"Flacks"

Tagline – “Believe Nothing, Question Everything”

“25 words or less” – The lengths a pair of Hollywood publicists will go to hide their unstable celebrity clients’ secrets and cover up their indiscretions is explored

Full Summary:

Jacob Peters and Katie Monroe are ambitious Hollywood publicists who would do anything to promote and maintain their clients’ pristine public images.  Two years ago they left their PR jobs to partner together in a new firm with a small, but strong, nucleus of celebrity clients.  They’re also in a long-term relationship with each other that occasionally causes stress at home which tends to boil over into the workplace.  At the center of their domestic dispute is Katie’s desire to get married and start a family, which Jacob has been avoiding while he concentrates on building their firm into an industry powerhouse with his business partner and girlfriend.   

When it comes to their valued clients, it’s up to Jacob and Katie and their PR firm, Monroe & Peters, to pick up the pieces from the messes they make, cover up their transgressions and tell tall tales that put them in a positive light among the unsuspecting, gullible public.  At this stage of their fledging boutique PR agency, their client roster includes five famous celebrities in the world of Hollywood and music who all have ties with Jacob and Katie through family connections or the neighborhood they grew up in: 

Brent Sheridan is a handsome movie star and closeted gay in his mid-thirties who tries to suppress his feelings through raging alcoholism.  To him, and his publicists, it doesn’t matter how big of a star he becomes or how much America evolves socially, there’s still a huge fear of turning off the heartland and affecting his box office sales by coming out.  However, his heavy drinking tends to put him in precarious situations that endangers him both physically and mentally.

In the first episode, Brent breaks his wrist while trashing his hotel penthouse suite after the male co-star of his current production rejects his sexual advances.  Fearing he’ll be fired from the movie if the truth comes out, it’s up to Jacob to fix the situation by planting a fake story in the press about Brent’s “made up” heroics to explain his recent injury.    

Then there’s Dylan Dame, a goody-two-shoes pop singer in her early-twenties who obsessively thinks non-stop about her painstakingly crafted public persona.  She goes through great lengths to never be, or say anything, controversial because she doesn’t want to damage her image with any of her fans.  However, tired of always singing “bubble gum” pop music, Dylan asks Katie in the first episode to set her up with a famous, or semi-famous, black guy so that she can gain “street cred” as she prepares to record a pop, R&B album with Timbaland.

There’s also the hot rap group Double Down featuring African-American twin brothers in their early twenties, Ja’Von and Da’Von Downs.  Although they’ve had tremendous success early in their careers, they hardly ever see eye-to-eye on most decisions and occasionally, and embarrassingly, fight publicly over their creative differences and girls.  It’s up to both Jacob and Katie to continually put a positive public spin on their tenuous relationship.

In this episode, it’s up to Katie to act as a mediator when Ja’Von tries to force a bizarre movie idea, and the accompanying action figures, on his younger brother (who’s only younger by four and a half minutes), Da’Von, both of which put him a very negative light while Ja’Von comes out looking like a superstar.

Finally there’s Courtney Ford, a young, flaky, coked up, promiscuous, up-and-coming Hollywood actress in her mid-twenties who’s known just as much for her promiscuity, especially among married actors, and drug use as she is for her acting.  In fact, she’s gaining such a reputation around town as a homewrecker that Courtney puts the onus on Jacob to fix it.

In this episode, Courtney freaks out after learning she lost her purse at a West Hollywood restaurant which had a large amount of cocaine in it.  She doesn’t care about anything else in the purse, except her coke, so she asks Jacob to find it.  Eventually, the mystery man that originally found her purse calls Jacob and offers to hand it back with all the contents intact in exchange for a sexual rendezvous with Courtney.

This leads to the unique “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style ending where Jacob asks for audience participation to help inform Courtney’s plotline moving into the next episode.  This is a style that will be employed at the end of each episode featuring a different character’s precarious situation for that week and multiple potential solutions for viewers to vote on.  In this episode, Jacob offers the viewing audience four options on how he should handle the mysterious caller which includes decisions like paying the guy off, or hiring a private investigator to find dirt so he can reverse blackmail him, or actually offering up Courtney to keep him quiet.  Viewers have until midnight three days after the original airing to vote.  The option that gets the highest vote total will be what’s incorporated as a continuation of the character’s storyline in the next episode.  So what will Jacob and Katie, or Courtney, have to do in order to protect the young starlet’s image?
Flacks Screenplay