Presumption of Innocence

Author:

Taylor, Paige

Area of Honors:

Film Production

Degree:

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type:

Thesis

Thesis Supervisors:

Rod Bingaman, Thesis Supervisor
Maura Shea, Thesis Honors Advisor

Keywords:

screenplay
feature
film
true crime
drama
cia
cyberintelligence

Abstract:

My thesis was written with the purpose of honing my craft in the screenwriting arts and pushing my writing to excel past unique challenges. While I plan to become a screenwriter in the future, I had never written a feature-length project before this one. With this, I wanted to challenge my screenwriting as well as my planning and organization skills to tell a story that was both entertaining and consistent in a long-form project. Besides pulling brief snippets of inspiration from my own life, I had also never written a screenplay that was based on a true story. The life of Joshua Schulte is an incredibly intriguing one and it was an incredibly rewarding experience to conduct extensive research on his life and attempt to bring him to life on-screen. I felt that Schulte’s complex and nuanced character was both challenging and fascinating to write. I loved attempting to explore his emotional volatility and ascertain how a relatively average man is pushed to extremes after withstanding perceived mistreatment from his peers. I made sure to pull inspiration from existing films like Nightcrawler (2014), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and The Informant! (2009), all of which explore complex, unlikeable male protagonists in-depth and turn a critical eye to the often apathetic and male-dominated nature of postmodern society. Additionally, Schulte’s background in cyber-intelligence was completely unfamiliar to me; while it was certainly a bit of a challenge to include terminology and technology that I had previously never heard of before to make the story feel more realistic, I enjoyed learning about a new field and exploring a new genre for my writing. Overall, while writing this thesis presented me with a lot of unique challenges and ‘firsts’, I am incredibly proud of the finished product and am grateful for the opportunity to graduate with a feature-length script such as this in my repertoire.