ALICE

A screenplay by Jane C. Rosen

ALICE is soaring to the top of the advertising biz, when she hits her head on the glass ceiling and trips down a rabbit hole. Can she fight her way back to Wonderland?

Alice has a powerful imagination. She’s spent her life mastering the ability to direct it toward creating magnificent advertising campaigns for her clients. So, when she wins the biggest award in advertising and is offered her dream job as a creative director at the big agency, she feels celebrated, challenged and concerned by the possibilities of such a male dominated empire.

After weighing her options, like the financial stability it would bring to her marriage, Alice decides to leave her comfort zone and take the leap. She’s off to a roaring start, bringing in Lena, the client no one else could get, and securing the support of the CEO.

Alice wows Lena with her vision for the campaign. But her new boss, Mick, is jealous of her success, and feels threatened by the agency’s decision to put them both on partner track, despite his seniority. To retaliate, he struts his power over Alice, harassing her and exhibiting the very behavior that has always prevented him from earning partner status.

Determined to kick this jobs’ ass, Alice stays focused on her work. Mick sees this as rejection, which fuels his persistence. It becomes unbearable for Alice, so she reports his harassment to the firm. Enraged, Mick sets out to sabotage her and secure the partnership.

Unaware of just how diabolical Mick is, Alice can’t figure out why her project keeps getting derailed. Determined as ever, she digs deeper into her work and the safe harbor of her imagination. This behavior served her well as a child, when she basked in her mother’s love, starring in her mother’s experimental film of Alice in Wonderland. Ever since, Alice has found a strange safety in that world. At her best and worst times, those characters become part of her reality. Mick morphs into the Mad Hatter, as Alice struggles with the psychological patterns of her youth, and Wonderland aligns with her current state of topsy-turvy.

Meetings become tea parties, the company golf outing feels like the croquette game, and her therapist transforms into a hookah smoking Caterpillar. All the while the Mad Hatter keeps chasing her further down the rabbit hole.

But when she finally gets pushed too far, Alice finds surprising support and concocts a fantastic plan to flip this nightmare around and create a joyful Wonderland of her own design.

ALICE was a Finalist in The Richmond International Film Festival, the Female Eye Film Festival (Toronto), Moondance, The Writers Place, and Silver Screen, a semi-finalist at New England Women in Film and Video, and a quarterfinalist in Creative World Awards.

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