*not a guarantee of Guinness
My friend and colleague Cian McGarrigle has entered a project into the Arthur Guinness Projects competition.
Cian is the writer and Director of the multi award winning film ‘No Messages’ and the project he is pitching is a feature film that sounds like a lot of fun.
You can vote for his project here, and remember YOU CAN VOTE EVERY DAY. I’ve already voted a bunch of times, you should too.
Here’s what Cian had to say about it…
Heist Take Two
A film about one woman’s revenge on the financial sector. A perfect escape for Irish cinema audiences.
If successful, funding from the Arthur Guinness Projects will be used to hire a crew of independent filmmakers to shoot a promotional trailer and test scenes from the film. It will also go towards developing the screenplay including hiring a script editor.
This completed package will then be used to attract investors and production companies to a unique independent Irish feature film.
The Pitch:
Right now Eleanor’s bank is being robbed. But that’s not why she’s miserable.
All her life, Eleanor has done everything right and it’s gotten her nowhere. She works in a job she hates at a bank she owes tonnes of money to, lives alone in a squalid bedsit while renting out her negative-equity apartment to ungrateful tenants and her father’s rising medical bills are threatening to clean her out completely.
So being pushed face down into the carpet at work by armed raiders is nothing on her scale of misery. What isn’t nothing is the fact that instead of an expected pay rise Eleanor has just had her wages cut and been admonished for her ‘bad attitude’ while Debra, the office bitch, has been given a promotion.
When Debra campaigns successfully for the bank staff to play themselves in the CrimeCall reconstruction of the robbery because it would be “cathartic” Eleanor is not impressed. She objects to the idea but nobody listens. Debra, after all, is flavour of the month and Eleanor is aniseed. Nobody likes aniseed-flavoured anything.
While on a disastrous date with Dean, an unemployed and talentless actor, Eleanor drunkenly concocts a fantasy revenge on her employers. During the filming of the robbery reconstruction she and Dean should actually rob the bank for real and slip away unnoticed!
But that fantasy becomes a dangerous possibility when Eleanor learns that her father will soon need 24 hour live-in care. With no other way to pay the bills and facing complete financial ruin it’s time for Eleanor to engineer her own bailout from work.
To successfully pull off the heist Eleanor must call in favours from some dodgy characters she thought she’d left in her past – including her own brother who’s behind bars. They’ve got to train wimpy Dean to play a hardened criminal and get cast in the reconstruction, find a way to swap a bag of fake TV money for real cash while being filmed and figure out how to launder the one million euro they’ve got their sights on.
But Eleanor’s not the only one with designs on the bank’s motherload. During the reconstruction a real criminal with a real gun slips into the bank unnoticed amongst the actors in balaclavas. He takes the place down. Amidst the panic, confusion and accusations of stolen lines from the actors Eleanor manages to switch bags. The real criminal takes off with a load of fake money while the real money is taken back to the TV station mistakenly labelled as a prop. A prop that’s too realistic to be left lying around and is scheduled to be incinerated the next day.
Now Eleanor has just 24 hours to break into the TV station and get back the cash. But with a Garda detective and the other bank robber on the trail of the money too, things are not going to be easy. Can someone who’s always played it straight go crooked and get away with it? Eleanor’s about to find out the hard way that crime doesn’t pay but it can be very funny.
Heist Take Two is a comedy-thriller about one woman’s attempt to solve her own financial crisis with an itchy balaclava, a fake shotgun and a real attitude problem.
To learn more about the Arthur Guinness Projects click here
John Murphy 