waverly acres

I recently read two interesting articles in the New Yorker, which when merged together would make a great screenplay.  They both took place in Florida, a state that fascinates me in its bizarreness.  There’s at least three cultures merging together in odd ways down there:  the redneck Deep South, Jewish New York, and Latin.  There’s a sense of being permanently stuck in the eighties, music and fashion-wise, and a certain lawlessness.  Don’t forget the obscenely rich snots living in Palm Beach, the drug dealers in their oceanfront villas, and the elderly people snarfing up their all you can eat earlybird buffets.  Add in the hazy humid heat, the wildly colored tropical flowers and thick scratchy grass, and alligators creeping along the canals, and who wouldn’t feel a bit off-kilter?

The first article dealt with exotic animals (exotic animal smuggling is big business in Florida) that have escaped into the wild, primarily during hurricanes.  Many of these animals have survived and prospered, in particular iguanas, Nile monitors, and pythons.   As greedy housing developers continued draining swampland building more and more remote subdivisions further inland, they’ve encroached on Python territory.  The pythons have swallowed animals as large as an alligator; who knows what they could eat next? 

The second article dealt with those very subdivisions and how most of them are in foreclosure, disintegrating ghost towns with weeds growing head high in the lawns.  Isolated residents live in the largely abandoned subdivisions, usually renters or people way behind on their mortgage and awaiting eviction.  I wouldn’t be surprised if you found some people just squatting in the homes.  And I’m sure anyone choosing this living situation has an interesting backstory.

So here you have the screenplay.  I am really bad at these high concept pitches, but here goes:  An unscrupulous developer half-builds a fancy subdivision (Waverly Acres–they all have names more suitable to a British shire than Florida swampland) but then goes into foreclosure and abandons the project.  He knows there are pythons in the canals that traverse the subdivision but of course says nothing about it.  Various people move in.  You’ve got our heroine, the wife of a Wall Street banker in New York City, who, after the collapse of his hedge fund, abandons her and her three children with no money.  Familiar with Florida from prior vacations, she snaps up a bargain house–boy, is she in for a surprise.  Then maybe you have some working stiff who actually bought one of the houses at full price but then lost his job.  He is struggling to hang onto the home but his wife has left him with the kids.  Maybe these two will get together.  Then you could have some drug dealer hiding out from the law, or Haitian refugees, or teenage runaways–many possibilities, all with their own backstories.  Put them all together, add in some hungry pythons, and see what happens.

How does this end? I haven’t decided yet, but I’m inclined to leave Waverly Acres to the pythons.

So when I win my Oscar, or at least make multimillions from the licensed plastic snakes with swallowing capability, you heard the idea here first.