. She was denied and instead bussed to the Ural Mountains for a manufacturing job; having no experience in this, her third major error gets her sent to a workcamp in Siberia. On this day, she has returned to Berlin—coming here directly after being let-out from the workcamp, with a brief stopover at her old farm—and now stares across the checkpoint, where freedom is so close yet so far away. Stalin is long-dead and the norm has descended toward starvation and stagnation; life is a bland husk of humanity, and she’s a walking ghost.
THE THAI PRISON FIGHTER
A Thai prison fighter exercises, trains, and battles other inmates in an endeavor to reduce his sentence (having been convicted for meth manufacturing); not only is his effort succeeding, but the warden recommends him to the Thai Olympic team, along with a few other prisoners. He sees this as his best opportunity to restore his honor and be pardoned, per the warden’s twisted rules, however the other inmates see their transportation to Milan as great opportunity to escape—and when the escape attempt begins, the protagonist has no choice but to join them (or else face punishment for being presumed among them in spirit, but too slow/inept to avoid a quick recapture).
During the Olympic boxing games, the commentators comment on how Thailand’s whole team was prisoners and they escaped while en route to the pavilion. (I’m not sure where the story goes from there, but ideally the protagonist gets recaptured, believed, and given a shot at redemption.)
THE DATING SCHEME
A married man falls in love with another woman; his wife finds out and he admits it, asking for a divorce; she won't grant him the divorce, though, because she doesn't want to give him the satisfaction of being able to marry the woman he left her for. He moves into his own apartment, to live, love, and gallivant with his mistress, and his wife lives on her own, spiteful and alone in their old house. Still unable to move on, legally, he determines that the only way she'll divorce him and let him marry his mistress is if she wants to marry someone else herself.
He hires a man whom he believes she would fall for, based on his physical appearance and basic personality (though he fabricates for this potential mate a series of interests and opinions that reflect his wife’s). He devises a meet-cute where the mate “happens upon“ his wife; he then coaches the mate through courting her, and through getting serious—teaching him to be cultured and mysterious. (Note that this mate was a poor blue collar worker, recently laid-off, and he is given a Pygmalion treatment and a contract entitling him to $100,000 once the divorce is processed.) The mate slips-up a few times, in their courtship, but he spins it to his advantage (re: mystery and culture) and, with time, the wife really does come to love and see a future with him. She calls her husband and wants to meet, proposing that they do divorce—and he feigns shock and hastily agrees. Papers are drawn-up and they both sign and submit.
Two possible endings, because I’m indecisive:
The Hollywood ending: the mate actually did begin to fall for the wife, and actually proposes to her and maintains the charade—and he doesn't even want the $100,000. Perhaps he confesses his ruse but declares that-all which was earnest, and she is upset but eventually sees past it because “Hollywood” and they do get married. Everyone is happy.
The karmic ending: the mate falls for the mistress, during all of the Pygmalion shenanigans, and vice versa; the mate then reveals himself to the wife and leaves her, and the mistress leaves the man—to his utter shock and dismay, especially since he had already paid the mate the $100,000. Vengeful, he tracks the two traitors to a hotel, enters their room, and shoots them both dead; he then goes to his old house with the intention of shooting his wife, too, but she gets the drop on him and kills him before he gets the chance.
Original document created 08/06/2014.