An enormously tall, redheaded woman hunts down and traps her father's killer.

SYNOPSIS:

Characterized as “Dash Hammett’s The Thin Man meets Stieg Larson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” Red McKenna is a delightfully clever film adaptation of my novel entitled Red, which was published in 2010. It is part of a five-volume series. The film follows the heroine’s quest to solve the disappearance of her natural father, and her rocky love affair with a mysterious biker who helps. Realizing that her father had been a serial killer’s first victim, she sets a trap to capture the killer. The action includes elements of comedy, suspense, science fiction, and romance with LGBT-supportive overtones. The story is heavy on character development, especially the heroine’s maturing from a headstrong girl into a team leader. The script is 116 pages long. My name is Charlie Masi, and I am a multimedia artist, as well as a scientist, engineer, journalist, and author. The script I’m pitching features college senior Judith McKenna, nicknamed Red, who is an enormously tall redhead (think Saffron Burrows or Natalya Rudakova) with a crack athlete’s body, a mathematical genius mind, and an independent streak a mile wide. She also displays a smart mouth and a hair-trigger temper. The story opens with Red in Miami, FL abandoning her Harvard studies just months from graduation to go on a quest to find out what happened to her natural father, who disappeared ten years earlier while on a prospecting trip. She’d lost her temper that morning when her rich step father tried to set her up to meet some pencil neck he knew from work. Hours later, Red’s poorly maintained car has broken down. A mysterious biker stops to help. She feels an instant attraction to the huge, bearded biker (think Jim Caviezel or Tom Hopper), but dismisses him as a would-be macho tough guy. Red decides to continue her quest by offering to pay the biker – known only as “Doc” – to give her a ride on his motorcycle to the location of her father’s prospect-mine shaft, where she hopes to pick up his trail. En route to Nevada, Red realizes that Doc is much more than the testosterone-addled macho bike bum she thought. She decides to push him into becoming her lover. Trouble rears its ugly head when she finds that Doc has been in cahoots with her evil step father all along. He is actually the pencil neck her step father wanted her to meet in Miami! Furious at what she sees as betrayal, she summarily breaks off her love affair with Doc, but still has to work with him or be homeless, out of work, and destitute in a strange city, with no way to continue her quest. Two weeks later, Red finds herself ensconced as a middle-management executive at Doc’s research company leading a team using state-of-the-art robots to explore the abandoned mine. She begins to rethink her attitudes toward both Doc and her step father, who have cooperated to make it all possible. When her expedition team reaches the mine site, she begins suspecting her father was attacked by a serial killer, and she identifies Luthor Todd, a local guide, as the probable culprit. But, there is no hard evidence linking him to the crime. Red conceives of a “sting” operation to lure Todd into repeating his crime with her as victim. Todd takes the bait, kidnapping her to ransom back to her step father. Red gets him bragging about his past crimes and pushes him to make the ransom call to Doc, which is Red’s signal that she’s gotten enough to convict Todd. As Todd steps out of the cabin, mercenaries hired by her step father ambush and capture him. The film ends with Red kissing and hugging Doc, and admitting that she still loves him.

RED MCKENNA