World Building

Treatment by Bo Geddes

Premise: Through preparation, you can make your own luck.

Setting:  April. 1971. Detroit. Downtown. The Federal Bank. 

Act 1

(silence)

Light pours through the clearstory windows onto the marble bank lobby, and we can see the dust particles dancing in the light. The bank appears to be empty. There is a strong yellow cast with lots of blown-out highlights. From the entrance, the camera dollys through the lobby and into the bank manager’s office. A ski-masked gunman has just finished tying up and blindfolding 8 hostages. They lie on the floor face down. The gunman leans back against the desk, and his finger inadvertently brushes the alarm button mounted under the desk’s edge. 

(music starts, and we hear the bank alarm ringing)

We watch the gunman jump up from his lean. The camera pulls back out of the office, into the lobby, and down the stairs in the back, past hundreds of opened safety deposit boxes, towards a man who turns from the large bank vault door he has been working on to meet the camera face on (Extreme Close Up). He says to the camera . . . “Something always goes wrong.” 

Act 2 (It appears to be a flashback to the viewer, but is actually a flash-forward and the 3rd Act.)

The camera pulls back from the ECU to reveal we are with our bank robber in a dark and smoky card room cast in blue light. Our robber is sitting at a table full of shady characters. He looks away from the camera towards the cards in his hand, begins to place a bet, and then thinks better of it. He waffles a bit. A ruddy old Irishman asks, “What’s it going tobe, Lucky? Are you in or out?” Our robber looks again at his cards. (CU of our robber’s hand: AAAJJ). Lucky puts his bet in, “Yeah, I’m in.” As the camera dollys around the table, it seems the players think Lucky is bluffing.  Each player raises. (VO: Lucky “they bit”) (CU on the pile of chips time lapsed, growing and growing). It seems as though Lucky is going to make a killing. As everyone calls, we hear an alarm go off, and police stream into the card room. The Irishman flips the table over and pulls out his gun. Lucky watches all the chips fly in the air in slow motion. He looks at the gun. He looks at the cops. He grabs his jacket and a red leather bowling bag and runs for the lady’s bathroom. 

We hear gunfire from the card room as Lucky lifts the window and quickly snaps the bars free. He crawls out the window into an alley. The window closes just as two cops burst into the bathroom. Lucky runs across the alleyway and past a busboy out for a smoke. He races through a restaurant kitchen into the dimly lit dining room and out the door into the hustle and bustle of a busy sidewalk. The camera follows him through the crowd. Cut to Lucky stopping at the curb. Cut to “DON’T WALK,” changing to “WALK,” and zoom in to an extreme close-up of Lucky’s face. He says . . . “Something always goes wrong.”

Act 3 (This Act picks up exactly where Act 1 left off.)

“Always have an exit plan” – the camera pulls back. We are back in the bank basement where we first met Lucky. The camera follows Lucky as he picks up a red leather bowling bag, runs past the empty deposit boxes, and up the stairs. The gunman watching the hostages turns and shrugs, “What’s it going to be? In or out?” (the audience will recognize this voice as the Irishman’s). Lucky says, “We are out”. The gunman rips the phone cord from the wall and uses the cord to tie the bank manager’s door shut. “That should hold ‘em,” the gunman says as he pulls the ski mask off to reveal his ruddy face “Let’s go then”. 

The camera follows our robbers as they leap over the teller’s counter and pry open a vent on the back wall. We see them entering the vent. Cut to an alleyway outside. An unseen force pushes a dumpster away from the building wall. Our robbers emerge from a large hole behind the dumpster (Lucky’s exit plan). They dust themselves off and walk a bit down the alley. Lucky stops to tie his shoe and looks to the left. The camera follows his gaze to a basement window with bars on it (CU: the bars have been hack-sawed to within a millimeter of a full cut). We hear the Irishman ask if Lucky is coming as he ducks into an alleyway door filled with blue light. Lucky smiles and speaks to the camera. “Always have an exit plan.”

An Animated Short by Bo Geddes

Opening titles appear on a quaint little country cottage surrounded by beautiful gardens. The sun is beginning to rise. The camera dollies into the open upstairs window, where we see a plump elderly woman sleeping. Her eyes pop open as a sunbeam crosses her face. She springs out of bed and into her white bunny slippers (quicker than we might expect). The stairs creak as Grandma makes her way down. Quick shots of grandma turning on the coffee, grabbing her purple cardigan, pouring cereal into a bowl and coffee into her mug, then pouring milk onto her cereal and into her coffee, popping everything onto a tray, and walking out her front door. 

She walks down a little path to where a small café table and chairs sit in the middle of a flower garden. She places the tray and sits. A pudgy brown squirrel scampers up the opposite chair and sits on the table. Grandma smiles and says, “Good morning, Theodore. Where is Perry?” A blue jay drops from the sky and lands on the top of the chair’s back “SKWAK!” Grandma reaches into her pocket and pulls out a peanut and some sunflower seeds. She hands the peanut to Theodore with a smile and places the seeds near Perry. The three friends enjoy their breakfast together. As they finish, Grandma appears to be distracted. The camera follows her line of sight and zooms in on a weed just barely poking out of the soil. Perry turns to Theodore. “Here we go,” as Grandma makes a beeline for the weed. Grandma battles with the weeds tirelessly while her friends watch (shown in a montage of the daily war - with the weeds making “invasion” plans in their “bunkers” at night, and grandma fighting back the tide day after day).

One morning, Theodore and Perry are waiting at the table, but Grandma does not come. They wait a long time. Finally, an ambulance comes to the house. The paramedics enter the house, bring Grandma out on a stretcher, then take Grandma away. Theodore and Perry are sad and ask each other the “who, what, where, and why“ questions but have nothing but crazy made-up answers. The next morning, they meet again at the table and still no Grandma. Later that day, as they sit in the garden talking, Theodore feels something under his bottom. He gets up, turns around, and sees a weed spring out where he was sitting. “BOING.” We hear echoes of BOINGS from all over the garden. We hear the weeds yell, “CHARGE!” Theodore and Perry turn to each other . . . “UH-OH”.  They spend days battling day and night to ensure Grandma’s garden stays as pretty as she left it. 

After a week, a car arrives, and some younger people help Grandma out of the vehicle. Grandma has a cast on her foot and walks slowly with a cane. She waves at Theodore and Perry before entering the house. Perry and Theodore exchange proud grins.