Placebo Effect

Synopsis: Our Protagonist caught up in the "Hype" of the Hollywood dream... Discovering...

Treatment - Low vs. Diamond "Don't Forget Sister"

Present Day Los Angeles, CA

We open up with an Arial shot of Hollywood Hills in all its luxury and material glory. We focus in on one big mansion; as we get closer there is a noticeable party going on. We keep getting closer finally showing our protagonist socializing with a couple of the attendees (all while showing how elaborate the scene is). We see our protagonist looking like he belongs there but he has a certain body language about him that he radiates showing he feels out of place. We get even closer and become intimate with the conversation in close ups of the people around him (they look life prominate players in the LA Entertainment matrix). A server comes by and offers him some wine...

Low vs. Diamond are at a small club performing (Don't Forget Sister). There is a sense here that everybody knows everyone else and the show is crackin'!

Dreamy state a few years prior - Our protagonist is picking his sister up at the train station and they are checking out Hollywood and the night life of the city. Out partying (drugs, etc.) his sister gets mad at him and the have an argument...

Low vs. Diamond are in the club jamming out; cross dissolves back and forth between them and the Protagonist arguing with his sister. He finally gets so angry that he storms out onto Hollywood Blvd all drunk and heavily drugged. We see Hollywood Blvd and all of its vast glamour while he's stuck right in the middle of it walking past The El Capitan, Mann's, Kodak, and Hollywood and Highland on the walk of fame. All of the normal activates are going down as he passes (red carpet event, street performers, homosexuals, tourists, fast luxury cars, etc).

Shows his sister all lost in this vastness of weirdoes... She jumps into a taxi to and as the taxi takes off it gets blindsided by another car the side where she is sitting. Cross-dissolves between Low vs. Diamond performing, Protagonist still in his drugged stupor, and the aftermath of his sister's fatal accident.

Back to the opening party where he looks even more depressed than before but also trying to hold his composure while answering the questions of the other partygoers. He is visually losing it though getting frustrated and the people around him start sensing it.

Cross-dissolves back into the dreamy state; him and his sister while they are younger enjoy playing in the wide open spaces of their childhood town. Without a worry in the world.

Low vs. Diamond again cross-dissolving between the Hollywood party and the club performance (real party)

The Protagonist finally gets so caught up in his grief that he starts going bezerk; throwing things, pushing people, drinking all of the wine from the bottles, breaking everything in sight... The band is parallel with him but in a performance way going out of control.

Shows everything that we just showed about the Protagonist but in chronological order then shows him all alone on the balcony while his hands are in the air and he is frozen while we circle around him (like the Eminem video Guilty Conscience).

There can be alternate endings... 1.) He is making the video we track out and see the production; 2.) He just falls off of the balcony to his demise; 3.) He just wakes up from his nightmare; the end has unlimited possibilities...

Jared Chung Lundy
Checkmate Films
8391 Beverly Blvd. Suite 207
Los Angeles, CA 92683
323.241.7431
JL@checkmatefilms.com
www.checkmatefilms.com