Timeframe [the Screenplay]
Waking up after a Laboratory accident, Dr. McCall finds his boss is dead, and he is trapped in an alternative universe. He discovers this is a world where his son has been dead for years, his daughter doesn't exist, and he’s the prime suspect in several murders. This a universe that has been shaped by his dead bosses' time tampering, and Dr. McCall’s perfect life has been shattered. He has to find a way back to his reality. But is there a way back?
At first, his wife supports him as he tries to unravel the mystery. But it doesn't take long for her to betray him to the police. A betrayal that ends with Dr. McCall and his wife being shot dead in a hail of bullets- - but fortunately, he finds his boss's trick to time travel and goes back before the accident but in the same alternative universe. He has to figure out a way to undo all his boss has done, but time is not on his side. He has to confront his boss in the past in order to save his future.
How far would you go to get your life back?
Author’s Note
I got this idea for this screenplay back in the early 2000s. It came about from my obsession with two ideas: (1) if you could go back in time what would you change in order to make your life better and (2) the miraculous circumstances of every birth on this planet.
The first obsession may be something that you’ve entertained yourself. Do you invest in the stock market so you could be independently wealthy? Would you avoid that person that turned into that toxic relationship? Would you try to meet that special someone even earlier in your life? Would you try to stop 9/11? Standard stuff.
But the second obsession complicates things. Because once you have children, and you go back in time before they were born, you could never duplicate the circumstances that resulted in their existence. Because it requires the right sperm to join with the right egg at precisely the right time and the right place. If you miss the timing by mere seconds or the temperature was off by a few degrees… you’d get a whole different person. Alan Moore, author of the Watchmen, put it best:
“And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter… Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold… that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermo-dynamic miracle.”
So you hope to make your life better with a little jaunt into the past, but now you just wiped out the existence of your children. Now time travel has just become a horror show.
That was the seed of the screenplay.
One more thing you should know, I finished my first draft in June 2005. That was 2 years before the introduction of the iPhone. As I reread my script in order to prepare it for publishing on Amazon, the lack of modern-day smartphones is glaring. Why would anybody buy a map in a convenience store when you have Google Maps on your phone? So, I had to keep the dates of the original screenplay as they were ~~ 2009. I also had to keep the time travel limited. I couldn’t have my traveler go back before 9/11/2001. Because they would be distracting in stopping that national disaster and tragedy. So my two constraints to this time-traveling story were the iPhone and 9/11.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy all my hard work. And like any good screenwriter, I would love notes on my script. If you have any suggestions, or would like to produce this script, let me know at farmviewer@gmail.com.
~~Paul B Martin, May 29, 2023
