Genre: Dark, Romantic Comedy
Logline: When a desperate California Film Commission bureaucrat tries to save her husband’s doomed superhero movie with state production tax credits, she falls for a rebellious digital artist squatting on the preferred soundstage — unaware that a media mogul wants the movie to fail to justify moving his studios to a tax haven.
The characters and events depicted in this movie are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental.
MARGOT (30s): A screenwriter-turned-executive at the California Film Commission, who uses tax credits to save a dying entertainment industry.
CHASE (40s): Margot’s husband. A fading, arrogant cinematographer clinging to the old Hollywood, demanding 35mm film while the world moves on.
LEO (30s): A charismatic avant-garde artist building immersive virtual worlds. He is aggressively independent.
MAXIMILIAN “MAX” VANE (40s): A trust-fund billionaire who recently bought three legacy studios. His true plan is to grab state production tax credits, make a dud, write off the losses, and move his empire to Monaco.
GOVERNOR “HAIRDO” HARDING (early 60s, looks 45): California’s image-obsessed governor. He must stop his Hollywood donors from fleeing the state.
MARGOT, at the California Film Commission, hews to a failing strategy of saving in-state movie production with tax credits that benefit wealthy producers. Her husband, CHASE, is the director of photography on Captain Chloroform, about a superhero whose power is making villains drowsy.
Enter MAX VANE, who owns the studio behind Captain Chloroform. Max wins no matter what. He either doesn’t make the movie, saving $150 million, or he gets tax credits, makes a bomb, and uses the failure to justify moving out-of-state.
Margot can’t justify the credits under the commission’s calculations of jobs and economic impact. But, desperate to save Chase’s job, Margot finds an abandoned studio warehouse in a empowerment zone, to make the production eligible for wage credits. She goes to inspect it, expecting an empty shell. Instead, she discovers LEO and his collective of rogue artists using cutting-edge LED volumes and game engines to build stunning, participatory art. Margot demands they vacate so a real movie can save her marriage.
Margot tries to bribe Leo to leave with state credits. Leo laughs in her face. “You’ve been handing out those credits for a decade,” he tells her, “and Hollywood is dying anyway.”
Forced to negotiate, Margot spends her days at the warehouse. The contrast is devastating. At home, Chase whines about the cost of vintage lenses. At the warehouse, the unsubsidized Leo is collaborative and free. A crackling romantic tension builds as Leo shows Margot that storytelling doesn’t need Hollywood gatekeepers.
Max Vane inflates Captain Chloroform’s budget, demanding Margot deliver the credits and the warehouse immediately or he will publicly announce his studios’ relocation. In a tirade, Chase blames Margot her for his failing career. Panicked, Margot bribes LA city councilmembers to get Leo’s turned over to the state for filming.
Margot immediately regrets her actions. Max Vane forms an alliance with GOVERNOR “HAIRDO” HARDING, who wants to show he is saving Hollywood jobs.
The governor, with Max’s support, plans a televised police raid to clear out “the squatters” and reclaim the old studio warehouse. Margot discovers their plan. She realizes she has been manipulated by Max, and that she could destroy Leo, the only real artist she has ever loved.
Margot makes her choice. She races to warn Leo.
Leo won’t run. Instead, his team rigs the warehouse with farcical traps designed to prey on Hollywood’s and state government’s bottomless hunger for money.
Gov. Harding and Max Vane arrive with studio execs, SWAT teams and news crews — and find a house of nightmares:
• Police officers chase holographic projections of uncashed pension checks into dead ends.
• Studio execs are lured into net-traps by illusions of real data on streaming viewership.
• Max’s phone, hacked by Leo, displays a forged alert that the IRS is seizing his offshore accounts. Max screams fascist insults at the crew, and admits to his entire scheme.
The livestream breaks the Internet. Leo monetizes the video as an anti-establishment documentary, earning his artist collective millions.
Max Vane is arrested for tax and securities fraud. Chase relocates to Atlanta to shoot infomercials. The governor brazens his way through the fallout, and wins the White House.
As the sun rises over LA, Margot stands on the warehouse roof with Leo. They look out at a city where the corrupt old ways are crumbling — making room for something beautiful and new.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.