THE STAGE 32 LOGLINES

Post your loglines. Get and give feedback.

Joseph Murkijanian
posted a screenplay

FLOAT
By Joseph Murkijanian

GENRE: Drama, Comedy

LOGLINE:

When a high-stakes bank robbery orchestrated by his own family strikes his small-town branch, a meticulously repressed manager must protect the secret of his own years-long embezzlement while outmaneuvering a relentless federal investigator who was already watching him before the first gun was drawn.

SYNOPSIS:

Gerald Fig is a man of rigid ritual. For eleven years, he has served as the branch manager of Meridian Savings & Trust in Dillard County, a flat, rural stretch of the Midwest where nothing ever seems to change. Gerald’s life is defined by parallel lines and exact counts: his car must be parked just so, his coat must hang on the second hook, and his lint roller requires exactly two passes per shoulder. But beneath this veneer of extreme order lies a "second set of books". .

His carefully constructed world begins to fracture when a trio of amateur robbers—including his wife’s nephew, Denny Polzak—storm the lobby. From the safety of his office, Gerald watches the robbery unfold on his CCTV monitors with an eerie, calculated detachment. He does not call 911 immediately; instead, he watches for three minutes, performing the mental arithmetic of how this chaos might affect his hidden ledger.

. Gerald soon realizes a terrifying truth: Frell wasn't sent because of the robbery. She had been building a case against his branch for fourteen months, tipped off by a regional office looking for an excuse to restructure and close the branch.

As Frell tightens the noose, Gerald is approached by Carol Polzak, the actual brains behind the botched robbery. Having watched Gerald’s "ritual" from afar, she recognizes him for what he is: a man who took the money just to prove he could. She offers him a way out—a sophisticated routing path to move the money beyond Frell’s reach—but it comes at the cost of half the "float".

Gerald must decide if he will frame his own family to save himself or find a way to close the account forever. In a world of cold logic and shifting shadows, Gerald Fig discovers that his greatest challenge isn't the law or the thieves—it’s deciding who he is when the ritual finally stops.