Description: SCREENPLAY AND/OR PILOT FOR PREMIUM CABLE SERIES (Available: contact David Elliott,
SCREENPLAY AND/OR PILOT FOR PREMIUM CABLE SERIES (Available: contact David Elliott,
[email protected]) Terra Incognita: “Unknown Lands” on the maps of ancient mariners. What will life in America be like if the ship of state goes down? How will Americans live during the long "decline of the Empire" if some of the gloomier predictions of Peak Oil and global warming theorists play out? Many 21st Century pioneers are already enjoying lives cut off from the grid, global food supplies and the automobile, in Intentional Communities springing up across the country. Who are they? What kinds of lives do they lead? How secure are they – and will they be, in a post-empire world? 1-page Series Synopsis: This is not a documentary; it's intended as an intelligent and informed imagining of what the near future may hold for us. Alarmed by the disintegration of neighborhoods in her Midwestern city, RITA, a new young mother, flees with her son AARON to an intentional community, Terra, in North Carolina at the urging of her friend SARAH, who has already made the transition. Rita's husband BILL can't understand her concern at first, and her upper-middle class parents pay dearly for their own denial. NATHAN, Terra’s only teenager, unhappy at being cut off from his friends, returns to the city but finds that it’s become a far different place in the year since his aunt and uncle adopted him and left following his parents’ murder in a home invasion. In a nod to Seven Samurai, he ends up recruiting JOSHUA, a carpenter and martial arts black belt who’s been laid off, to come back with him to help defend Terra. But the outlook in general is a positive one, especially compared to such dark scenarios as Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, for example. As a movie and, if viewer response is strong enough, a potential series, Terra Incognita can offer its audience both reassurance and information in the context of dramatic entertainment. Potential storylines will involve themes such as: • Building and maintaining a sustainable local economy and community • Linking these communities into an international network to reshape a new, more desirable and sustainable future for humanity • The inevitable conflicts that will arise as the old economic model and its major players are challenged, and… • “Massively multi-player gaming,” in which thousands of Internet participants game together to actually shape the future. Multi-player gaming will allow us to introduce new communities and characters even as we further develop those in the pilot.
