Evidence: Film Treatment


YOKNAPATAWPHA COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT

Investigating Officer(s): Det. S. Murphy, Det. T. Armstrong
Incident No.: 002221-15H-2004
Case Description: Corwin Fitz Homicide

The following treatment (synopsis) of Fitz's movie, Bacchanals' Destruction, (Evidence # 002221-11) was found among the papers taken into evidence from the film crew's lodge.


BACCHANALS' DESTRUCTION -- TREATMENT

RALDLER is a young actor traveling with a theatre troupe across the East. Their style of performance departs from the devoted school of the dramatic arts. These players seize their audience with violent, realistic images, staged so cunningly that drama and reality are indistinguishable. Only the mind is left to decipher.

The crew consists of COSTA, the director and weapons expert; KENNY, the inveterate leading man; MIGUEL, the auxiliary hatchet man; and Raldler, who is forever lost in a world of conflicting characters, who are always acting him out rather than the opposite.

When at first we meet these performers, it's at land's edge, on the Gulf in the lowest of Alabama. The routine of their trigger shows have soured the players toward one another, and the source of the trouble is Costa, who has become too lax in his planning, too complacent about their safety. When Kenny is nearly captured by local law enforcement for a mock shooting, the crew hides out in a Mississippi Gulf Coast casino. There Raldler meets and falls in love with CHEYN, a scam artist and classic femme fatale whom he spots from afar. Before he is able to express his love, the law is on them again, so they retreat to a country lodge, further upstate, with Cheyn along as a hostage.

Sensing the group's restlessness, Costa plans an awful scene on their trip north; the scene is designed not to blur reality and drama, but to bring them into focus and show that they have swapped places. As a result, Raldler unwittingly shoots Kenny, his friend and mentor.

The crew arrives at the lodge bitter and shaken. Unwilling to call a doctor, Costa puts Kenny to bed as Raldler administers care. Drunk with power and madness, Costa abuses and violates Cheyn. On his deathbed, Kenny tells Raldler how the world is deceived by ornaments, how he had been guilty of it himself. Kenny tells him that life is like the stage, only the acts can be rewritten in an instant. His final words convince Raldler to overthrow Costa in an elaborate finale that pits drama against reality, friend against friend, lover against lover.*

The players craft the drama of their own deaths, rehearse their own salvation. There is no one left for the curtain call, but the audience leaves feeling the trembling threads of their own mortality, as if they too were playing out their lives like some strange, harrowing play.

* The ending cannot be spelled out here as it will be determined by the actors' performances. The performances will be managed in such a way that allows the players to write the ending by their own actions, making the outcome more realistic while retaining the dramatic nature of the film.