Finalist: 2008 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards
(Top 10 thriller genre category; top 100 overall from 3900 entries)
Semi-finalist: 17th Annual Write Movies Writing Contest
You make my job easy, writing great pages I enjoyed reading… I connect and care about Joe, get engaged easily in all your scenes thanks to the conflict and tension you create in each one. Great job all around!
- KARL IGLESIAS: UCLA Instructor, script analyst, author (Writing for Emotional Impact, The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters)
SYNOPSIS
A few years later he meets a mysterious journalist, Trish, at his sister’s wedding (to an army officer). Meanwhile, half a world away mass murder is about to be committed…
An American airliner is flying over Burma. On board is the one man who could beat Warren in the race for the presidency. But the plane’s shot down, killing everyone on board. The perpetrators of the crime are - it’s assumed - the Burmese junta.
The White House dispatches a naval task force to attack Burma. But Trish resurfaces and tells Joe it was the Americans who shot down their own plane as a pretext to invade. The motivation? Oil.
Joe’s skeptical about this apparently wild conspiracy theory, but the evidence mounts. And so does the body count: a drug dealer who shot footage in Burma that implicates America, and Joe’s best friend and mentor who uncovers lies told by the US military, and winds up dead in a waste compactor.
As Joe investigates, it gets harder to avoid the conclusion that his father is involved - even after the death of the rival presidential candidate turns out to be a coincidence, and Trish’s oil motivation theory falls over.
Warren’s got a lot of political capital invested in a bill promoting anti-missile defences on commercial airliners. The Burmese tragedy has given the project unqualified support and Warren owns shares in InfoTech - the weapons company developing the system. He’s also close to a shady army officer, Colonel Kincaid, who’s been leading black op’s in Burma for years.
In the end, Joe’s army officer brother-in-law has a crisis of conscience, and helps Joe put the last pieces of the puzzle together, before he too is murdered.
Joe confronts his father with the evidence, secretly filming him for a planned broadcast. But it turns out his father was duped. Col. Kincaid, however, knew the man responsible for bringing down the plane was the owner of InfoTech - Martinez. Kincaid helped him with the cover-up while insulating Warren from the truth. In a climactic confrontation, uncomfortable truths about Warren’s past - unrelated to Burma - come back to haunt him.
A final twist reveals the actual shooter was a member of an oppressed Burmese minority - Trish’s cause célèbre. Having been supplied with the missile by Martinez, the woman shot down the plane hoping to prompt America to attack Burma and topple the oppressive junta.
Joe threatens a TV crew with a hand grenade to get his story on air. However, it’s a Pyrrhic victory when a fugitive Martinez claims Joe’s only contributing to “scandal fatigue” amongst the public, allowing people like him to get away with such crimes in the future.
