Everyone dies. We just don’t like to talk about it. Well, except for 20-something Tabitha, who not only talks about it on her ever-growing podcast, she has an interesting view on the subject as she is about to follow in her father’s footsteps as the town’s mortician.
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Like many young-people today, she’s more comfortable living her life on-line than being out in the cold, cruel world. But, at a time of life where her contemporaries are dating, romancing, getting engaged and even married, Tabitha, as a mortician student, isn’t exactly ringing the dinner-bell for gentlemanly suitors. In the real world she’s quiet, reserved and borderline agoraphobic but when it comes to her midnight ‘Brown Bread’ podcast each night, she’s a confident dynamo, a force to be reckoned with. Most people would rather lick an airport toilet seat than handle dead bodies on a daily basis but not Tabitha, this to her is home... in fact, it is her home as the morgue she broadcasts from is in her family basement.
Trying to navigate life while besieged by death, this young beauty can only fully open up to her audience from the safety of being surrounded by dead bodies while doing her live-stream podcast. Since the people Tabitha spends most of her time with have shed their mortal coil she, in spirit, brings them back to life, if only by her invented tales of how these clients must surely have died.
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Of course, she has no real idea other than a coroner’s report and that’s when her imagination and story-telling run wild attracting a growingly rabid on-line fan-base. As her fantastical mind invents these morbid, sardonic and often hysterical stories, Tabitha’s oblivious to the fact that she is indeed revealing insights as to what is happening in her own world.
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To bring it all home with her ‘real life’ experience in the funeral business, Tabitha offers a peek behind the curtain of what actually happens to someone in those final hours before burial.
Unfortunately for Tabitha, her father Toby’s unusual marketing ideas and great social graces as a Funeral Director have not been inherited and she will need to dig deep inside to find that courage if she wishes to carry on the family legacy.
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You would think with a never-ending supply of clients that the funeral industry is a guaranteed successful business but for her quirky father’s small mortuary operation, it’s a constant struggle.
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To make matters worse, Death With Dignity - the McD of the funeral business, is about to set up shop in their small town that will no doubt ‘seal the coffin’ on their business’ fate. So, as Toby MyCroft plots unique ways to advertise and keep his legacy alive and running, his daughter Tabitha will have to step up to the plate and fill the shoes of her dearly departed mother.
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What lies ahead for Tabitha will be a challenge that shapes her world and her very soul.
TOBY MYCROFT is quite the character. He’s willing to do anything to keep the spotlight on him and the family funeral business. He means nothing but the best for his local community, but often doesn’t take into account that how he sometimes chooses to promote himself, might just be super offensive. Yes, he’s a beloved local celebrity, he’s a scout leader, a member of the Knight’s of Columbus, a little league umpire, but when he sponsors a team for the ‘Morning Wood Funeral Home’ the kids playing for the Grave Diggers are mortified to have images of tombstones with their names and numbers on the back of their uniforms.
And it doesn’t end there. With coffee mugs, ashtrays and t-shirts featuring the faces of the recently deceased, as promoted in his funeral-home gift shop, it’s not exactly in good taste to try and squeeze more money out of his clients. But what really keeps the neighborhood whispering behind his back, are those late-night commercials. Toby thought it was a swell idea to dress like an old fashioned undertaker only to do a song and dance routine channeling Danny Kay to promote six-foot holes in the ground by pirouetting on a casket, maybe jumping a motorbike over 5-6 caskets thus creating and breaking a world record. His flair for the flamboyant is likely what got his daughter to become a bit of a celebrity herself. What happens at the MyCroft house, doesn’t stay at the MyCroft house. Sometimes notoriety isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Sure, Tabitha knows the ins and outs of the mortuary business having assisted her father embalm grandmas and grandpas since she was eleven years old. You could say she could ‘school the best of them’, despite needing to reach the end of her eighteen-month formal education at a board-approved school of Mortuary Sciences that will issue Tabitha a ‘license’ to legally practice what she knows. However, Tabitha’s dander is up and she wants to fight the system.
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Yet, she wasn’t savvy enough to keep that part of her experience secret during her recent podcast where she admitted helping her father in the morgue. Now, with a Death with Dignity “Where you can finally have it your way!” Corporate Funeral Conglomerate will immediately try to gobble up or run out of business all the county’s mom and pop funeral parlors and it’s that little tidbit of information on Tabitha’s podcast they will try to use against that that charlatan Toby MyCroft, who makes a mockery of their impersonal high-priced, low value operation that might very-well sink the family trade. Looking for any angle to shut down any all competition, a lawsuit has been presented with the intention of putting the MyCroft’s on the street and into a soup-line.
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How will they survive the season if the fifth-generation family business shuts down? Well, it’ll fall upon the capable shoulders of Tabitha in which her knowledge and expertise will rise to the top, and before a jury of her peers, wow them into seeing she has a better understanding of all things ‘Funeral’, than anyone on either side of the tribunal.
EPISODES...
EPISODE 1: Licence to Kill
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While attending Mortuary School, an important upcoming exam inspires Tabitha’s Podcast program with parallel importance to a fictional story that revolves around the most recent client located in their funeral preparation room in the basement.
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Podcast story: When a snarky, distracted 16-year- old student attempts to pass her driver’s test yet again, she recklessly ends up with her seriously obese instructor stuck on the railroad tracks. With a locomotive barreling down on them, will tubby be able to escape the vehicle in time or will she be mindful enough to think of anyone but herself for once?
DIRECTORS WISH LIST
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Smart Guns producer, Laura Gregory Founder of Great Guns, has ongoing working relationships with Ilya Naishuller, Roar Uthaug, Danny Trachtenberg, Tom Shankland, Olly Blackburn, David Nutter, Cassandra Brooksbank and Robin Sheppard. Steve Ecclesine producer, Laura’s partner at Smart Guns has recently attached director Sean Macnamara to BUS54 our 80’s Cuba project. Our aim, contingent upon interest and timing, is to initially reach out to the directors with whom we have established relationships, subsequently including other prominent directors from television, film, and music videos. We aspire for these productions to exhibit a compelling visual aesthetic complemented by robust performances.
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ILYA NAISHULLER
DANNY TRACHTENBERG
ROAR UTHAUG
ROBIN SHEPPARD
TOM SHANKLAND
DAVID NUTTER
CASSANDRA BROOKSBANK
OLLY BLACKBURN
CHARLEY STADLEY
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NOTE: Assets are available on request - A treatment and two scripts.
