![[Austin]](/images/ads/AFF2024a.png)
A FATAL CURE
A loyal PR consultant rudely awakens when mysterious deaths confront her with BigPharm's sociopath gatekeeper, who fiercely protects the secret about their happiness pills.
Helena is the hub in the tightly knitted PR department in a pharmaceutical company. The Vice President – her confidant – rewards her loyalty with a generous raise. While the team celebrates, the VP turns up to announce a campaign for the company’s trump card, a new stress-reducing drug. He also introduces a new colleague, a legal expert hired to keep an eye on pitfalls.
She sees a TV news-item about a man, who after using a similar drug is rushed to hospital and dies. Shocked, she shares her concern with the team, only to be scoffed at by the legal adviser. She seeks comfort and advice from her daughter, a physician, who recounts the case of one of her patients who died in the same way. Helena is in doubt but to keep her conscience clear she suggests that the company warn users about the risk. Now the legal expert slanders her.
Backed up by warnings from the Pharmaceutical Agency, Helena sharpens her arguments about the company’s responsibility. The legal expert makes up far-fetched statements to stop her. The colleagues swallow his explanations whole, block Helena’s warning to the users and stigmatize her as paranoid.
A stressed colleague takes one of the pills and becomes comatose. The doctor pretends to need a list of the pills’ ingredients for treatment and tricks Helena, still in shock, to give it to him. She has broken her vow of confidentiality to save a dear colleague and has put her own future at stake.
She contacts an old lawyer friend for help. He reassures her that the doctor’s note to the authorities probably will drown in bureaucracy. Hoping to distract attention from her broken vow, she warns the VP that the colleague’s coma demonstrates that use of the drug involves a risk. He brushes it off, referring to the firm’s solid testing program. Hoping to get rid of the legal adviser, she also presents proof for the VP that he never studied law, he is a fraud.
The VP informs the CEO that the legal adviser left his last company in chaos. The CEO shields the legal adviser. To get rid of Helena, the legal adviser makes the CEO believe that she is behind alarming stories in the media. The CEO intimidates the VP to expose her or else …
Now the legal adviser plants the idea that the coma was caused by an overdose. Helena digs the pill bottle up from under a book case and hands it to the VP. He finds out that five pills are missing and follows the overdose theory. What is real and what is sheer fabrication? Desperate about her broken vow and in doubt about the overdose, Helena contacts her ex, now an established pharmaceutical scientist He reveals that the mysterious deaths are caused by a forbidden and secret opioid in the drug. Information about the risk will only give the patients a false sense of security. Together they confront the CEO and the VP. It turns out that the VP was kept in the dark. He cancels the campaign, sacks the CEO and the legal adviser and promotes Helena.
Helena is like Erin Brockovich, she finds out what is real and confronts those in power.
A 104 page WGA registered script.
Woman 50 skinny
Man 45 short thin
Ten angry men
none
Atlanta (Second Place) [2000]
International Independent (Second Place, silver) [2017]
Show More
ScriptLinks
Post Your Script Here!Untouchable!
A blonde bombshell in stainless steel becomes a femme fatale - a relentless tiger with razor-sharp-toothed-pen spilling blood across the pages leaving nowhere, for the perpetrators to hide.
BRAVE HEARTS
In 1840, an unconventional widow risks her life when she joins forces with a charismatic journalist, brutalized tenant farmers and a traumatized exile she rescues in Montreal, to stop the most powerful men in Scotland from violently evicting Gaelic Highlanders, unaware of her own family's complicity in the ethnic cleansing.
SETTLING THE BOOKS
Lured by the reading of a billionaire rare book dealer’s will, an investigator and four other heirs are sealed in an airtight panic room, and with only four hours air, must solve the centuries-old mystery contained in the book ‘The Castilian Cypher’ in order to escape.
All My Trials, Lord
In a drunken stupor a handsome young singer kills a taxi driver while visiting Spalding County, Georgia.
Playmate
In spite of her husband’s attempts to help her, a young female writer suddenly finds herself falling into a severe depression when snippets of painful suppressed childhood memories come out in her writing at the same time as the visit of her religious fanatic mother whose own haunting memories plague her causing both women to lose themselves in the process.
Jesus Called
Three women, one of whom is seeking what lies beyond death, live on a chicken farm in the rural South and attend a funeral for their neighbor who was eaten by a hog.
Tinker's Christmas
A clumsy teenage elf is ridiculed and alienated by other young elves when he fails every assignment until his mechanical skills are discovered after the reindeer develop chicken pox and Santa asks him to modify the train to deliver the toys which he does successfully with the help of an attractive female elf and a monkey.
Private Dancer
After her husband dies leaving all of his estate to another woman, a former middle-aged psychologist with the help of a friend opens a bar where they nurture those in their employ, each of whom faces challenging situations and must dance and sing as they attempt to keep their dreams alive.
Who's There?
A bizarre comedy within which a cynical, middle-aged woman is charged with caring for her eccentric mother and goofy sister who hold daily memorial services for husband/daddy's amputated leg.
The Experiment
Ambition, class prejudice and racism forever alter the lives of a poor white boy bound for delinquency and a young Afro-American athlete headed for stardom.
