TOP STORY
SCRIPT INFORMATION
Script Type: Feature
Genre: Suspense, Action, High-Tech, Character-Driven Drama
Pages: 135 Pages
A psychopathic genius media-mogul, Ben Shepard, uses his financial power and high-level government and underground connections, to manipulate the public and frame the innocent, while creating horrific, unthinkable, tragedies for enormous profit. The latest is what appears to be a terrorist attack on the Children’s Museum, on the San Francisco Pier, killing over 100 children!
One of the victim’s mother, a well-known criminal psychologist, Dawn Mathews, and her detective husband Lou, are devastated at the murder of their child and are desperate for justice. They are drawn into the crime by the wife of the News Media’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Doug Barnes, who suspects Ben of creating tragedies for first coverage – and confronts him. Doug disappears.
Learning that Dawn and Lou are onto him, Ben uses new high-end technologies of deception, putting his machine into motion. The Top Story, withering in action, losing huge ad revenue once skyrocketing from it, seeks a way to to piggy-back its tragic history, inflaming it, to boost ad sales back up. He frames Dawn as the insane mass murderer responsible for the deaths of 100 children in the Children’s Museum Bombing, that killed her child! He forces her and Lou on the run, and that becomes part of the nation-wide compulsive news-watching that brings in more billions. Then Lou is murdered leaving Dawn alone to fend for herself, on the run.
Dawn is framed for Lou’s murder too, increasing the illusion of her madness to the world audiences now tuning in. Alone, wrought with pain from her losses, in the middle of nowhere, and being hunted by every police officer in the country she hides in the deep woods of Mid-America.
“Dawn Matthews – THE MAD DOC – Mass Murderer of Children, her own child and husband” is the only news story on television.
Dawn treks across America on foot, through forests, slums, and other invisible locations, determined to right this unbelievable crime and frame-up, one enraged foot at a time; exhausted, frightened, in pain, and filthy; but focused like a lion about to attack its prey.
She holds Ben Shepard at gunpoint in his News Media Television Studio on the top floor of a skyscraper in New York city, and in front of the entire world hungry for the next twist of this Top Story, THE MAD DOC – Madwoman Dr. Dawn Matthews – tells America the “absolute truth”.
Holding up a photo of her dead, murdered child and husband for them all to see, she intelligently explains how her family was brutally killed by this maniac, and why Ben Sheppard and his associates killed them. Everything she’s saying makes sense. But Ben’s well-honed news machine spins it all to make her look like she is nothing but a criminally insane mass murderer, and Ben Shepard yet another victim, who only tried to save the world from her via his News Programming.
“Tragedy, as Entertainment” is the new normal and TOP STORY takes us inside a world that holds the power to create confusing illusions of reality for profit, that under the wrong hands can create deep mis-perceptions of the truth, making the innocent look guilty, and the guilty look innocent. It takes human tragedy and spins it as entertainment, while innocent lives are framed, and murdered, for profit, and psychopathic criminals who cast themselves as saviors, run the show!
Related Writing
SCRIPT INFORMATION
Script Type: Feature
Genre: Suspense, Action, High-Tech, Character-Driven Drama
Pages: 135 Pages
A psychopathic genius media-mogul, Ben Shepard, uses his financial power and high-level government and underground connections, to manipulate the public and frame the innocent, while creating horrific, unthinkable, tragedies for enormous profit. The latest is what appears to be a terrorist attack on the Children’s Museum, on the San Francisco Pier, killing over 100 children!
One of the victim’s mother, a well-known criminal psychologist, Dawn Mathews, and her detective husband Lou, are devastated at the murder of their child and are desperate for justice. They are drawn into the crime by the wife of the News Media’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Doug Barnes, who suspects Ben of creating tragedies for first coverage – and confronts him. Doug disappears.
Learning that Dawn and Lou are onto him, Ben uses new high-end technologies of deception, putting his machine into motion. The Top Story, withering in action, losing huge ad revenue once skyrocketing from it, seeks a way to to piggy-back its tragic history, inflaming it, to boost ad sales back up. He frames Dawn as the insane mass murderer responsible for the deaths of 100 children in the Children’s Museum Bombing, that killed her child! He forces her and Lou on the run, and that becomes part of the nation-wide compulsive news-watching that brings in more billions. Then Lou is murdered leaving Dawn alone to fend for herself, on the run.
Dawn is framed for Lou’s murder too, increasing the illusion of her madness to the world audiences now tuning in. Alone, wrought with pain from her losses, in the middle of nowhere, and being hunted by every police officer in the country she hides in the deep woods of Mid-America.
“Dawn Matthews – THE MAD DOC – Mass Murderer of Children, her own child and husband” is the only news story on television.
Dawn treks across America on foot, through forests, slums, and other invisible locations, determined to right this unbelievable crime and frame-up, one enraged foot at a time; exhausted, frightened, in pain, and filthy; but focused like a lion about to attack its prey.
She holds Ben Shepard at gunpoint in his News Media Television Studio on the top floor of a skyscraper in New York city, and in front of the entire world hungry for the next twist of this Top Story, THE MAD DOC – Madwoman Dr. Dawn Matthews – tells America the “absolute truth”.
Holding up a photo of her dead, murdered child and husband for them all to see, she intelligently explains how her family was brutally killed by this maniac, and why Ben Sheppard and his associates killed them. Everything she’s saying makes sense. But Ben’s well-honed news machine spins it all to make her look like she is nothing but a criminally insane mass murderer, and Ben Shepard yet another victim, who only tried to save the world from her via his News Programming.
“Tragedy, as Entertainment” is the new normal and TOP STORY takes us inside a world that holds the power to create confusing illusions of reality for profit, that under the wrong hands can create deep mis-perceptions of the truth, making the innocent look guilty, and the guilty look innocent. It takes human tragedy and spins it as entertainment, while innocent lives are framed, and murdered, for profit, and psychopathic criminals who cast themselves as saviors, run the show!
Related Writing
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