Script File

FUGUE STATE

“FUGUE STATE” is the story of a young gay American musical prodigy (DAVID, 23), chasing his dream to be a classical pianist. At the gates of an English Music Conservatory, his speeding motorcycle crashes into a hearse, and David slides headlong into the eccentric domain of PROFESSOR JACOB ZUNT (Romanian, 65), an unstable, sexually repressed genius, on the way to bury his late wife.

Zunt believes their meeting to be kismet: In David, who has an androgynous beauty both men and women find seductive, he sees the promise of the sexual liberation he has denied himself for his entire life. He takes the young prodigy under his wing, and although the relationship is purely platonic, David gives him a lust for life he never found before.

Blinded by ambition, David takes advantage of Zunt’s infatuation. But when David enters a relationship with an attractive lecturer (JUAN,Cuban, 35), Zunt’s simmering psychosis is unleashed, and Juan warns David to break it off with the professor. But when David rejects Zunt’s increasingly-aggressive overtures, he finds himself trapped in a bizarre world where reality and fantasy are perilously confused, and he must fight to save himself when his spurned mentor seeks to destroy him.

The film is a shadow play of reality and delusion, of desire so potent it punctures the thin membrane between mental health and mental illness. The question that lingers throughout is ... whose delusion, and whose reality?

  • Rob Wilson
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Screenplay
  • Genres:
    PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER, GAY
  • Number of Pages:
    125
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • First-time Screenwriter:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Writer Biography - Rob Wilson

Rob Wilson has made his living as a writer and director in Los Angeles, winning the Emmy, Cable ACE, CINE Golden Eagle and other awards for his diverse body of work. He has been director of primetime programming for Disney, Discovery, Group W, ABC and PBS. He is a member of both the Writers and Directors Guilds of America.
As a screenwriter, Rob has had properties optioned by CBS, Universal Pictures, Jersey Films and ITC Productions. He has produced and/or directed pilots for NBC Productions, Turner, Variety TV and created experimental interactive content for the Internet.
Rob is a graduate of Stanford University (BA Communications/Psychology), the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in the City of New York (MS Journalism), and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the American Film Institute. He studied acting with Joanne Linville and Judith Weston.
As a Journalist, Rob’s work has covered a wide gamut of fascinating subjects and taken him to far-flung locations. He has reported first-hand on crime and criminal justice, venturing into the nation’s prisons and jails. His documentary work has included investigating corruption in police departments, international Chinese gang networks, Latin American revolutions, the death penalty, treatment of mentally ill offenders, prison rape, the use of cancer-causing herbicides over populated areas, and the battle for LGBT rights. He has tackled complex subjects such as data encryption, technology versus privacy, the politics of persuasion, high-tech medical breakthroughs, computer graphics and 3D Technology (recently winning a 2013 New Media Film Festival award for his work as Story Producer on "Digital Darkroom: The Art of 3D").

Rob has just completed his second feature screenplay, a political action thriller.

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Writer Statement

FUGUE STATE is my first script. It is a cautionary tale from my youth, a psychological thriller loosely-based on a true story. It was an episode that shook me to my once-solid core, leaving cracks in my self-confidence that I still feel today, decades later. It is a word of warning to young gay men from one who wandered a bit beyond the pale, into the uncertain terrain between eccentricity and psychosis.