Untold Stories
This screenplay is a mish mosh of ideas I’ve had rattling around in my brain for years. I put all the ideas together in 2019 and wrote a treatment. In 2021 I wrote the screenplay. This screenplay is a ‘first draft’ of a screenplay that needs to be re-written to focus on just a couple of characters - or - transformed into a series with episodes involving all the characters that are presented in this ‘first draft’.
An original screenplay by David L. Klein
Elevator pitch It’s a movie about a rape that happened in 1985. In 2018 the victim decides to make the rapist pay for his crime.
Loglines The suspicious death of a fifty-year old woman who had been raped when she was just seventeen years old is investigated by a Detective who solves the mystery and in the process finds the love of his life.
In 2018 a fifty-one year old District Attorney accidentally kills the fifty year old woman he raped in 1985, then goes into a downward spiral as he tries to prevent anyone from finding out about the crime he had committed thirty-three years in the past.
Synopsis This film is an ensemble piece, It’s a love story that emerges out of a crime drama full of passion and suspense. This film is a mix of a ‘Lifetime Channel’ movie and ‘Law and Order’. It’s set in the late summer of 2018, beginning on the day before a white Tehama County Detective learns of the suspicious death of a woman in her home In Red Bluff - with flashbacks as the characters remember and tell other characters about their past. The final scenes occur during the Brett Kavanagh hearings, September 4 - 7, 2018. This movie is about a rapist and his daughter, his victim, the victim’s friend and a detective. The victim is a fifty year old light skinned African American woman, a nursing supervisor at the small hospital in Red Bluff in Northern California who was raped when she was seventeen years old after a party in the Venice area of Los Angeles and never told a soul until she heard the name of the rapist mentioned by chance on the radio. After hearing her rapist’s name on the radio, she decides to tell a friend from her high school days, a Latino woman who she hadn’t seen since high school who is now a dressmaker and asks her to help her devise a plan to make the rapist pay for his crime. The rapist, now a fifty-one year old man of Armenian ancestry is a respected Prosecutor in Fresno County. He accidentally kills the Nurse but doesn’t report her death. He’s becomes distraught with guilt from the killing and then a few days later he overhears late at night his older daughter, a beautiful twenty-five year old aspiring actress in Hollywood, tell her younger sister that she had sex with a producer in order to get a role in a Netflix movie. This leads the Prosecutor to drive to LA, track down the producer and assault him in a fancy Beverly Hills Restaurant which is photographed and recorded by the diners on their smart phone. The images go viral and leads the Prosecutor to become even more distraught. The Tehama County Detective’s investigation into the death of the Nurse leads him to Montebello near Los Angeles where he meets the Dressmaker, a woman who had been sexually assaulted when she was just fourteen years old and, like the nurse, had also never told anyone. In a long meeting between the Detective and the Dressmaker in a Mexican restaurant, with the Kavanagh hearings on a TV in the background we see in flashbacks how the rapist and the victim interacted with each other at Venice High School, how he raped her - and by telling of the rape of her friend it leads the Dressmaker to tell her ‘Untold Story’ of her sexual assault to the Detective. The Dressmaker continues to hide the truth to the Detective about the plan to make the rapist pay for his crime, but in a flash back we see how the two women reconnect earlier in 2018 after being apart for thirty-three years, devise their plan, have a wonderful night out on the town in Hollywood and in downtown LA and then fall into each others arms at the end of evening. In a dramatic climax, the Prosecutor who has become more and more crazed in his attempt to keep anyone from finding out about his past kidnaps the Dressmaker. The Detective follows the Prosecutor and Dressmaker into the desert, unsure if the Dressmaker had been kidnapped and arrives just in time to stop the Prosecutor as he tries to rape the Dressmaker and rescues the Dressmaker. In the end the Prosecutor confesses to all his crimes and pleads guilty to the rape that happened in 1985, the kidnapping, attempted rape and the manslaughter of the Nurse in 2018. He goes to prison where he helps other prisoners with their legal issues. The Prosecutor’s daughter becomes a celebrity and is watched being interviewed on the Conan O’Brien TV show late one night by her mom (the Prosecutor’s wife) her brother and sister. And in the final scene the Detective and the Dressmaker with wedding bands on their fingers share an intimate moment in bed together in a hotel bedroom with a fantastic view out the window of the Eifel Tower. The screen fades to black and as THE END appears on screen the song ‘Love is the Answer’ by England Dan & John Ford Coley plays. During the credits we see the owner and employees at the Dressmaker’s shop in Montebello and the Sheriff and other detectives in Tehama County looking at a computer screen of the Dressmaker’s facebook page with cell phone photos and videos of the detective and the dressmaker enjoying themselves and kissing in famous Paris locations.
This movie is dedicated to victims of sexual assault. I hope it will show how victims battle their demons for their entire life - and how most survivors never lose the desire to find love no matter how deeply they have been hurt in the past.
And just for the fun of it, here are the actors I envisioned as I wrote the script:
The Rapist/Prosecutor: Nicholas Cage
The Nurse/Rape Victim: Halle Berry
The Dressmaker: Salma Hayak
The Detective: Sean Penn
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And lastly, a note on why I wrote this screenplay…
As fate would have it I’m a “me too” person too.
My male guidance counselor where I went to High School in West LA didn’t guide me towards getting educated. My parents were distracted. I didn’t have a strong support system. He befriended me and coerced me into coming home with to to do chores around his house. And before I left his home we hugged, we kissed, even tough at no time was I ever attracted to him physically. I was confused. It was abuse, but I didn’t realize it at that time. During Christmas break, 1973, the counselor led a group of about 12 seniors on a weekend retreat at Lake Arrowhead. That night we had a group nude encounter and I ended up sleeping in bed with him. He wanted to have sex with me, but I rolled over and went to sleep. That night I knew it was time to end the relationship. I avoided him the entire spring semester of 1974, graduated and moved to northern California to go to school and I have lived near San Francisco ever since.
What I feel most badly about is that the counselor didn’t guide me to develop my talents as an artist. I drifted through high school with no education or mentoring. I have done the best I can with my life. But I will always wonder how the years of my life from age fifteen to eighteen could have been spent differently and how differently my life would have turned out.
After the ‘me too’ movement came along I started to think about how I cold turn this negative thing in my life into something positive and here it is; the screenplay I’ve written based on how a perpetrator of sexual assault and victims of sexual assault are affected by the assault for the rest of their lives. Fortunately, by writing this screenplay, it’s helped me blank the memory of what happened to me from my daily consciousness. I rarely think about what happened to me in High School. So to a degree, I feel this screenplay has already been a personal ‘success. Now, someday, I hope either I, or some other writer, will develop this screenplay into a viable feature length film or a mini series screenplay and it will get made and shown and be successful!
Other people, including a filmmaker, have asked me to write the story of my relationship with Caldwell Williams, the guidance counselor. As an actor, I love to play other characters. Writing fictional characters is like acting the character. I don’t want to write a character that is me. I want to play other characters And I don’t think my exact story is all that dramatic. I wasn’t raped. I wasn’t assaulted. I was a teenager with the bad luck to have a guidance counselor more interested in getting physical with good looking young men then guiding them towards success in their life. And as I prefer not to think much about my high school days I certainly don’t want to write about the “experimental school” that I went to in high school. You can read about that story here and if some filmmaker wants to make a film about it I’d be happy to talk to them.
And lastly, here are some photos from my time at IPS (Innovated Program School), the experimental section of University High School, West Los Angeles, 1971 to 1974.
