Bungalow

Feature Length Film*
Written and Created by Paul Rabinowitz

LOG LINE:

A Big Pharma sales executive attempts to transform a dilapidated bungalow colony into a community art center to assuage his guilt about pushing prescription opioids. 

MAIN STORY ARC: 

Big Pharma sales executive SCOTT is anxious about both his role in flooding communities with opioids, and his passionate extramarital affair with MIRANDA, an artist and opioid addict. Scott is restless and uneasy, desperate to quiet the gnawing inside him.

With his closest friends, MARTY and NATALIE, he attempts to buy the once-vibrant Bungalow Colony in New York’s Catskills—where they shared carefree summers in the '70s. He dreams of transforming it into a community arts center, hoping to bring light and focus back to a landscape his sales work at Lepner Pharma helped destroy.

Scott meets ISABEL and CAIO, street-artist siblings who become sounding boards for his idea and let him know that they were the ones who found his lover, Miranda, dead from the opioid addiction he helped fuel. The death of Miranda makes Scott’s goal even more pressing, but his plan stalls when the mayor—whose brother died by suicide after opioid addiction—blocks the town’s engineer from issuing a Certificate of Occupancy.

Marty and Natalie take over the colony, with the condition that Scott’s name is removed, allowing all permits to go through. Meanwhile, Scott works to rebuild his relationship with his wife, ABBI, and their two children. The play ends with a twist: Scott receives a published version of Miranda’s journal in the mail, but Abbi opens it. Abbi is now aware of Scott’s affair and his motivations for restoring the bungalow colony. How this impacts the colony, Scott’s relationship with his family and his inner landscape is left only to viewer speculation.

Income equality, the role of art in life, and shifting family dynamics are all themes in the film. Bungalow also asks viewers to consider the role of opioids in creating high unemployment rates, and the role of opioids in catalyzing the rise of the MAGA dream in many communities. It is the story of a man seeking redemption for his role in a grave collective wrong and the story of his path toward facilitating healing for himself and one community he helped destroy.

Unlike other films and documentaries that explore the trauma of opioid addiction, this film explores the impact of the opioid crisis on the landscape (internal & external) and the extent to which the transformation of an external landscape can or cannot transform internal landscapes that have suffered damage.

Bungalow T.V. Series
The feature length film can be adapted into a Pilot Episode for an episodic T.V. Series

Bungalow T.V. Series (Pilot Episode)
Finalist at the Austin Short Film Festival 2024 for Best Drama Screenplay.
Quarter Finalist at the 2024 New York Metropolitan Int’l Screenwriting Competition.

For more information about Bungalow and to receive the treatment email Paul Rabinowitz