A very vain middle-aged man named Mathew Price has always been in the spotlight and is now working as a popular news anchor. As a younger man, he worked as a model for upscale magazines.
He practices kindness towards his fellow man and tries to act out at least one generous gesture a day. After saving the life of a stranger, Mathew is magically given a gift from him, and over time, any acts of kindness begin to make him younger.
Mathew does value youth, but doesn’t want to be physically young again, so in order to get rid of this gift, he has to change his kind nature. He finds that small, unkind acts aren’t working, so he decides that he has to do something drastic, like even murdering someone.
Mathew has to leave his place of work and his home that he shares with his wife, Lori, and go off the grid. Matt then checks himself into a Hotel, where he will stay until he can work out a plan of attack. One night on the evening News, Matt sees that a known convicted child abuser named Sam Hill is about to be released from prison. This sparks off a decision that evil Sam will be the one he kills.
After stalking Sam for a while, Mathew realises that he has to make himself look younger in order to even get noticed by Sam, so he carries out a couple of good deeds to transform his looks to be younger. This works, and now Matthew can get closer to his prey. On a carefully planned night, Matthew murders Sam, but to his horror, it doesn’t reverse the gift, because it was seen as a good deed. Instead, it makes the unwanted gift pick up speed, and now Mathew is getting younger by the minute. It is a race against time to get home to his wife, Lori, before it’s too late.
‘The Giving ‘was my second story but it did pop into my head around the same time as A Dog’s Love, in 2022. This is a quirky, mind-bending story that I wrote a 20-page Treatment for.
I eventually sought out a professional South Australian Producer for advice and to assess my story, and to my delight, he classed it as a high-concept idea. From this stage, the story will undergo quite a few Treatment drafts and will then move to a script leading to further development.
