Story-telling | 25 Word Pitch + Screenplay Details

The Way

After his mother fails to pick him up from school, a teenager must walk home late at night, but who else lurks in the darkness?

Genre:

The prominent genre of The Way will be drama, but it will also draw on themes of social realism, as does Soft, which I will take inspiration from in this regard.

Main Characters:

Nick

• Nick: An introverted sixteen year old boy who suffers from anxiety and only confides in his closest friends due to the distant relationship between him and his mother after his father passed away and the development of her alcoholism.  He is very wary of getting in trouble at school, hence why his school uniform is immaculate and he carries all his school books with him to avoid not having the right books on the right days.

Will

• Will: A scraggly homeless man, aged between 20 and 35, who is frequently drunk.  He is a lonely man, and does his best to make friends but he comes across as invasive and unpleasant, which can cause him to lash out, relating to his difficulty in trusting people, but he does try do the right thing where he can.  Will lost his wife before he lived on the streets which is why he turned to drink.

Secondary Characters:

Angela

• Angela: Nick's mother; an unknowingly neglectful mother, she pays little attention to Nick, as she believes he is able to look after himself like his father could.  She drinks a lot, which acts as a coping mechanism for the loss of her husband, but she hides this with her laid back attitude to parenting.

  

  The Gang

• Gang: Local hoodlums with no regard for other people's well-being.

Locations:

• The Way will begin outside Nick's school, and we will see parts of the surrounding neighbourhood, but the main location will be the alleyway that Will sleeps in, as their meeting will be the focal point of the screenplay.

Source Material:

• I was inspired to choose this subject matter from my own experiences from having to walk home in the dark from school some nights.
• The inspiration for the neglectful mother does not come from my own experiences thankfully, but the loss of a parent is something that has affected a number of people I know, each of them responding with differently.  Drinking can act as a way to cope with drastic changes such as this, so I felt I could explore this in The Way.

Extra Information:

• The meeting in The Way will be the meeting between Nick and Will, which will lead to Nick sympathising with his mother's drink problem, as there is a parallel between Will and Angela in the sense that the have both lost someone and they both drink to deal with it.
• Nick will initially be angry with his mother, but seeing and talking to Will allows him to understand her better.
• In one scene, Nick will be attacked - this will come from one of my own experiences in which I had a rock thrown at my head, then mud shoved in my face whilst waiting outside my school - afterwards he comes across Will, whom he is initially frightened by, but they continue talking and find a mutual understanding.
• The screenplay will explore Nick's anxiety and his frustration toward his mother, which will change by the end of the screenplay.  We will also see the internal conflict of Will and Angela.