Xtreme Ghost Hunting

Episode Zero

Pilot Webisode Treatment by Joe Granato IV

 

 

SYNOPSIS:

Episode Zero introduces the primary characters, their relationships, and how the prospect for their show, Xtreme Ghost Hunting, comes about.  It also demonstrates how their group’s unfortunate abbreviate name becomes inevitably associated with them.

 

 

CHARACTERS:

JUSTIN TANKARD: A business major at Baltimore College, Justin is a typical byproduct of an aimless generation.  Subject to incubating in the mundanity of suburbia led to a recursive existence of trading one fashionable trend for another without ever quite finding his niche.  The resulting malleable persona allows him to chameleon into any social group.  He is amicably attractive, albeit quite vanilla.  An overt charm is his genuine zeal, which compounds the disappointment of his many folding passions.  He is uniquely average and is painfully aware of it.  He holds on to aspirations of immortality and is determined to start up the next Microsoft or invent the next hula-hoop.  He finds brilliance in those who have the uncanny ability to sell an abstract idea, and while he is amenable to doing the hard work, he wouldn’t know where to start.

 

PETE STARKE: A model underachiever, Pete flirts with burnout.  His intelligence is acute, he is incredibly well read, and his uncanny reflex to drop clever quips often goes over the heads of all but the smartest in any given room.  His social awkwardness usually manifests as cryptic sarcasm.  But he has yet to find an outlet for benefit from his exceptional intelligence.  He dropped out of community college after a little less than a year in order to work full time at and attempt to save his friends’ failing local bookstore.  Pete has a fascination for the spiritual, the supernatural, and the occult after a strange childhood brush with otherworldly weirdness.  This was an event which he has dubbed his “experience” and it is something he constantly refers to, but never elaborates upon.

 

STARLA (Kristina Taylor): Starla is a caricature of privilege gone awry. Upon her first taste of personal freedom, exposure to the real world unleashed a repressed teenage rebellion.  She transformed from the Kristina to Starla.  Kristina wasn’t above waving pom poms, where Starla wears a choke collar. Kristina was once runner up for class president, where Starla likes to impress people with her extensive knowledge of what she refers to as ‘the dark arts’.  She spends the majority of her time at independent bookstore job with her nose buried in literature about the occult, most especially local lore.  She even falsely claims that she moved to Baltimore after communing with great energy upon a powerful pilgrimage to Edgar Allen Poe’s grave.  Kristina’s truth is that she wanted to be part of the award-winning dance team at Baltimore College.  To exacerbate her public rebellion, she is romantically involved with a film professor at Baltimore College who is almost twenty years her senior.

 

TRAVIS HAYES: Starla’s unwitting male counterpart, Travis is a pillar student in the film program at Baltimore College.  He has studied the life of Jim Morrison, who he idolizes as the definitive artist of the twentieth century.  Consequently, Travis is pretentious and loathes commercialism, consumerism, and the hypocrisy of the American political system.  Most of his anti-establishment philosophies, though, are little more than regurgitated, carbon copies of that which he reads.  However, while he’s not likely to move the world with his poetry or philosophy, Travis is such a talented film maker that it almost warrants his ego, pretention, and eccentricity.  He is the favorite pupil of Dr. Berringer, and is secretly infatuated with Dr. Berringer’s secret young girlfriend, Starla. 

 

DR. MICHEAL BERRINGER: A failed film maker with continuing delusions of grandeur, Dr. Berringer teaches night classes on basic video concepts as an adjunct at Baltimore while maintaining a managerial position at a local copy store by day.  He devoted the entirety of his energy to his failed passions, leaving him with a vacant abscess in place of a life. As a result, his personal, professional, and emotional growth were stunted.  He maintains his youth by staying close to college students, even dating some of them.  Currently, he dates Starla.

 

LUCAS DENT: Luke is an atypical stoner.  Though he has his own minimalist apartment in the arts district of Fells Point, he also keeps a dorm room at Baltimore College despite having aged out.  His dorm room is pragmatic, more a place of operation for a seedy entrepreneurial venture.  His father is a veterinarian, and his mother is a dog groomer for expensive show dogs.  Together, his parents also own an animal shelter.  This affords him access to many controlled substances, including Baltimore College’s favorite party drug ketamine.  His roommate, Travis, enjoys the relationship for the access to K as well as benefits from Lucas’s financial surplus.  Luke is prone to long, silent, wide-eyed stares.  He is known to make vacant, morbid analogies and non-sequiturs.

 

DENNIS: An unseen b-roll camera man.  Often, Travis will critique and belittle Dennis’s lack of artistic vision.

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TREATMENT:

PETE STARKE, with an expression of calm optimism, sits against a predominantly dark, relatively blank documentary backdrop.  The backdrop is a work in progress.  The monologue statement which is to follow is competently filmed.  There is evidence of good lighting and sound work, and the image is clean and subtly color corrected to give polish and professionalism.  In the monologue, Pete describes in cryptic vagaries about his paranormal experience, and how others like him could benefit from paranormal investigation services like the one that his group of young film makers is instituting.  News clippings, photographs, and videos documenting historical brushes with the paranormal serve as a visual accompaniment to his earnest pitch about his group’s aim to provide an honest and transparent approach to paranormal investigation.

 

A pretentious montage introduces an independently owned bookstore coming to terms with its demise at the hands of a corporate giant.  In a nondescript accent dripping with affectation, TRAVIS HAYES narrates.  The tone, in harsh contrast with Pete’s introduction straddles self-serious film noir.  Inside the independent bookstore, Pete Starke and STARLA are packing up books into crates.  Starla is slipping certain books into her own backpack, and Pete remarks on them.  They are mostly books on the occult and about dark local folklore.  Starla is afforded cinematic intimacy and is positioned as the hero of the segment, her victimless theft framed as evidence of her love of literature.  Pete and Starla talk about impending financial fallout.  Travis provides ominous narration over a final montage of empty shelves and the two locking up the store.

 

Abruptly unprocessed footage shows Travis filming this closing shot.  However, he turns this second camera and curses the cameraman, DENNIS, for not capturing the locking of the door on b-roll as requested, instead filming Travis himself who is obviously not a part of his own documentary.  Pete interrupts the berating.  The second camera is still rolling while Pete lays out the pitch regarding his paranormal investigation show.  Travis is annoyed that Pete would even bother him with such a trite request until Starla disarms his pretentions. His standoffishness evaporates with the batting of her eyes.

 

JUSTIN TANKARD sits in a makeshift director’s chair set against the documentary backdrop, which is now closer to complete.  He is joined by Pete.  Pete explains how Justin is the businessman who will help this project happen.  Justin embellishes with how excited he is for their project, and how from the moment he first heard about it, he knew it was brilliant.  To accompany their shared enthusiasm, amateur footage shows Justin and Pete having a beer at Bateman’s Pub.  This record of Justin’s response to Pete’s initial pitch is far less enthusiastic.  The grainy audio conveys Justin apologizing for having to say no to such a good friend, but that his friend must finally plant his feet on the ground and do something productive with his life. 

 

Pete sits in a lecture hall as at Baltimore College as the director discusses the ubiquitous success of reality television, and how it is the generation’s pet rock.  It requires low startup capital and has the potential to yield tremendous profit margin.  Justin gets out of his seat and walks towards the camera that’s set up in the back of the room to capture the lecture.  Before out of frame, he calls Pete from his cell phone to clearly articulate that he has changed his mind.

 

The group thus far is congregated at Justin Tankard’s house.  He has moved back in home with his parents and the house is a perfect suburban spread, complete with china cabinet and flower print tablecloth.  Justin and Travis are debating the role of corporate sponsorship in getting their project off the ground.  While Justin cites his crooked understanding of the throw away dialog in his lecture class, Travis contends that an art grant would suit them better and allow their documentary series credibility unbeholden to advertising interests.  They all chime in with opinions and at the heat of the argument a buzzer goes off.  Justin gets up to get the meatloaf that he has made for everyone.  Travis scolds his cameraman Dennis for filming them eating, and asserts that if must capture the collective experience of the team in their first formal dinner together, his approach is all wrong.  When the group resumes conversation, Justin acknowledges that without any proof of concept, they’d have a hard time securing funding either way, but without some startup capital, it would be difficult to generate a proof of concept.  Travis reluctantly offers a solution.

 

Travis’s college roommate, LUCAS DENT, stands in a white room which resembles a hospital.  He looks wide eyed, perplexed, and perhaps a touch paranoid.  Lucas agrees to help front money for the project.  His answers are short, and he seems unconcerned with spending a large amount of money on a project he knows very little about.  Lucas’s mother comes in holding a cute and cuddly puppy.  Lucas kisses his mother on the cheek and takes the puppy.  He then injects the puppy with something as Travis continues to tell him about the project, and in the end Lucas dumps the puppy in a trash can.  He gathers up the trash bag and gestures for the camera to follow him out the door.  Lucas heaves the bag full of dead puppies into a dumpster and lights a cigarette.  He explains to the camera that he currently has a large surplus of money that he is afraid to spend on anything ostentatious that might trigger an alert of his suspicious source of income.  As he’s explaining this, security camera footage shows him stealing ketamine from the medicine cabinets at the pound.  Other security cameras show him selling this to students on campus.

 

Back at the Tankard home, the full team is assembled.  Justin, Pete, Starla, Travis, and Lucas all sit around the table while Dennis films.  They officially call to order the first meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Paranormal Organization.  They argue about the name.  One says that MAPO sounds nonsensical as an acronym, and would be much more evocative as MAPS – Mid-Atlantic Paranormal Society.  Justin explains that the name was already taken.  Lucas, in a daze, scribbles on a yellow steno pad. Starla compliments his doodles.  The group debates  MAPO versus MAPI (Paranormal Investigators) versus Paranormal Investigative Group, where at least the acronym actually spells a word, versus Haunting Investigation Services.  While the group debates the name, they each insist that Lucas take note.  He furiously tries to keep up with their debate.  In the end the group decides on Mid-Atlantic Paranormal Investigators, but continue the debate as to whether or not there should be a hyphen in Mid-Atlantic.  Travis angrily states that he won’t film a team that doesn’t include a grammatically correct hyphen in the name of their organization. With a reluctant compromise reached, the group charges Travis with using his startup capital to procure basic commodities sporting the name.

 

The boxes arrive. The group’s enthusiasm wanes upon the shirt’s reveal.

 

Copious amounts of merchandise is wrongly branded with Para-normal Investigative Services, acronymized as P-NIS.