Brief

A secret society, a paranoid school administration, and helicopter parenting collide to create the
perfect storm of adolescence for young Sam Webber.

What We Liked

- This story involves a number of hot-button topics, from school admission policies, to high-society politics and decades-old secret societies. An audience would feel as if they are eavesdropping on a story involving multiple generations and years of deceit, and become swept up in the drama and mystery of it all;
- Drama and intrigue, making it ripe for a film that would keep viewers hooked until the end;
- There are plenty of rich characters to explore in the story, and every development of the story would unfold in each episode of a TV series;
- The story takes place over multiple years which would make it the kind of story that viewers would become invested in.

Synopsis

In a prologue of sorts, Sam Webber is trespassing on his headmaster’s property, painting a giant red 6 on the door of his residence. As we’ll soon come to learn, it’s the least of what the headmaster of Dunning Academy deserves.

The story flashes back in time. Sam enjoys being free from his needy mother’s constant attention and focus, and although he feels out of place at the school, he finds his footing when one of the most popular boys at school befriends him. Justin Crandell is everything Sam and his family are not - wealthy, sophisticated, elite and part of the illicit secret underground society, the Nine.

Justin brings Sam into the Nine, helping to expose him to a fun side of school life - as they play pranks on the headmaster and other faculty members. As Sam struggles to deal with the pressures of the school - his grades, his social life, his mother’s ideals, he becomes more active in the Nine. One night, when he and Justin are attempting another prank, they stumble upon a camera recording the girl’s dorm bathroom. They are caught inside one of the school’s hidden tunnels. Justin’s social status allows him to go scott-free, while Sam suffers the punishment. The school’s dean lies and says he found Sam with weed. Everyone around Sam believes that he has been messing around with drugs, and the Nine pressure him to keep silent about all his suspicions.

Together with his hacker friend, Grabs, Sam finds out that the headmaster had covered up a former school teacher who had been caught abusing some of the boys at the school. There is also a porn ring that has been operating at the school, with the knowledge of the headmaster. Justin’s uncle, had also been trying to blackmail the headmaster, and used Justin to make Sam take the fall for it all. It backfires when the FBI come to the school to question Sam. He reveals all he knows to the authorities, but Justin's uncle had left enough of a trial to implicate Sam that it still looks bad for him. So he and his family cut a deal with the school — they are paid out for their silence. Sam leaves New England and goes to work in San Francisco, in an attempt to put it all behind him. It seems as if the school is allowed to continue its tradition of covering up bad behavior, using money to create a false reputation of prestige. But Sam writes an essay exposing the headmaster, which he sends to a news wire service that spreads it far and wide, once and for all, revealing the truth about Dunning Academy and all it really is.

About The Author

Jeanne Blasberg is the author of Eden: A Novel, winner of the Beverly Hills Book Awards for Women's Fiction and finalist for the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best New Voice in Fiction and Sarton Women's Book Award for Historical Fiction.