Pearls: Feature Film and Short Story
Pearls A Family Drama with a supernatural twist, as a young and fierce female protagonist learns to collaborate with her ‘Future Selves’ and redirect her life and the lives of her family. This feature is based on my short story, which is part of the LOVE IS LOUDER collection.
Tone: Matilda meets Dreamer
Logline: A courageous and precocious Pearl (9) discovers that she can see fifteen minutes into the future after her father is taken into custody, but refuses to testify at a mobster’s trial. She uses this gift to help him reclaim his life and to reunite her family, while a recurring dream of a dying old woman reveals how far her gift stretches into her own future.
ACCOLADES/AWARDS:
Semi-finalist Zoetrope Screenplay Awards (2021)
Quarterfinalist, Emerging Screenwriters - Genre Screenplay Competition 2021,
Finalist in ScreenCraft’s Cinematic Book Contest (2019)
Overview: This feature script (short story) illuminates the power of love and imagination. As Pearl discovers that she can skip forward in time and communicate with future versions of herself, she learns the power of collaboration and compassion for herself and for others. This story is about love that never dies and shows how one brave young girl can create timeless connections. Pearl learns to live her life in a nonlinear fashion and finds her own soul in those moments when she’s able to stretch her consciousness and wrap her emotional arms around every moment of her life at the same time. Pearls is a story about living in the moment and finding a lifetime of power in the ever-elusive, eternally impactful, Now.
Synopsis: The story opens at the racetrack where Pearl and her unemployed father, THEO’s (45) bet on the horses and meet the mob boss, Myron Marcucci (60) who convinces him to participate in a high stakes poker game. Theo is desperate to provide for his family, takes the bait, and wins a lot of money in the beginning. Eventually, he loses big and he has to work for Myron, which leads to his arrest by the Feds who want him to testify at Myron's upcoming trial. Theo refuses to snitch on him to protect his family and because he really doesn’t know anything that could incriminate him, so he remains in jail indefinitely. During this traumatic time, Pearl conjures Future Self, a kind of apparition of herself in the future who’s part imaginary friend and part prophetic messenger. At the same time, she begins having a recurring dream about a dying old woman who insists on seeing 'the little one,’ though Pearl only wants to see her father and tries to escape the other women in the room.
Future Self reappears randomly at first, then saves Pearl’s life by making her stop before crossing the street in anticipation of a car that runs a red light. Pearl begins to understand what’s happening and conjures Future Self to get answers to a math quiz and to outsmart the school bully. Future Self accompanies Pearl and her best friend, Marta during their after school adventures in Marta’s sketchy neighborhood and beyond. One day, they take the El train to the animal shelter in downtown Chicago so they can play with the puppies to cheer up Pearl. But Pearl’s mother, SADIE tracks them on her new cell phone and puts an end to their wild roaming. Pearl and Marta take one last trip (without the cell phone) to the racetrack where Pearl confronts Myron the Mob Boss about her father. She gets some crucial information that may help her dad and also learns that she can predict the winners of each horse race when she conjures Future Self.
Pearl gets into an altercation with the class bully with Future Self’s insistence that she push him, then she gets expelled from school. To her great surprise and delight, both of her parents are waiting for her in the Principal's office. Since her mother has to work and Pearl is required to spend the three suspension days under adult supervision, she gets to spend three days alone with her dad. Pearl convinces him to take her to the racetrack where she proves to him that Future Self can help them win back the money needed to buy his freedom. Sadie discovers their winnings and threatens to throw Theo out of the house. Pearl convinces her mother to let her prove the existence of Future Self. They go back to the race track together. They win big. But then Future Self shows her a frightening scenario where her father’s life is in danger. Pearl sneaks away from her parents and confronts Myron one last time to pay off her father’s debt. They’re finally free of him and reunited as a family.
On their way back home in their car, Pearl falls asleep and finished the dream of the dying old woman who’s the ninety-nine-year old version of her Future Self. She soon discovers that all the other women in the room are versions of her that she has yet to live. This higher consciousness moment as her own death unfolds in the future connects the young Pearl to her entire life in one instant. This montage provides a unique cinematic experience as her nine-year-old self flashes forward in time and her ninety-nine-year-old self flashes backward in time. Through this experience, she’s able to embrace her whole life as she reveals both stories simultaneously — her young self and her older, dying self together empower the nine-year-old Pearl to move forward in her life and to create the life that she dreams about.