A charismatic, belligerent English nightclub singer, born with flipper-like arms because his pregnant mother took the drug thalidomide, believes his deformity will keep him from ever finding love -- until he falls for a pretty young American doctor, with intimacy issues of her own, and must confront his own dark past in order to win her.

SYNOPSIS:

Nicholl Fellowships Top 50, Page International Screenwriting Awards Finalist: “Wow. I don’t know of any film, or script previously read, that THE FLID SHOW remotely resembles. Beyond the originality, this writer has fantastic craft skills. He creates an amazing character in the lead--interesting and dynamic and compelling, he grips the reader right from page one.” “This is one of those scripts that opens so powerfully that you forget, for the moment, that you're reading a script. I was just ‘in.’ Instantly. The story does a fantastic job of communicating the horror and challenge of thalidomide's effects. It humanizes the consequences without ever going for cheap sympathy.” The original stage play version of THE FLID SHOW received rave reviews in New York starring Mat Fraser, the breakout personality of AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW (see www.newdirectionstheater.org/id2.html).

Duncan Mowbray is an English nightclub singer born with flipper-like arms because his mother took the drug thalidomide. He lives with his sister, earning a paltry living with an act in which he sings only songs from 1962, the year of his troubled birth. Despite his obsession with the time period, Duncan wants nothing to do with anything that defines him as a “flid,” especially a group that's pestering him to sing at a candlelight vigil to commemorate the drug, which caused an epidemic of malformed births around the world. Then Duncan meets his sister’s young doctor friend Rachel Stohl, and they're instantly attracted to each other but, for different reasons, pretend to dislike each other intensely. At the same time a series of spirits show up in Duncan's life with the apparent purpose of touring him through the dramatic high points of what was the greatest pharmaceutical disaster of all time, but with the ulterior motive of guiding Duncan into a more honest relationship with his dark past (including the suicide of his mother), which allows him to open up to Rachel in a way he never has with a woman before. But when Duncan learns that Rachel has prescribed the newly redeemed thalidomide to a patient and that she plans to speak at the upcoming vigil herself, he leaves her, and Rachel's own insecurities drive her into the arms of an able-bodied lover. Neither finds happiness apart, however, and when Duncan shows up at the commemorative ceremony after all, he and Rachel recognize their lasting bond with each other, and side by side with her, Duncan expresses his newfound tolerance of life’s essential imperfection with a final, and surprising, song.