Loglines & Screenplays by Jonathan LaPoma

GENRES: Horror

When a famous true-crime podcaster returns to her hometown to investigate the murder of a childhood friend's family, she slowly begins to realize that she's actually investigating her own traumatic past. 

*co-written with Isabel Drean

GENRES: Comedy, Drama

A struggling Hollywood screenwriter recruits his former best friends to help him write a script about a series of pranks they pulled in high school, and they discover why their friendship fell apart (ADAPTATION meets IDIOCRACY). 

GENRES: Action, Drama

In Mexico, a drug cartel boss kidnaps a washed-up Hollywood director, and the two are driven to insanity while shooting a documentary about the boss's once-powerful cartel--a project meant to help both men reclaim lost glory.

GENRES: Mystery, Historical, Drama

In 1953, two scientists interrogate a man they believe may have perpetrated "The Biggest Scientific Hoax of the Century," planting a fake skull in Piltdown, England long believed to be the Missing Link connecting man's ancestry to that of the apes.

GENRES: Independent, Comedy, Drama, Family

After his brother attempts suicide a few weeks before Christmas, an unrepentant asshole with a heart of gold moves back in with his comically dysfunctional family to help his brother, only to discover that his brother is the sanest of them all.

GENRES: Comedy, Drama

A first-year teacher in an at-risk Los Angeles middle school finds the inspiration to confront his bullies through his interactions with a lovable, but equally teased, student.

GENRES: Independent, Drama

An impressionable young man struggles to make sense of the alternating good and bad advice he receives from a much older friend as they travel through the heart of Mexican drug territory on a cursed trip to a remote Pacific coast beach.

GENRES: Drama

Two estranged best friends set off on a road trip to explore what truths unite people in a modern America dominated by apathy and discord. It is soon clear, however, that truth is the last thing either man seeks. (EASY RIDER meets GOOD WILL HUNTING).

GENRES: Drama, Family, Sports

A successful, but unhappy, novelist reluctantly returns to his childhood town to attend a friend’s funeral. While there, he reminisces about his childhood experiences playing basketball on a city court to escape from emotional abuse, and he understands himself and the theme of his next project more clearly. (STAND BY ME meets THE BASKETBALL DIARIES).

GENRES: Drama

A young boy who loves animals must cope with his father’s insistence that he will someday work in the slaughterhouse that has employed the men of his family for the past several generations. (KES meets BILLY ELLIOT).

GENRES: Drama, Romance

An obsessive-compulsive twenty-one-year-old Peruvian woman, hoping to find love and relief from her mental illness, travels from Lima to the USA on a work-abroad program and takes a job at a small ski resort in Montana. (MARIA FULL OF GRACE meets GIRL, INTERRUPTED).

GENRES: Drama, Romance

After trying for seven years to successfully make it as a dancer in New York, a 30-year-old half-Mexican, half-American woman with dual citizenship reluctantly returns to her hometown of Oaxaca, Mexico and struggles to find her identity. (MIDNIGHT IN PARIS meets EVEN THE RAIN).