Screenplay / Sattelite
‘Satellite’
By
Simon Doherty
INT APARTMENT HALLWAY DAY
A very ordinary front door. We hear muffled talking, then the sound of someone rifling through a lot of keys. Eventually we hear the door being unlocked, then opened.
JULIAN, the letting agent, enters first, talking loudly over his shoulder to RICH, who blankly shuffles in and closes the door behind him. Julian is young, over-eager and smartly dressed in a cheap sort of way. Rich is slightly older, under-fed and looks like he sleeps in his clothes.
JULIAN
...so of course we had to get the entire property fumigated new bed carpets everything cost a fortune I’ll tell you unbelievable mess but anyway here we are good solid door that sizable hallway you’ve got your kitchen here…
CUT TO:
A very bare, dank kitchen. Rich looks in, frowns.
CUT TO:
Julian practically pulling Rich down the hallway, still talking.
JULIAN
...washing machine hob oven fridge all the whiteware even though the oven’s actually brown hahaha here’s the bathroom…
CUT TO:
A very small, depressing bathroom. With no bath in it. Rich looks in and frowns again. Julian walks in to gauge Rich’s reaction so far. There’s an awkward pause when Richard fails to say or do anything.
JULIAN
...okay…if you’ll follow me I’ll show you the livingroom!
CUT TO:
A livingroom that has clearly seen too much living. The wallpaper is peeling off the walls and, in one corner, it looks as if the walls are peeling off the building. The only furniture is an old, cream coloured leather sofa and an odd-looking television.
JULIAN
So this is all new furniture in here well nearly new I might say feel free to give the room you’re own personal touches even a lick of paint if you’d like I mean after what happened with the ah disappearance of the last tenant we’re fairly relaxed as long as the ah rent is paid on time you know what I mean?
Rich doesn’t say a word. Julian looks slightly deflated.
JULIAN
So ah what do you think!?
Rich flashes a brief and very fake looking smile.
INT APARTMENT HALLWAY DAY
Rich dumps down two battered looking suitcases, kicks the door shut behind him and walks down the hall.
INT BEDROOM DAY
Rich collapses onto the mouldy looking bed and closes his eyes.
FADE OUT
FADED IN
INT LIVINGROOM DAY
Rich is sitting on the sofa, drinking and smoking and staring at a photograph he’s holding. There’s a small avalanche of beer cans around his feet. The photo is of Rich, looking a lot younger and healthier and happier than he does now, with his arms around a slightly less happy looking girl.
With his cigarette, Rich delicately burns a hole in the photograph where the young girl’s head was. He admires his handiwork for few seconds, then repeats the process with the image of his own face. Then he blows a column of blue smoke straight at the image and watches as it passes right through.
Faintly, we begin to hear a strange, pulsing, buzzing noise building in the background. As it the sound grows it becomes obvious that Rich is trying desperately to ignore it. But he can’t. He finally heaves himself off the sofa and stands unsteadily in the centre of the room, listening.
Slowly and tentatively, he moves towards the window. The buzzing gets louder, annoyingly loud. It seems to be coming from outside the window. Rich pulls the window open and looks outside.
The apartment is high up, obviously in a block of flats. The noise seems to be coming from a strange looking metal box mounted on the wall next to the window. There’s an eerie sort of glow coming from inside the box.
Rich reaches out to touch it…
WHITE OUT
FADE IN
INT LIVIGROOM NIGHT
Rich regains consciousness.
He’s sitting on the sofa again. His cigarette has burned down to the filter, leaving a long, drooping tail of ash hanging from the end. He wipes his chin, clumsily. His t-shirt is soaked in saliva and sweat. As he gets up its clear that he is in a lot of pain.
The window is open. Its dark outside. Rich looks at his watch, realising that he must’ve been out for some time.
The buzzing is louder now. Unbearably loud.
Rich stumbles to the window and heaves it shut, but the noise doesn’t get any quieter. It sounds like the angry fizzing of a million tiny insects focused in on the exact centre of your skull.
Its very annoying.
Rich re-examines the metal box from the safety of his livingroom.
There is a thick, white cable running out of it. It goes through the wall and into the room, down onto the floor, behind the television and underneath the carpet. Rich gets down on all fours and follows it by patting the lump it makes in the worn material, but soon loses it. Then he notices that the carpet has come loose at one corner of the floor. He starts to tear up the carpet, it rips and pops as the the ancient glue and nails come violently free. His hand slips and he smacks himself in the mouth, drawing blood. He wipes his lip, takes a deep breath and keeps pulling.
Then he finds it. The cable runs along the floor and out into the hallway.
INT HALLWAY NIGHT
Rich is now getting very pissed off. He follows the cable round the door frame and into the hall cupboard.
INT CUPBOARD NIGHT
Rich wrenches the door open. He finds the light switch and and flicks it on. He can see where the cable comes in through the wall, but he can’t see where it goes to because of some boxes and jars cluttering the shelves. He starts taking the stuff off the top shelf and putting it on the empty ones beneath it. But there’s a lot of stuff up there. Becoming increasingly frantic, he starts pulling the stuff off the shelves and dropping it onto the floor, but he still can’t see the cable, so he swipes the shelf clear, sending decades of accumulated junk and dust cascading into the confined space.
The cable runs right around the cupboard, near the ceiling and disappears into the next room.
Rich roars with frustration.
INT KITCHEN NIGHT
Rich barrels into the drab kitchen, breathing heavily. The noise has now gone beyond excruciating and off into uncharted territories of pain and annoyance. He wheels around, looking for the cable, but he can’t see it because the kitchen wall cabinets are in the way. He grabs a dilapidated chair from the gaggle of them crowding the kitchen table and rams it against the oven. Gingerly, he climbs up onto the work surface. He raises himself onto his tip-toes and peers over the cabinets. The cable is tacked onto the wall, near the ceiling. It runs halfway around the room, then doubles back on itself and runs down and out the door he just came in. He whimpers when he sees this and tries to turn but loses his balance and starts to slip. Grabbing hold of a cupboard door to stop himself falling, he pulls the entire row of cabinets off the wall and lands with a shuddering crunch on his back on the kitchen floor. The cabinets land on top of him.
Rich begins to make the noise that dogs make when you leave them on their own. A kind of high, pathetic keening. He frees his hands and clamps them over his ears to keep the noise out and his sanity in. Its clearly not working, either way. He bucks and rolls and shifts the cabinets off him and gets slowly, painfully up and limps towards the door.
INT HALLWAY NIGHT
The cable runs out of the kitchen, up the wall, over the ceiling, down the other wall and back into the living room.
Rich starts to sob quietly when he sees this.
INT LIVING ROOM NIGHT
Rich practically falls into the room. The buzzing noise starts to shudder and warp around him. On all fours, he starts to follow the cable again, its been corner-tacked near the floor this time, along the skirting board. It runs halfway along then disappears into the wall. Rich stands up. He scrabbles at the cable horribly until he pulls a segment away from the wall and stands there, strangling the fat, white plastic in his hands with an expression of supreme loathing on his face. Then he places a foot on the wall and heaves.
The cable whips out of its bonds and tears a sheet of plaster the size of a horse’s neck out of the wall as it comes free. Rich bowls backwards out of the room, still holding on.
The noise stops.
As the dust settles, Rich walks back in. He kicks through the lumps of plaster until he finds his quarry. The end of the cable. He lifts it up to examine it.
It looks like a long, misshapen plug fitting.
Rich stares at it incredulously for a while. Then turns slowly and walks over to inspect the back of the odd-looking television.
There’s a matching socket in the back of the T.V. And Rich slides the plug-thing home.
Nothing happens. Rich walks around and kneels in front of the screen. He reaches out a trembling finger and pushes the ‘On’ button.
With a sucking pop, all the lights in the flat go out. In the dark, Rich jumps back from the screen as an eerie, choral whine fills the room. The screen flickers into life.
His face is bathed in a sickly orange glow as he stares at the screen. His expression changes from puzzlement, to sick fascination, to awe, dread, then to a kind of terrible realisation. Rich’s mouth opens. He lets out a small, dry sob.
RICH
...please…
He reaches out to touch the screen.
BLACK OUT
THE END
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I love all of the diction, I can picture the entire short in my head. I like the ending, I do not know why anyone would not. I think you have a lot of talent and an amazing visual ability and such a wonderful vocabulary, In the end when you are telling how you describe Rich’s facial expressions.
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Very captivating. This is exactly the kind of brilliantly odd story that I can get behind. It has the potential for some really fun visual effects, and would make a solid entry into any short festival. I sense that you really understand this character, and you have gone over the finer details of the story in your mind many times. I think what I liked most was the simplicity of the plot. The dog chasing its own tail, and all that kind of clever stuff.
Well done!
Very polished. Impressive grasp of screenplay as a visual and moving medium. I am big fan of dialogue, but will not hold that against you. I am also a big fan of ambiguous endings and this certainly has one of those. The one problem, I had is the entire story is ambiguous. I like that it is open to my interpretation, but I am not sure what I have interepreted. At the beginning, Julian talks of a big mess. And a guy has disappeared. Is Rich hoping for the same tragedy? The only thing I really know about him is that he once had a woman in his life, who, if we take the one snapshot of their life, didn’t care as much for him as he did for her. I guess I also know that he will chase a cable to the depths of hell as well. Okay I have changed my mind. This is really cool and I need to start watching some shorts.
I am blown away by how instantly I was intrigued by this story. Who hasn’t heard strange noises they felt an unwavering need to investigate? Even with no backstory about Rich you feel like if it were you, you would do the exact same things he does to find that damn cable! During the cupboard/night scene I thought you used the word “Stuff” too much. Other then that it was right on. I actually felt myself getting irritated by the noise myself and couldn’t wait to find out where it was coming from. Good job! Is it really over?
Write on!
Mojo
I only found one typo [As it the sound grows it becomes obvious that Rich is trying] no big deal but thought you might want to know. The story is pretty good in my book. I like these odd films. I was able to follow it through in my head, the pace and descriptions were good. I had a little trouble when he was pulling the cable out of the wall and how he went out of the room? not sure how that went, I kinda lost the picture there but caught up again as he came back into the room.
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