Vertical

This is a contained action thriller with only four main characters. An independent producer who was briefly attached to the script estimated the budget at between 6-9 million depending on who the lead actor would be. VERTICAL is set mainly on the outside of a skyscraper. It's sort of DIEHARD on the side of a building. The story is currently set in Boston but could be relocated to any city with tall buildings. Here's how it begins ... The main character is Billy Wilson, a 35 year-old window washer with terminal cancer and no assets or life insurance to leave his struggling family. His solution: he plans to fake an accident from his work platform and fall hundreds of feet to his death to earn worker's comp death benefits that will provide for his loved ones--including a daughter with Down Syndrome--for decades to come. Just before dawn, after a last look at his unsuspecting, sleeping loved ones, Billy clocks in at the skyscraper where he works, straps on his self-sabotaged safety harness, and from the rooftop goes over the side of the building in a window washing platform with his equally unsuspecting co-worker, Sal Pizzuto. Just as Billy is about to tip backwards over the edge of the platform and fall to his death, a light comes on in the office directly across from where he faces, and inside, a woman in a skirt and pearls is being strangled from behind by a man in a business suit. Billy attempts to halt the murder in progress by banging on the sealed window with his squeegee. The strangler hears him, sees him, drops his victim (who falls to the floor, inert), then steps to the window to confront Billy with a menacing glare. Thus begins Billy's transformation from would-be martyr to reluctant action hero. He won't die until Sal is safe and the murderer--who determines to murder the two window washers too--brought to justice. The action is near-unrelenting through to the epilog, broken only by short bursts of brave banter from the two window washers. The scenes prey often upon our universal fear of great heights.