OPEN: An ideal, ivy-league-style SCHOOL. Wood paneling, polished floors, statuary, paintings, etc. Rooms and rooms of learning--seeing inside some appear "normal" and others fantastic--just a glimpse, enough to see it's "futuristic". A bell rings and clean, good-looking STUDENTS flood the hallways. Most either go to lockers and then out the nearest door, or they just leave. It sounds busy, like you'd expect in a high school. Perhaps unnoticed, there are several boys and girls who are dressed exactly the same--plain black t-shirts and jeans, black Converse sneakers. Above all their heads, ghostly, float their names in boxes that point down at them. Lockers look normal, if extra-deep. WADE WATTS, a teenage boy in the plain clothes, is at a locker. He is good-looking if a bit nondescript. Opening his knapsack, he taps on book icons that reappear floating over the top shelf of his locker. His backpack appears lighter with every tap. The locker slams and an even better-looking boy in fancy clothes is behind the door, several friends behind him.
**interaction just as in book**
STUDENTS leave quickly and the HALLWAY quiets. WADE walks slowly to a door. Just outside a couple STUDENTS blink out of existence. WADE walks beyond the school grounds and keeps going until he is on rolling, beautiful green hills on a gorgeous fall late afternoon. Empty of people, there is a gentle breeze, forest in the distance, blue skies with just a few clouds. WADE sits on the hill and watches for a while. He sighs, reaches up, logs out.
Suddenly, WADE appears on the floor in the corner of a noisy, dirty laundry room. It is dark grey inside and out. It is cramped. WADE is no longer good-looking. He appears a little younger than before. He is overweight and looks unhealthy. He has acne, he is pale, he is dirty. WADE is wearing dirty, patched clothes. WADE pulls off a plain-looking set of goggles and worn-looking gloves. He puts them lovingly into a vintage metal Star Wars lunchbox. There is the sound of fighting, shouting, sirens, music, television, and more. WADE tucks the lunchbox into his knapsack (a filthy, sewn-up version of the one he has in school) and pulls himself into a ball, shivering a little. A fight on the other side of the thin wall is disturbing. WADE pulls out a beat up laptop and plugs in headphones. He watches Family Ties. The sound of theme song is first nice and loud, comforting; WADE smiles, wiping his eyes. The camera pulls back and as the song fades out for the audience, the fighting fades in. We see the relatives and renters who live in the trailer, many plugged in, some doing drugs. The camera pulls back and back until we can see the STACKS: mostly trailer homes with some RVs or vans mixed in. Lots of sounds and sights of extreme poverty, drugs, crime, economic and ecologic devastation.
NOTE: the characters are all real actors. There will be three WADE actors:
YOUNG WADE: overweight, short, acne, normal, but not overtly attractive.
OASIS WADE: tall, good-looking, fit. Has same general coloring and the idea of real WADE, but an ideal WADE.
OLDER WADE: taller than YOUNG, very fit, acne gone, normal, but not overtly attractive though better than he was, extremely pale and devoid of hair.
CONTINUATION:
Pulling back from the STACKS, you get a view of the further devastation. The trailer homes, in multiple neighborhoods, surround an over-packed, poverty-riddled, energy-lacking city. The roads do not have private vehicles, and many roads are overgrown and crumbling back to nature, some with homeless living in lean-to shelters or makeshift tents. The only vehicles are buses with solar panels, and even those are patched together. Pulling back further, there are dead zones from ecological disaster and abandonment, and, even further, some US cities have been destroyed (either crumbling and abandoned, burned, or nuked and are cordoned off holes). Pulling back further, the ash-filled, polluted sky gives way through the clouds to blue, then up to a cluttered layer of satellites, abandoned space program paraphernalia, and rocks. Pulling back further, only starfield is visible.
The actual starfield seamlessly transforms into an old video game starfield--opening credits roll over decades of video game scenes.
AFTER OPENING CREDITS:
WADE wakes early in the LAUNDRY ROOM. He powers up just the laptop (not the goggles and gloves) to scroll through old family pictures. He stops at one of his mother and father: a selfie his mother took with his father holding a hand on her pregnant belly. They look thin and dirty, but smiling. He has a FLASHBACK to his childhood (**if flashbacks are used, there will be one more WADE: a little kid who is thin and dirty**.)
FLASHBACK: LITTLE WADE is sitting with his MOTHER on their filthy, old, torn couch in a dark single-wide trailer (at the bottom of the STACKS). There is a cardboard box labeled **FATHER'S NAME** on a dirty coffee table also strewn with take out food containers, pop bottles, and subtle drug paraphernalia. She is showing him the same picture of his father on her phone, scrolling to it through a couple other pictures.
MOTHER This is your daddy, Wade. He loved you very much. (She pauses to hold back tears.) Your daddy's the one who named you, you know? (She reaches into the box and pulls out some superhero comics, including Spiderman.) Like Peter Parker, you know? "Wade Watts". The first letters are the same. Like you're a superhero, because you are. You're my little superhero! (She tickles him and they laugh.) Come on (she drops the comics back into the box), it's time for you to play your games. I gotta go to work.
MOTHER puts WADE in old fashioned VR goggles and little gloves. She logs in for him via an old laptop and sets him more firmly on the couch. Before putting the large headphones over his ears, she whispers to him.
MOTHER (whispering) I love you, Wade Watts.
WADE I love you, Mommy.
As WADE's hands lift and make passes in the air as he plays, MOTHER stands, pockets some drug paraphernalia, and is already taking down her hair and unbuttoning her shirt. She exits to the next room and closes the door.
WADE takes off his headphones and goggles so he can look in the box of his father's belongings. He finds more pictures that show his father was very young, his mother was very young, they were very, very poor and struggling. He finds pictures of a happier, younger father with his own family in a suburban home. He finds notebooks. He finds an obituary page filled with listings, all who died of influenza, that includes his grandparents together. Finally he finds a newspaper article about his father being killed while looting during a blackout. As he's looking, he begins to hear his MOTHER making sex noises in the other room, as she is an online escort. WADE puts the papers away and his headphones and goggles back on, turning up the volume to drown out the sounds.
CONTINUATION:
WADE comes out of this flashback, scrubbing his wet eyes with the end of his sweater sleeve. At that moment, his AUNT enters, carrying an armload of filthy laundry. She is thin, with sores on her face. She starts the process of doing laundry and notices WADE, frozen in the act of trying to cover his laptop. The AUNT's eyes widen and she bellows for her husband.
AUNT **NAME**! NAME! Get in here! The little asshole's got a laptop!
WADE No, Aunt XXX. Please, I need this.
AUNT You owe me and your uncle, for taking care of you.
WADE But you get my food vouchers...
UNCLE enters and stands at the door, unseen by AUNT. He is also filthy, tattooed, wearing a shirt that shows off his muscles and track marks.
AUNT NAME!
UNCLE What!
AUNT Wade's got a laptop.
WADE surreptitiously executes a program that deletes all of his information off the laptop.
UNCLE Hand it over, freak.
WADE Just a minute...
UNCLE enters fully, flexing and making a fist.
UNCLE Now!
WADE just manages to let go when his UNCLE yanks it from his grip. AUNT and UNCLE smile at their fortune. AUNT speaks as they both exit.
AUNT Let's see how much we can get...
WADE crouches for a moment longer, then packs away the rest of his belongings with one eye on the door. He opens a window and climbs out onto a metal rail that helps hold the trailer home onto its perch near the very top of the stack. WADE looks out and sees desolation in the still-dark, grey morning. A cold wind whips at his clothes and too-long hair. WADE pulls his pack all the way on and shuffles sideways holding onto a rope he tied onto the metal to help him escape on this more dangerous route. WADE makes it to the end where he can climb down the scaffolding, and he does.
Along his climb, he sees men, women, and children plugged into their computers, wearing old goggles and gloves. Some only have huge computer screens showing scenes of shopping or entertainment, some violent and/or vile. No one is moving much, and no one is very fit--either over or underweight. WADE stops at one window where the scene is a bit more homey and decorated in an old-fashioned, grandmotherly style. There is an old sofa with an afghan, doilies, kitchy pictures on the wall, many cats, and a TV showing an evangelical Christian service.
CONTINUATION
WADE taps on the window. An old woman, NAME, enters, sees WADE and smiles. They both wave and NAME opens her kitchen window.
Interaction is same as in the book.
As WADE climbs down the stack, it gets darker and darker. Dirtier and dirtier. The bottom is filled with litter, dirt, and mud. All the drippings and grossness of being at the bottom of a vertical trailer park, plus a few hulks of rotting vehicles, pushed to the side and used for other purposes. Paths lead through the stacks, and WADE keeps his hood up and his head down, but his eyes wary. People lurk in the dark, selling drugs, selling themselves, looking for a target, or looking at absolutely nothing.
The stacks get a little shorter and the path opens up to a junkyard, filled with the other vehicles that were towed away and piled up to make room to build the stacks. WADE looks around furtively, then hurries into the junkyard, taking a winding path. Sure he's not been followed, WADE pulls a key out from around his neck, takes one final, hidden turn, and slides up to the back of a Ford Econoline van with blank back windows and framed all around with other junk cars. The top of the van has been saved because the vehicles on either side were just a little taller than the van and a vehicle on top was dropped sideways, balanced on the side vehicles.
WADE unlocks the back, climbs in quickly and quietly, and shuts the door. It is completely dark, but we hear WADE pick up a crank-powered flashlight and grind it into use.
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