Screenwriter
My beat is ordinary people who run out of exits.
Before the fiction: No newsroom would hire me, so I got to the scenes first – then sold them the story and the photos.
Feature · Contained horror · 88 pages
Log
When a defective control timer drops a mall's steel gates hours early on a busy Saturday, paranoia turns ordinary shoppers into a bloodthirsty mob that targets an ailing grandfather and forces him to hold them off while his eight-year-old granddaughter draws them both a way out.
One location, one afternoon, no monster in the building – except the people already inside. A phone video, a sealed exit, and a mob that's sure.
Comps
The Mist × The Purge
Feature · Revenge thriller
In packaging · Not available for option
Log
After his wife's vaping death, a shattered man unleashes a cyanide-laced guerrilla war on a tobacco giant, hunted by a tormented ex-FBI agent who understands him better than anyone alive.
Freudberg's own adaptation of his novel Find Virgil (1,110 reader ratings across Amazon and Goodreads). Under a packaging agreement.
Comps
John Wick × Zodiac × Michael Clayton
Will keep readers riveted until the final page. If a movie version turned out to be as riveting as the book, it would be a big winner.Amanda Davis, Associated Press, on Gasp – revised and reissued as Find Virgil
Feature · Magical realism
Log
A photographer who turns invisible when she's ignored has eight weeks to smuggle her dying uncle into the sealed lab that ruined him and photograph the glowing tree nobody believes he saw.
She didn't choose it and she can't explain it. It happens on its own, whenever being ignored cuts deep enough, and it takes her until twenty-nine to learn to switch it on herself. Then it becomes the only way to get a dying man past a guarded gate before the building is sealed for good.
Comps
Everything Everywhere All at Once × Frances Ha
Feature · Neo-noir
In packaging · Not available for option
Log
A grief-scarred CPS investigator, driven to protect children, is seduced by a calculating mother into staging a crash that frames her husband – then learns her escape plan has no room for him – or for the kid he thought he was saving.
Freudberg's own adaptation of his novel Baby Please Don't Go (1,841 reader ratings across Amazon and Goodreads).
Comps
Gone Baby Gone × Body Heat
Feature · Crime thriller
Optioned · In packaging
Log
Under option. Active packaging. The title and production company are withheld at the producer's discretion.
Details available to qualified inquiries.
My press credential was a quarter-tank of gas I couldn't afford to fill – and a head start.
That's not a bad-break story, it's my resume. It's why I spent years on the streets of Philadelphia with a police scanner, a notebook and a camera rolling around on the passenger seat. When I heard a 911 dispatcher tell me where I might find my rent money, I grabbed my keys and took off.
The reporters and photographers I was up against had editors, company cars and equipment I couldn't afford to look at. That head start was the trick. A story doesn't care who pays the reporter. It cares that somebody was there to see it.
I beat them at their own game. I got there first often enough. Local bylines and photo credits became assignments from USA Today, UPI, Reuters and the Associated Press. I filed the UPI eyewitness account of the last judicial hanging in the United States. Then a Los Angeles Times op-ed about Hollywood that got picked up worldwide.
I just kept showing up until showing up was the only press credential I needed.
Screenplays now. Really the same job: find the scene while it's raging out of control, shoot it fast – and file it before somebody says you can't.
Two published novels, Find Virgil and Baby Please Don't Go, carrying 1,110 and 1,841 reader ratings. Fourteen books ghostwritten in other people's voices. Five completed features, two of them adapted from those novels, two currently in packaging and one under option. Freudberg controls all rights.
Producers, execs and financiers: Name the title and I'll respond same day. Screenplays are not posted publicly. I control all rights to the screenplays and to the novels behind them.
ff@freudberg.com