I Forget
Genre: romantic comedy
Logline: I FORGET is a love story about hypnosis, inter-dimensional travel in pajamas and home surgery.
Synopsis: Julian is 27, brilliant and lonely to the bone, haunted by night terrors that vanish with each dawn. He lives and travels in his van, auditing lectures at various universities, feeding his photographic memory and selling custom-written essays to rich dumb students for cash. But life as an academic vagabond and perpetual half-night-stand ends when Julian reluctantly allows himself to be hypnotized in a campus stage-show by a freckled med-student, The Amazing Stanya. He wakes up damp in the pub at dawn
certain that he’s in love for the first time. Stanya is his soulmate.
After days of mooning over Stanya, his full memory of the hypnosis returns. She made
him ‘love’ her as a hilarious and touching part of her act. He recalls wetting himself on
stage at the terrifying appearance of a hovering naked man. He’s humiliated, enraged and
he still can’t get Stanya off his mind. He goes to her, battling the urge to profess his
‘love’. She’s got to fix him. Stanya says she can’t re-hypnotize him now that she knows
about his epilepsy. Hypnosis could trigger another seizure. Julian is flabbergasted.
What epilepsy? What seizure? He runs from her and throws himself into the study of
self-hypnosis, composing hypnotic scripts to be read to him by his laptop computer. He’s
highly hypnotizable. He is able to erase Stanya’s planted love suggestion. But when he
goes to her to test himself, they fall in love for real and end up in bed. She warns him of
the dangers of amateur hypnosis, how the wrong word can warp mind and memory.
Julian has to break their perfect embrace. What if his night terrors return? He can’t wet
Stanya’s bed.
Alone, locked in his van parked inside a warehouse, Julian creates a script to examine his
night terrors from a safe distance, visualizing them as projected ‘home movies’. In deep
trance he finds a lifetime of buried memories of half-dressed ‘visitors’ appearing from
nowhere to transit through his sleeping spaces at night, terrifying him. Finally he finds
the first reel, his earliest buried memory; the day he met a naked blue boy playing in the
creek. The Blue Boy who made Julian’s brain evolve a new organ – an antenna along his
spine to help the good dreamers find their way. Julian emerges from his trance to find a
yawning girl in a nightie in his van. As he fights his paralysis she exits through the wall.
Working in a deep trance, Julian is making a surgical incision along his own spine in
search of the antenna when Stanya finally tracks him down. She begs him to accept that
his trances, epilepsy and sleep-deprivation are causing hallucinations. She stitches his
back, screws him to sleep. But then he’s awake, ranting at nothing, running headlong
into a wall, splitting his head. Halfway to the hospital he awakens, transformed. He tells
a grandiose tale of passing through the wall, into space, to sense other antennas like his in
other people, perhaps in other worlds. The Blue Boy is speeding evolution, putting
minds in touch across the universe. To snap him out of it Stanya challenges him to ‘fly’
to her bank and tell her what’s in her safety deposit box. Desperate to prove he’s sane, to
save their love, Julian agrees to try. He enters the deepest trance of all, falls at her feet
and dies. She can’t revive him – but there by his dead hand, written on the floor, the
exact contents of her safety deposit box! Because she loves him, because she owes it to
him, she takes up the scalpel and cuts deeper into Julian’s back. There is an antenna –
and when she touches it she’s not alone anymore. The Blue Boy is there, touching her
spine with a very real blue finger. She can never be alone again.
Bio: Born laughing to a beautiful art teacher and a handsome math teacher in the picturesque snows of Ontario, Mark Schroeder was raised in the Caribbean, Australia, Mexico and Canada. Mark worked as a reporter/photographer in his teens and then studied English and Film at York University. He began screenwriting within a week of expulsion, apprenticing as a story editor at Wolf Films, a small production company in Toronto. There he developed projects with other writers and wrote four features of his own –– earning funding from the OFDC, Telefilm, The Ontario Arts Council and FUND. Mark’s collaboration with Allan Magee of Screenwrite Entertainment on one of his original screenplays led to further teamwork creating proposals for CTV, Disney, Sunrise and the CBC. Looking for a film job that could sustain his writing habit, he stumbled upon the bizarre cult of location sound recording. For more than ten years he’s been eavesdropping on hundreds of directors, as he pays the rent working on innumerable TV series, features, MOWs, commercials and shorts, while completing another 2 feature scripts, which won the Creative Crib Screenplay Competition and a Praxis Fellowship. Mark's first short film, INSTANT, has been accepted to the Vancouver International Film Festival for 2009.
Mark Schroeder, writer
mark@artemisdreams.com
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