My Pending Nomination

And the Winner Is

The Oscar nominations came out this week. With Black Panther making the list, I am confident that my draft screenplay will also be Oscar worthy. Superhero movies are in. And I lived one last year.

It’s a story that nicely dovetails with my last blog post, on the value of going to the morgue to advance your case. In this story, it was an obscure article in a small town paper that cracked the case.

My client had a financial executive suspected of unorthodox accounting. They had a few reasons to suspect he was not the best of hires. They did not expect to find he was a Batman villain.

What did I find when I went to the morgue, what old clipping pointed us in the right direction? There were bankruptcies, litigation, but the most interesting thing I found was an article. In this article, I learned that our subject was an author, albeit an author under a pen name. His pseudonymously published novel was about a financial executive who happened, in many ways, to be exactly like the person being researched by me. That was not the fun part. The fun part was that the novel was about a financial executive getting away with financial crimes (in the midst of some global greater conspiracy kind of stuff). I became convinced that this guy’s plan was to write a book and then later commit in real life the exact fraud already written. He was a real life Batman villain I believe.

Do you think you think the screenplay will be believable enough? Oscar nomination ahead?