LOGLINES AND SYNOPSES OF SCREENPLAYS BY GERALD SCHOENEWOLF

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DESTINY

Adam Wonderling has the perfect life and perfect wife until both are blown up on 9/11. He then sinks into a kind of madness and plots a scheme of revenge that takes him to Saudi Arabia and to the wife of the man who rammed the plane into the Twin Towers.

Adam, a music executive, and his wife, Julie, an aspiring designer, are the perfect young Manhattan couple. Then one day as he is driving to his Manhattan job he hears a bulletin on the radio: the World Trade Center has been hit by an airliner. He rushes to the Twin Towers, where his wife has an interview, only to see them crumble before his eyes. Adam’s perfect life falls apart and he sinks into a depression, refusing to listen to family and friends who visit him. He tries grief counseling but ends up trying to strangle the grief counselor. One day while watching TV he sees a picture of the man who rammed the plane into the World Trade Center, along with the man’s wife. He hangs the picture on his wall. He becomes obsessed with it. Gradually he hatches a plan to go to Saudi Arabia and confront Seri, the wife. He learns how to make a vest bomb and signs up for a tour. In Saudi Arabia he breaks away from the tour, followed by two detectives, and forces his way into Seri’s apartment. He threatens to blow her up with his vest bomb, then ends up crying in her arms. She hides him from the police and they gradually get to know the human beings behind the ideologies and fall in love. The end is a Romeo and Juliet kind of tragedy.

To read the screenplay, DESTINY, click the links below:

Destiny, Part 1

Destiny, Part 2

A WAY YOU’LL NEVER BE

A black serial murderer with a dark past picks up a pretty, white teen-aged runaway. These two misfits form an unlikely and tragic bond as they take an adventurous drive from Kansas City to the Florida Keys.

Robert Allen Jones (Bobby), the son of a white mother and a black father, writes his memoirs as he awaits execution on death row. He recalls living a “normal” life, with a wife and kids, in a Kansas City suburb, until he began to form an “addiction” as he puts it, to murder. One day Bobby drives off in his car and picks up Jenny, a beautiful, talented teen-aged runaway. A precocious 17-year-old who aspires to be on “American Idol,” she tells him she is attracted to older black men and offers to “fuck” him. He drives her into the woods, pulls out a gun, and proceeds to sodomize her, much to her chagrin. They then go on a road trip to the Florida Keys. Along the way Bobby threatens to blow off the “member” of a boastful swinger who has come on to Jenny in a sleazy motel room; Bobby tells Jenny about his childhood in which his white mother abandoned him to a succession of fosters homes; Jenny wants to look up and kill Boby’s mother, and they stop overnight at a campground on the Florida coast, where they meet Howie, Marge, and their three daughters and Bobby proceeds to tell them the scariest story they’ve ever head. Bobby finally murders Jenny in a cove on the Florida Keys, where he strangles her on a sand bar as she mouths the words “I love you.” Only at the moment that he is executed does he remember her and break down and cry. This is a dark tragedy reminiscent of Felini’s La Strada.

THERAPY

A young therapist in training meets a beautiful young patient with multiple personalities who lures him into her world and he ends of falling for her and losing himself.

“Do you talk?” a young woman asks her new male therapist. She says her last therapist wouldn’t talk. Bill, the therapist, is a young man who has just begun his training as a therapist. The patient, Jeanie, a beautiful ex-ballerina, turns out to be not only suicidal but also to have four personalities. His supervisor at the training institute recommends that he refer the patient to someone more experienced, but the young man stubbornly insists he has what it takes to work with her. As her personalities reveal themselves, Bill becomes more involved. In his supervision sessions, his older supervisor questions whether Bill is developing a “countertransference” toward the patient. Bill lies and says he is perfectly fine. His girlfriend, Millie, is meanwhile becoming more and more jealous of this patient. Bill succeeds in integrating the patient’s four personalities, and then gets romantically involved with her. The next day he tells his girlfriend and his supervisor that he’s in love with Jeanie. His girlfriend slaps him. His supervisor threatens to kick him out of the institute. Bill quits the institute in a fit of temper and walks around Central Park However, his relationship with Jeanie turns upside down when she becomes suicidal again and returns to her abusive father.

NORMALITY

A pretty graduate student's attraction to a shy, normal-looking neurobiologist leads her into a world of delusion and madness.

Joyce, a pretty graduate student of psychology, is sitting in a park in New York one summer day when Shelby plops down on the bench next to her and tries in a clumsy way to pick her up. She later bemoans the fact that she can never meet "a normal man" to her friend Dinah. Dinah wonders whether Joyce has some kind of unconscious attraction to abnormal men. Later Joyce meets Lars on the elevator in her building. He is tall, blond, and attractive, and he seems rather shy, which Joyce associates with normality. He has a very prestigious job as a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University, which adds to the appearance of normality. However, as Joyce gets to know Lars, she finds out that he has an unusual "hobby," which he refers to as "teleporting." It turns out he has a delusion that he can travel to a planet in the Orion nebula late at night, and that he is the commander of security on this planet. At first Joyce is fascinated with Lars' delusion, as a student of psychology, as well as a little in love with the man; but she is gradually drawn into the delusion. As she becomes more wrapped up the night world of Lars, she becomes more deluded herself. When Lars becomes aware that Joyce has become deluded, he himself is "slapped" sane, while Joyce ends up wandering through a city park in her pajamas.

To read the screenplay, NORMALITY, click the links below:

Normality, Part 1

Normality, Part 2

STOPPING BY THE WOODS ON A RAINY EVENING

Two couples accidently meet at an isolated campsite in the woods and get to know each other a little more than they wanted.

Diane and Vic, an attractive young couple, backpack to an isolated pond in the woods. While they are skinny dipping in the pond, another couple, Bart and Wei, come along. They are lost and it is nearly sundown so they ask if it is all right to set up their tent. The two couples proceed to camp out together. Diane, who has become disinfatuated with her nerdy boyfriend, Vic, proceeds to flirt with Bart, a charismatic young man who says his occupation is "designing dreams." Wei, Bart's Asian wife, approves of the flirtation, but Vic does not. When it begins to rain late that night, Diane and Vic are forced out of their tent and into the larger tent of Bart and Wei. As the downpour continues and Diane's flirtation with Bart goes on, Vic's anger becomes less passive and more aggressive. What happens next is a rainy night of miscommunication and horror. Imagine "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf" meets "Friday the 13th" and you may have an idea of where this story goes.

To read the screenplay, STOPPING BY THE WOODS ON A RAINY EVENING, click the links below:

Stopping by the Woods, Part 1

Stopping by the Woods, Part 2

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

A heel in 1880s Russia deals with his neurotic complexes by challenging a hated classmate to a duel and playing mind-games with a sweet young whore.

“I am a sick man. I am a mean man,” narrates Dostoyevski’s Mouse in this adaptation of the classic novel. The story begins as the antihero writes in his diary, remembering a sordid past when he was a mean civil servant in the Assessor’s Office. He recalls his obsession with a Tall Officer who snubs him one evening. The Mouse then spends several weeks plotting revenge against this Tall Officer, and finally hits on a plan to bump his shoulder as he passes him, thereby hoping to force a duel. Later he barges in on a reunion of schoolmates, who end up ignoring him and mocking him, whereby he again challenges one of them to a duel. When the four men dash off to a whorehouse, he follows them, plotting his revenge, but ends up meeting Liza, a young whore and displaces his anger on her by having rough sex with her and then taunting her for a long time about how she will someday die in the whorehouse. He then begins to feel sympathy for her, makes love to her in a more gentle way, and tells her to get out of the house while she is still young. Later when she comes to visit him he again sexually abuses her and rejects her. He ends up a lonely, middle-aged man writing in his diary about his wasted life. Like Scorsese’s Raging Bull, this is a dark character study that’s as modern and accessible today as it was when Dostoyevski wrote it. This adaptation brings it to life, using modern idiomatic English.

THE INTERVIEW

A beautiful young actress arrives for an audition with a mysterious older dentist named Dr. Veritas. The “interview” ends up being a strange encounter in which both are in for a surprise.

This unusual story takes place in one location (Dr. Veritas’s office) in real time on a summer afternoon. Bliss, an actress arrives for an audition at Dr. Veritas’s apartment. When he opens the door he has a video camera and he proceeds to film her. “Are you filming this?” she asks. “Yes, I’m filming all the interviews.” She nervously enters his apartment and tries to find out what the interview is for, but he puts her off, saying he will tell her in due time. This story is a twist of the old “Beauty and Beast” theme, as the two participants slide into an encounter that leads to an odd sexual interaction and the gradually revelations of their real selves. It turns out that he is a frustrated dentist who has advertised for an actress in order find a wife, and she is a somewhat lonely and phobic young girl who has a strange rescue fantasy that involves being raped by a stranger. When her fantasy and his collide, the story takes some strange twists. It ends ambiguously with her dancing off in the sunset on the street in front of Dr. Veritas’s Manhattan apartment. It is unclear whether this will be a “one-night stand” or lead to something more.

FREUD IN LOVE

When Sigmund Freud and one of his young protégés, Victor Tausk, become involved in a romantic triangle with a femme fatal psychoanalyst-in-training, Lou Salome, neither foresees the tragic consequences.

Based on a true incident, this story takes place when Freud was in his forties and at the height of his powers. He invites a beautiful woman, Lou Andreas-Salome, to come to Vienna to train with him for a year. During the training he arranges to have midnight meetings with her in his office and proceeds to fall in love with her. However, due to his moral standards, he does not allow himself more than a kiss. At the same time, his young protégé, Victor Tausk, known as a ladies man, also embarks on an affair with Lou. Tausk, an unstable man, has a habit of hypnotizing young students and luring them to his apartment. When Tausks asks Freud to take him into a training analysis, Freud instead refers Tausk to a younger woman, Helene Deutsch. Tausk is insulted by this snub, and begins to slide downhill. When Lou leaves for Germany at the end of the year, Tausk feel doubly abandoned. In the end he hangs himself, bringing about scandal to Freud, who is blamed for his death. Freud’s wife, in a final scene, when asked her opinion of psychoanalysis, says she thinks it’s a kind of pornography. This is a “Shakespearean” type of script, portraying the complexities of Freud and the other characters as they ponder life.

LILA’S BATHROOM

A neurotic young artist with a phobia of beautiful women meets a beautiful woman with a dark secret. He overcomes his fear and her loathing by painting her bathroom.

Virgil, an aspiring New York poet and artist, meets Lila, a beautiful visitor from Eastern Europe. He proceeds in his bumbling way to try to woo her, but is handicapped by his phobia of beautiful women, which causes him to have a “kissing reflex,” whereby he attempts to hastily kiss and have sex with a beautiful woman (before it is the right time) in order to allay his neurotic fears of rejection. Despite his handicap he succeeds in getting Lila to bed, whereupon she turns out not to be so beautiful as he thought. His despair at seeing her “woolly mammaries” mortifies him, which turns Lila off and causes her to run off with a friend to Paradise Island. He shows up there unannounced and runs into her on the beach, where he attempts to humbly apologize and is rebuffed again. Finally, after yelling at his mother on the phone, Virgil calms down and reaches a point of “temporary sanity,” whereby he is able to engage in more mature conversation with Lila and show her his caring and generous side by painting her bathroom metallic gold, magenta, and green. All ends happily as he accepts her hairiness and she accepts his foibles and they make passionate love on a Manhattan summer evening. This is a romantic comedy similar to Something About Mary.

DELILAH

When a handsome but lonely young therapist encounters a naked young woman singing and bathing in a wooded stream, he doesn’t realize that this idyllic scene will eventually lead him to a strange world of terror and Satanism.

When Max, an exhausted young therapist who has recently been divorced, comes home to his vacation retreat in the woods of Pennsylvania, he discovers food missing from his refrigerator. The next day he takes a hike into the woods and finds a beautiful and naked Delilah bathing and singing “Jesus is Calling,” near a brook. She runs off and he walks after her only to be knocked unconscious when she flings a rock at his forehead. One stormy night he finds her shivering in her tent and brings her to his house. She yells, “Are you going to fornicate with me?” She tells him the story of how she was kidnapped by a religious nut when she was a small child and had lived in the woods ever since. The next morning she has disappeared. Max and his neighbor track Delilah down. He finds her, along with her religious nut “father” and his wife, at a campsite near her first campsite. She is tied to a tree, to be offered to God at sundown. While watching this scene, Max and his friend Grabner are caught and tied up by his second wife. He witnesses a strange ceremony which is to culminate in Delilah’s being burned as a witch, but he finally manages to escape when the nut’s wife turns on Jacob, kills him, and releases Delilah and Max. Ranger Blake locates Delilah’s family and she and Max fly to Denver the following day.

MAID OF THE MIST

In 1670 the chief’s beautiful daughter, Lelawala, becomes the last virgin to be sacrificed over the Niagara Falls as the explorer, LaSalle, and the missionary, Father Hennepin, look helplessly on.

This is the legend of the Lelawala, “The Maid of the Mist.” When the French explorer, Robert Cavellier, Sleur de La Salle, and the Roman Catholic missionary, Father Hennepin, visit the Seneca Tribe of Native Americans who lived near Niagara Falls, they are appalled to find a strange custom. According to LaSalle and Father Hennepin, this tribe had a practice of sacrificing its most beautiful virgin each spring by sending her over the falls. Father Hennepin tries to argue with the chief of the Seneca Indians, Eagle Eye, saying that the sacrifice of a young virgin to the Spirit of the Niagara was a barbaric practice. The chief counters that in Father Hennepin’s religion his Jesus had also sacrificed himself. They go round and round this issue. Mean while, pretty Lelawala is chosen in a ceremony to be the honored virgin of that year in a contest that is perhaps similar to the Miss America contest nowadays. Her boyfriend, Running Bear, as well as her father, the chief, try to talk her out of it, but she looks forward to the honor. In the end, in a beautiful last rite, she is sent over the falls in a white canoe, and her father, in despair, plunges after her. This screenplay is written in verse and is intended not only as a movie musical (complete with songs), but as a work of literature to be read in and of itself, like the great plays of the past.

WHIPLASH IN WHIPPANY

When a young couple decides, on a whim, to explore a mysterious side road, it leads them to a strange town called Whippany, surrounded by an electric fence, where they are whipped for being nice and then arrested for “Public Decency.”

Sef and Michelle, a young couple, are driving to her mother’s house when they take a side road. The road becomes a dirt road that leads through a jungle-like forest into a valley. At the end they reach a town called Whippany, which is surrounded by an electric fence. They are asked by guards at the gate, dressed in black leather, to sign a disclaimer before they enter the town. When the enter the town, they stop at a gas station to get gas, but when they get out of their car, the gas attendants laugh at them and begin whipping them with long black whips. They escape to a restaurant only to find themselves being whipped by the waitress. When they run to a police car outside, the police also proceed to whip them. They are brought before a judge and accused of “public decency.” It turns out that in this strange town, niceness is against the law—it is considered provocative and destructive. Sef and Michelle meet Jill in jail and through her they join the underground. The people of the underground think he is the man of whom the prophets have foretold—the Wild Man of Whippany—who will save them from the evil mayor. This leads to Sef learning to “draw” a whip fast and eventually to a final dual with the mayor of Whippany in a tragicomic ending. This is an allegorical satire in the vein of Groundhog Day, about how in certain situations insanity is made to seem sane and sanity is made to seem insane.

SUCCESS STORY

A young man goes to the city to seek fame and fortune, but instead he runs into his own neurosis. After a brief moment of fame as a playwright, he becomes an angry man who hates women, until a female therapist puts him straight.

Almost as soon as Jake arrives in New York he meets up with Sam, who needs a one-act play for a bill he is directing at an East Village loft theater. Jake writes a play in one night and the play becomes an instant smash hit. He is welcomed into the world of off-off Broadway and meets Elaine, a sexy owner of Mother’s, a theater club on 2^nd Avenue, who adopts him as one of her “children.” However, before long he is fighting with Elaine and everyone else while struggling with his writer’s block. Ten years later he is an angry man who continually acts out his rage with women, stalking them, shoving them, and generally being a heel. His friends, Stan and Molly, try to stand by him, even though he makes it difficult. Eventually he enters therapy with Jane, an attractive female therapist, and develops an erotic transference toward her. Before long he is abusing her just as he abuses other women. Fortunately Jane is able to stand up to him and to steer him toward an understanding of himself, which comes as he recalls, in a dramatic session, his own childhood abuse. The story ends 10 years later, when Jake has become a professor of psychology and meets Jade, an attractive anthropologist. This is inspiring tale of one man’s plunge into darkness and his redemption.

CHEERLEADER CAMP

Six college girls go to cheerleader camp, where they make fun of Wylie, a retarded janitor. People have been making fun of Wylie all his life. You do the subtraction.

CHEERLEADER CAMP focuses on six college girls who are competing to become cheerleaders for Rosebud Christian College: Celine, the intellectual; Roz, the man-hater; Mary, the devout Christian; Lucy, who drinks mineral water to prevent Alzheimer’s Disease; Grace, the cell phone addict; and Bebe, a daffy blond. In between cheerleading drills led by ex-Marine Miss Garamond, they run into Wylie, an odd janitor, who they tease. In the beginning the girls have a wonderful time with towel and water fights in the shower room and sex romps by the lake. However, Wylie becomes increasingly restless. He chases his first victim, Lucy, into the woods and cracks her skull with a hammer. After Lucy has been missing for a day, Miss Garamond summons the police--Officer Rowe, a middle-aged cop with a pot belly, and Officer Snyder, a young buck—but they can’t find Lucy’s body. Then comes the night of thunder, lightening and terror. Wylie takes out his box of tools and goes after Al and Bebe while they are making love in the Gazebo, drilling holes in Al’s head with his electric drill and a hole in Bebe’s navel after she tries to swim away from him in the lake. Then he stalks Officer Snyder and Grace--who are going at it in the squad car--using a staple gun to put out Officer Snyder’s eyes. Then he breaks into the girls’ cabin and gets rid of Grace, Roz and Mary in quick succession, using a variety of tools, from crowbar to box cutter. Then he stops Officer Rowe, who has come looking for him, by plunging a screwdriver into his chest. However, when he at last gets to Celine, she cleverly has him talk about his cruel mother until he falls sobbing into her arms. Finally, at the last moment, Miss Garamond, interrupts this touching scene with her old M-1 rifle and shoots Wylie down.

THE ONE-NIGHT WIFE

An idealistic young American, disenchanted with American women, goes to China to meet his mail-order bride only to discover that customs in China are a little different and that his bride-to-be is not as submissive as he thought.

Lonely and tired of the American dating scene, a young man writes to a young Chinese woman and asks her to marry him. However, when he flies to Guangzhou to meet her, she is nowhere in sight. He travels by cab to the village where she lives with a cab driver named Seinfeld, then back to Guangzhou. He finally finds his young bride, and she takes him on an adventurous boat ride to a resort town noted for its “Seven Star Crags”—seven hills, each with a monastery on top. In this colorful setting they are at first rejected by the post hotel which caters only to foreigners or Communist Party members; however, the mayor comes forth and saves them. His daughter, it seems, is one of the hero’s volunteer English students in America. This romantic tragicomedy follows the unlikely couple as he bumbles around trying to woo her. Following American custom, he tries to bed her, but she refuses to sleep with him until they are married. Finally they do get married, and then he discovers that his bride is not the person he thought she was. The story ends tragically when she abandons him the morning after their wedding night exclaiming that she is no “one-night wife.”

HAMLET

The prince of Denmark discovers that his Uncle murdered his father and married his mother, leading him to a murderous rage.

This is a modern-English screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. “Thou” and “Thee” have been replaced by “your” and “you,” and obscure and antiquated phrasing has been replaced to make the story accessible to modern audiences; however, Shakespeare’s language has been retained. Soliloquies are presented voice-overs and montage images are presented to make them more dramatic. Other long speeches are also broken up with images. Hence this spectacular drama of madness and revenge unfolds in a more poignant and dramatic way than ever.

Bio of Gerald Schoenewolf

I am a licensed psychoanalyst and professor of psychology who has been writing screenplays for 10 years. Recently my script, Freud in Love, made the semifinals of the WriteMovies Spring 2005 contest (it is still in contention). Before writing screenplays I wrote and directed stage plays in New York and Copenhagen; one, “The Circus” was published in Esquire Magazine. I have also published 12 books on psychology and a handful of short fiction. Recently I have produced and directed two of my films, THE INTERVIEW (2004, 1:35 minutes) and THERAPY (2005), 1:45 minutes).

[MAIN] ½[SCREENPLAYS] ½ [STAFF] ½ [THE INTERVIEW] ½ [THERAPY]½ [THERAPY POSTER]½ [SCENES FROM THERAPY]½[BIOGRAPHIES]½[TOP10]½[CONTACT US]