His beat is ordinary people who run out of exits.
Before the features: a police scanner, a notebook and a camera on the passenger seat. Freelance bylines and photo credits that turned into assignments from USA Today, UPI, Reuters and the Associated Press, and opinion pages in The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times and Der Spiegel. Filed the UPI eyewitness account of the last judicial hanging in the United States.
Feature · Contained horror · 88 pages
Log
When a defective control timer drops a mall's steel gates hours early on a jam-packed Saturday, paranoia twists ordinary shoppers into a bloodthirsty mob that turns on an ailing grandfather and forces him to hold off the swarm while his eight-year-old granddaughter draws them a way out.
One location, one afternoon, and no monster in the building – except the people already inside. A phone video, a sealed exit, and a mob that's decided it knows what it saw. A survival thriller that never leaves the floor.
Comps
The Mist × The Purge
Feature · 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.
Adapted by the author from his novel Find Virgil (more than 1,100 reader ratings across Amazon and Goodreads). Under a packaging agreement.
Comps
John Wick × Zodiac × Michael Clayton
Feature · Neo-noir
In packaging · Not available for option
Log
A grief-scarred CPS investigator, consumed by protecting 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.
Adapted by the author from his published novel Baby Please Don't Go.
Comps
Gone Baby Gone × Body Heat
Feature · Magical realism
Log
A wedding photographer who physically vanishes when being overlooked cuts too deep learns to trigger it at will, and smuggles her dying uncle nine hundred miles into the lab that had him committed for reporting a tree that glows – where she is offered exactly one photograph, and it can save her career or prove he was never crazy.
The invisibility arrives on its own, triggered by being overlooked, and she is twenty-nine before she learns to summon it deliberately, extend it to what she's carrying, and take another person inside it with her. That skill is the only way through a gate that closes in eight weeks.
Comps
Everything Everywhere All at Once × Frances Ha
Feature · Crime thriller
Optioned · In packaging
Log
Under option, with packaging underway. The title and the company are withheld at the producer's discretion.
Details available to qualified inquiries.
I couldn't hold a job, never could, and that's not a bad-break story, it's just the record, and the reason I ended up freelance in Philadelphia with a police scanner, a notebook and a camera on the passenger seat. The dispatcher told me where I might find my rent money and I grabbed my keys.
Everyone I was competing with had editors, company cars, travel budgets and equipment I couldn't afford to look at. I had a tank of gas and a head start. The head start was the trick because a story doesn't care who's paying you, it cares who's standing there when it happens.
I got there first often enough that it stopped being luck. Local bylines stacked into photo credits, photo credits stacked into assignments from USA Today, UPI, Reuters and the Associated Press. Later the opinion pages: The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel. Nobody hired me into any of it. I just kept showing up until showing up was the credential.
Screenplays now. Same job, different siren. Find the scene while it's still burning, shoot it and file it before somebody tells you that you can't.
Two published novels, Find Virgil and Baby Please Don't Go, the first carrying more than 1,100 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. All rights controlled by the author.
Producers, execs and financiers: name the title and I'll respond same day. Screenplays are not posted publicly. I control the IP for all screenplays and the adapted novels.
ff@freudberg.com