Safe Space

Title: Safe Space (alt “Helter Shelter”)
Genre: Comedy Horror
Dramatic Question: What if a hotel for the homeless turned out to be an internment camp?
Tagline: You can check in but you can’t check out.
Premise: Good fences make good neighbors
Logline: Wilde runs a homeless shelter but is made homeless herself from an economic crisis during the pandemic. Completely out of her depth, she is forced to rely upon Bullock, a hard-boiled street dweller from whom she had tried to keep her distance. Desperate to secure a better future, Wilde is taken in by a hotel for the homeless scheme run by Buscemi, a real estate magnate being forced to foreclose on his half-finished, 8,000-room holiday resort unless he can pay his debts. Luckily for him, the city desperately wants to get the homeless off the streets and will pay anything to solve their crisis. In fact, the money is so good that Buscemi can’t ever let any of his residents leave.

Alternative reveal is that the homeless are drugged and wake up in a resort in Space.

Character pitch: Wilde’s character is well-meaning and has helped the homeless through her charity – but at a distance. By not getting emotionally invested (presumably because she finds relationships messy and these people slightly repulsive), she isn’t really helping to solve the problem; instead she is merely putting a pin in it.
She realizes this when she is forced into the extreme circumstance of living in Buscemi’s internment camp. At first it seems an improvement to living on the street but not when all freedom is taken away. He is literally warehousing humans for money – echoing prisons for profit issues – which forces Wilde’s character to re-evaluate the notion of, “good fences make good neighbors”. Safety without freedom is a life without liberty.

Gansamacher Game cards:

Star: Olivia Wilde
Co-Star: Sandra Bullock
Antagonist: Steve Buscemi
Genre: Comedy Horror
Cause: Homeless
Set Piece: 2 historical re-enactment camping tours double-book same location and fight it out
Product Placement: Manischewitz Wine (“Manischewitz will set you free”)