The Swetky Agency - The Half-Life of Angels

Submission Synopsis

The Half-Life of Angels

by John Newman

Length:
90

Genre:
Psychological Drama
Suspense

Sentence:
When an aging, beaten-down insurance salesman realizes that one of his clients has a plan to wrangle a cool mil out of the company, he knows he has to do something to stop her...or maybe not.

Blurb/Logline:
An aging insurance salesman prepares to scam his own company out of a million dollars by faking his death and buying a one-way ticket to Argentina. When he sells a second million-dollar policy to a waitress who has the very same idea in mind--except that she won't be taking any extended trips because she'll be dead--he realizes that he has to do something to save her life. But if he does, he'll be condemning her terminally ill daughter to death. Won't he?

Synopsis:
After almost forty years as a Life Insurance Salesman, Harry Coolidge is beaten down. A complete failure as a husband and father and an alcoholic, Harry has survived his career by 'sticking to the script'; he has transferred that principle to his own existence which is defined by routine. The only thing Harry has managed to do right is keep up the premiums on his own policy, and now he's just counting the days until he can cash it in and book that one-way ticket to Buenos Aires he's dreamed of for years.

And then Harry makes a mistake, the sort of rookie mistake that he learned not to make on his very first day on the job. Late at night, and more than a little drunk, Harry sells a policy with a million dollar payout to Carly, the waitress who serves him dinner every night. When Harry gets his head straight a day or so later, he realizes that there's no way Carly, a minimum wage single mother, can keep up the premiums; it's the kind of inflated policy that'll drop off the books in six months. It's then that Harry realizes that Carly doesn't plan on keeping the policy for more than a few months; he realizes that she plans to kill herself to provide her child with the kind of life she never could. For her part, Carly picked Harry because he seems like the kind of guy who doesn't give a damn anymore.

Harry confronts the waitress and when she confirms his suspicions he does everything in his power to stop her. Knowing that Harry has the power to foil her plan, Carly lets him in on the whole story. Her daughter is chronically ill; without the means to pay for proper treatment she will die in her teens. With the million dollar payout, however, she can expect to live another twenty years or more. Thus, by saving Carly's life, Harry will condemn the daughter to an early grave.

In order to find a solution, Harry needs to overcome his own history of failure and make a sacrifice that will live on in others.

Bio:
John Newman was born in Scotland and moved to Canada at age 12; he now lives in Ottawa, where he graduated from Carleton University with a Bachelor's Degree in English.

Getting a writing career off the ground in Canada is hard going, to say the least. A teleplay John wrote entitled Really Grim Fairy Tales resulted in two offers to write for Canadian comedy shows....unfortunately both shows were cancelled shortly after. Two other of John's full-length screenplays, Spied and Something Old, are also represented by The Swetky Agency.

Additional:
The title "The Half-Life of Angels" is deliberately chosen because of the way it evokes two seemingly disparate human conditions: the fact that people are forced, by their suffering, to live half-lives; and that the half-life, or enduring effect, of genuine goodness persists long after that person has ceased to be.