True Error

“A drama about an inheritance gone wrong” Imagine you’re in your mid thirties and you’ve spent the past eighteen months living and working in China. You moved there because after years of hard work and a recent job promotion that attested to your professionalism you were nevertheless dissatisfied and decided to take a risk on furthering your career. In China you won a managerial position based in The World Trade Centre. You proved yourself capable in the role and you’ve earned some decent money. Now you’re taking time out to travel SE Asia on your way back to Australia in order to purchase your first home near the beach. While traveling you receive news your grandmother has died. As a child you’d lost your parents to divorce and death and she was your only remaining family. It’s only two weeks post 9/11 so you decide to mark both these tragic events by getting your first tattoo. TRUE ERROR tells the story of ROBERT’S traumatic travels through SE Asia and his fraught repatriation to Australia whereby he sabotages not only his travels and his original objective but also his once in a lifetime opportunity to know the full glory of his inheritance. This film has great potential for filmmakers and investors alike because it’s relevant to the fundamental issue of inheritance, which surrounds the US$84.4 trillion “Great Wealth Transfer” that is currently underway. Moreover, the screenplay illuminates those critical human qualities required to successfully know the glory of a full inheritance. Thematically, it delineates replete with motifs between TRUTH & ERROR; the Spiritual & the Material; Light & Darkness; Health & Disease; Righteousness & Sin; Love & Hate; Life & Death; Winning & Losing. A well-produced film based on the screenplay might plausibly be positioned as a must see for any responsible, god fearing TESTATOR/TESTATRIX and Inheritor. The film is mostly a Flashback set in Eastern Australia, China and SE Asia between 1999 and 2002. The first and final scene is late 2024 or early 2025 in Western Australia. The protagonist is a university educated 2-6 generation White Australian heterosexual male ROBERT (34-37). In the first and final scene Robert is (59). During the course of the film he’s employed as a national and international sales executive, key account manager and business teacher. Supporting characters are an online virtual girlfriend CASSIE (19), Robert’s Grandmother MARY (84), her retired friends MR & MRS G. (70's), KHUNTHEA (20) and a few others. Beyond this there is a large cast of minor actors and extras across many locations. “It’s A Beautiful Mind meets Fight Club meets The Bourne Franchise” The story’s Raison D'etre is essentially to offer a realistic measure of Robert’s performance when confronted with the unexpected, which is crucial for his improvement. It’s also to educate the audience how to be better equipped in similar situations. In short the importance of being righteous; how to not sabotage career or foreign travels but even more importantly one’s greatest once in a lifetime opportunity, one’s inheritance. Act 1: The Setup ROBERT wants a successful life, a professional career, his own home and a hot wife. He’s working as a sales executive and key account manager for a multinational corporation. Owing to his professionalism he’s been recently promoted to correct and improve the work of an interstate office. He soon tires of the job, seeks greater personal fulfilment and opportunity and travels to China in 2000. After a brief stint as an instructor at a business college for Chinese executives he retains a more lucrative position with a Joint Venture based in the China World Trade Centre. Again he tires of the work and decides to return to Australia via SE Asia with a vague plan to purchase his first home and pursue a love interest. While travelling, he experiences a sequence of inciting incidents namely, culture shock in foreign environments, 9/11 (2001), his grandmother’s death and his first tattoo. Act 2: The Conflict Upon learning of his grandmother’s death by email, Robert has the choice to return to Australia or continue his travels. He chooses the latter, which unfortunately for him proves to be the wrong choice when he gets his first tattoo that triggers a series of traumatic events. Well intended, Robert sets out to enjoy himself in order to feel better about his grandmother’s death but only achieves the opposite. Obstacles such as others’ dismal attitude towards him, having his wallet stolen on consecutive occasions and being mugged hinder his fun. It's as though the Universe, or at the least The World, is telling him the party is over and it’s time to be both sober and sombre and even, given the events of 9/11, adopt a Prepare For War, mindset. Robert however either fails to receive or refuses to accept the message. He feels he has a right to party. The more shit happens and the more crap people with whom he interacts, the more strongly he suspects a scam; that the world is secretly conspiring against him. He becomes less the Protagonist and more the Antagonist in a Protagonist World that is misrepresenting him as the villain. He responds by tasking himself with the impossible, namely to put Caesar and The World in its rightful place! To expose the absence of truth; the lies, the chicanery, the thievery, the skulduggery, the corruption, the abuse of power, the hypocrisy of a War On Terror, the false status quo, the money! Unless of course he’s Caesar, which, having been the protagonist; the super hero of death defying “Red Roses & Bat Out of Hell” motorcycle accidents, he suspects he might be, in which case, that would also be the correct thing to do. To do himself justice and save the world by putting himself in his rightful place! Suffice it to say, Robert’s newfound quest doesn’t begin well flying, as he is by the seat of his pants in foreign lands without the benefit of a wingman or an intelligent conversation in his mother tongue. Neither is his good form or position improved by well-buried character deficits that resurface as he grapples with the unexpected. Robert's most abhorrent or personally destructive liability is a predisposition to alcoholism; something he thought he’d overcome many years previous. His breach of sobriety puts him through the grinder both internally and spiritually and also in the world at large where his toxic reactivity to situations has disastrous results. Act 3: The Climax + Act 4: The Falling Action/Final Suspense + Act 5: The Resolution Robert lacks his bedrock of sobriety upon which his spiritual constitution is built thereby proving the cliché, “The Road To Hell is Paved With Good Intentions” to be correct. His good intentions serve him naught as he is reviled, relieved of his life savings and his future inheritance is put at risk. His best is badly misunderstood, he’s poorly misrepresented and he finds the veritable tribulation altogether humiliating. Robert has come to embody both protagonist and antagonist. He is both afflicted and conflicted; suffering a spiritual crises that plays out when he misrepresents himself by walking naked in public. It plays out again in the climax when he is violently arrested for stealing food after his wallet has once again been stolen then terrorised by a sadist for having too well resisted arrest. The conflict ends with his incarceration in an overseas prison where he has time to reflect upon what’s important to him. Robert the protagonist fulfils his wish to escape the prison and return to Australia with a view to purchasing his first home and doing his inheritance well by multiplying it tenfold. Ambitious to the end, there’s a twist whereby Robert outdoes himself at the proverbial eleventh hour by being his own worst enemy at the least where his worldly ambitions seem to be concerned. He sabotages the once in a lifetime opportunity of his inheritance to the tune of 84% True Error thereby forfeiting the life of a youthful multimillionaire. Ostensibly, Robert is in the final scene depicted as having spent the next twenty years attempting to recover his perceived losses. As previously mentioned he has failed miserably only managing to accomplish 84% True Error albeit in such a way he’s now able to eventually see light at the end of a long dark lonely tunnel. The movie resolves with him accepting his plight and being blessed, possibly even in the flesh but that is left to the audience’s imagination, with a visit from a real angel. Upon reflection, the more curious or sensitive viewer is given reason to wonder about it all; ripe for the sequel that illuminates how the protagonist Robert had covertly, even unbeknown to himself at the time, reverted to again being the antagonist whose mission had not resolved but only just begun.