People on buses....always makes me think of Battle Royale.....gas....fight to the death....its why I don't use public transport any more ;-) But perhaps not original enough in light of the ongoing Hunger Games... Perhaps the corporation is in cahoots with a private medical company and "loaning" prisoners for ethically dubious medical drug testing/experimentation? A new version of Soylent Green? Prison food really is "bad"....

As an immigrant, this was the line that jumped out at me: > Essentially with Geo Transport, a person accused of an immigration violation would spend very little time in ICE custody and almost the entire time in the custody of the private corporation. There's a bus driving on a long stretch of highway. It's full of people from states that harass people for skin tone & nab you if you can't "show your papers": you've got bewildered elderly people who don't speak English (with various medical conditions), small children separated from their parents, one very pregnant woman in extreme distress, one or more extremely intelligent foreign academics and/or H1B visa holders, several angry young men. One of the people on the bus is a multi-generation citizen of Hispanic descent, who is also an elected politician (could be male, could be female) in a minor office--high enough to know how the system is supposed to work, low enough not to have any significant clout. Got swept up by a "check their papers" dragnet and has functionally disappeared. The hellish conditions on the bus intercut with the the panicked family of the politico, and their search to find him/her. Their search is taken up by the community and becomes very high profile... ...at which point company that runs the buses, and their political sponsors, realize they have an extremely embarrassing situation. In the short term, they stall: they keep the bus moving, keep changing the route, so no one can find it. The bus drivers work in pairs so they can tag team. The older driver, who starts off pretty relaxed, gets scared as they abandon the standard plan, and he gets meaner as they go along (cf Stanford Prison experiment). The younger driver, who starts off as a racist know-it-all, is frightened by his partner's behaviour and increasingly sympathizes with the passengers. The situation inside the bus is extremely unstable. From the side of the politician's family, the story looks a lot like Charlotte Grey. Things can only get worse from that point: - The bus company realizes that stalling was a bad move, but now they're stuck. Decisions go from bad to worse. They decide to use their "crisis communication firm" to put out news stories about how the bus is full of hardened criminals--to create space for them to take whatever action they deem necessary. Their political backers wash their hands of any association and instruct them to clean up the mess. The pressure rises. (In the Soderberg-style big version of the story, there's a politican who is the incarnation of governance-by-lobbyist whose career is tangled up with this company and who is putting on the most pressure; there's also an employee in the bus company who has a crisis of conscience at the whole mess and speaks against the course of action, who is therefore set up as a fall guy inside the company.) - The family realizes something is very wrong, and divides into camps of "work within the system" and "take matters into our own hands". - The population of the bus divides the same way. There's a high-stakes situation that brings all three situations to a head... Working title: MOVING TARGET

PS What I meant to say, before I got excited about today's idea: I LOVE this series. So excited to see you running it again this year. And I'm excited to see what people come up with.

I wonder what happens if the bus breaks down? I can see some local bus driver, used to driving school buses, being hauled out of bed and turning up to pick up the passengers of a 'broken down bus' - only to find he's picking up a bunch of dangerous felons and their guards... What's the twist? Is one of the felons his wrongly convicted brother, and this is his chance to break him out? Or is one the man who killed his wife and struck a deal to avoid the death penalty - now fortuitously in our hero's power? I do love this series...

After more than a decade of success in the inmate transport and care industry, GEO has managed to secure trade routes, security access, protection, and government approval on many levels, but a single set of loose lips within the system is about to bring the entire company to the forefront of an international drug and human trafficking scandal. GEO is a cover/ploy for the transport of people and goods (sex trafficking, child labor, exotic animal trade… drugs!) and an unassuming inmate has caught wind and tells his lawyer of a particularly large drug haul about to go down. This will ultimately involve transit points in the Pacific (Asia via Australia and NZ), Indian Ocean (NE Africa, Suez), and the Atlantic (UK, NYC) all starting from two busloads of inmates who never actually made it to their intended prisons or care facilities and who have been given fake identities, documents, and orders to immediately disperse to their “loading zones”. They are an “elite” group of criminals who have been vetted by GEO’s own investigators and are known to have drug ties all over the world (in their respective countries of origin). From what the inmate has gathered, this will all go down within a period of just a few weeks. Oh, by the way, this inmate is an imbedded FBI agent who is keeping tabs on a certain drug kingpin in prison (watching who he befriends, when and how often he has visitors, etc) for completely unrelated reasons. He must convince his “lawyer” that this is real, who then must convince the Director that this is a real and active threat both domestically and abroad. The inmate doesn’t hear anything from his lawyer and has become increasingly bullied and taunted by the guards, one in particular. This guard has had a thing for this inmate since he got there and often threatens him and throws him into isolation for spilling his tray and starting a fight in the prison’s cafeteria. The inmate desperately wants to talk to his lawyer, but the guard won’t let him and continues to taunt him (nothing life threatening, just for show and humiliation). After a week in solitary, he’s released back into gen pop and the kingpin he’d been there to watch takes notice of his treatment and brings him in to his inner circle. He’s eventually able to see his “lawyer” who informs him that he has one week to find out who’s going and where and he’ll be back to see him in a week. FF to a week later and only being able to find out the names for one bus (lower level criminals who turn out to be decoys) the “lawyer” comes back and is frustrated. Upon leaving the visiting chamber, he catches a glimpse of the “lawyer” chatting with the guard who keeps giving him grief. The guard sees him and throws him a taunting wink and a kiss. The inmate feels that he is fffucked and starts to get closer to the drug kingpin who sees the continuous taunting and invites him to be transported. The kingpin says he’ll put a good word in with the transport committee and get him out and into a new location. When he asks where, the kingpin smiles and says “don’t worry… it will be MUCH better. You’ll see.” The “lawyer” never comes back to see him and he is on his way to being transported and sees the guard on his way out to the bus. The guard gives him a final shove and gives a menacing “good luck at the new place” jibe with an evil laugh for good measure. During the transport on the GEO bus, he sees that he is on the same bus as the kingpin and begins to internally freak out as he becomes aware that everything is being set in motion a week sooner than what he’d thought and he has no way of getting in touch with anyone to let them know. The kingpin lets him know what’s up and the inmate shows joy and excitement and instinctively hugs him and thanks him for this opportunity. The inmate knows the plan and he is soon dumped at a shipping yard in San Pedro where he boards a vessel headed to who knows where. He’s given a phone with implicit instructions NOT to make outgoing calls other than to the numbers programmed on the phone and to keep it with him at all times. He quickly, and nonchalantly, surveys the boat to see what equipment there is and what means of communication he has… he finds a rather large cache of guns and a SAT phone, as well as an old shortwave radio. He needs to get a signal out before they’re too far out of range. Does he? FF to the FBI scrambling with random intel and getting in touch with foreign police, etc and the boats are caught at all the designated GEO points, save for one in NZ where the kingpin has begun to doubt the inmate. Hostage situation, shooting, vessel ramming, and a realization that the guard at the prison was undercover FBI there to protect him. His actions of taunting and solitary led to the inmate able to get closer to the kingpin and what was going on. The prison guard had caught wind of it, too, and had all along been updating the FBI on what he knew. His intel combined with the inmate agent’s intel pulled a complete picture and they were able to get a directive and put international agents in place all along. The end. Phew! That might be complete shite and have a zillion holes, but I literally just burped that out in one sitting. That felt GOOD! Keep ‘em coming! I have to go pick up the kiddos from school now ?

oh jeez that was long... and not very well organized and edited. i just typed it out and had to run. sorry, all.

Wasn't the idea to do this as extended loglines like last year? 2 or 3 sentences, max?

i got way too carried away with it.

Apologies, didn't mean to give you grief. But last year, this was like the precursor to the Quest logline contest.

No worries, Despina. People can do with the ideas what they want, either here or on their own. It's really an exercise in generating stories and developing mental muscles / habit to find them. I'm in a rush to get somewhere, will check back on this thread later tonight. But go for it, have fun and be creative!

Maybe something like this: At a private Washington State prison, a prison informant is shanked and must be taken to the secure medical facility for the life saving surgery he desperately needs. However, with Mt. Rainier threatening to erupt and grounding all aircraft, and the other prisoners being evacuated to safety, the disgraced Navy Seal turned prison guard tasked with transporting the convict must use the last remaining bus to travel the 250 miles from the prison to the Army base near Olympia he must get to. Will they get to the hospital on time, or will killers chasing a ruthless drug lord's $5 million bounty or Mother Nature herself take out the prisoner?

Someone call Jason Statham's agent right now! Seriously though, I could see that getting made...

The whole idea of prisons-for-profits is creepy. Motivation for businesses to work with government officials to pass laws and law enforcement officials to bust people to INCREASE prison population. If you're getting paid X amount of dollars by the head, why not? Melding prisons-for-profit and medical-or-big-pharma-for profit? That's an angle.

This feels like prison bus as purgatory, a mobile Hotel California. It's Speed meets The Terminal.

I've been looking for story ideas every day since 1986, so it's a habit at this point. And it's one I try to encourage all GITS readers to get into. If you are OUTSIDE the business and writing a spec script to break in, it is CRITICAL for you to come up with the BEST STORY CONCEPT possible. It depends on the story, genre, and execution, of course, but I think it's fair to say that the value of a story concept to a spec script -- as far as the BUYERS are concerned -- is 50%. Here's a quote I've posted often on this subject: “Most aspiring screenwriters simply don't spend enough time choosing their concept. It's by far the most common mistake I see in spec scripts. The writer has lost the race right from the gate. Months -- sometimes years -- are lost trying to elevate a film idea that by its nature probably had no hope of ever becoming a movie.” -- Terry Rossio (Aladdin, The Mask of Zorro, Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) So this series is a great way to get in the practice of generating story ideas, as well as doing all the things we do to develop them, such as genre-bending, gender-bending, geo-bending, etc. BTW for those interested in submitting loglines for The Quest, it's perfect timing to jump-start that process as I start accepting submissions the last week of May.

Debbie, when I read that 'what if' -- What if the bus breaks down and they are forced to use a local bus driver -- my mind immediately went to a comedy. Jack Black: Prison Bus Driver.

Hey, Despina, I like that you took it and ran with it. Most of the work with story concepts is about brainstorming, and one of the keys of brainstorming is just blurt it out, put down words, no judgment, no pre-editng, just let it all hang out. This conceit does feel like it is ripe for some sort of conspiracy.

What if the informant STAGED the shanking as a means of escaping?

Mix it in with horror? The prisoners get experimented on and one of them gets injected with a zombie/rabies like 'Reaver' virus only to be introduced back into the prison population.

I love that limited location of the bus interior: The prisoners get experimented on. One of them gets zombified and winds up on the bus (an admin screw up / a live experiement / an escape attempt). The movie is about the ongoing cage match between the bionic zombie prisoner vs "the hardened criminals" inside the bus--while the bus driver on the other side of the steel-plated wall ignores them and has no idea what's happening.

I'm not sure I know how to make that work... If he needed surgery, surely he'd be in no position to effect an escape by himself (I was thinking more The Gauntlet than Con Air, but with the added ticking clock of having to get the guy to surgery). A faked heart attack might be a better way forward. He originally plans for his corpse to be taken under minimum security somewhere. But now, the prison doctors think he's dead, leave him alone in the prison while they run for safety, his friends can't get to him, so he takes the last bus and escapes. Are you thinking that the volcanic activity is the twist that changes the terms of the escape? i.e instead of being rescued/attacked by air, the associates who want him free/dead now have to wait until he clears the danger zone? Also, one could take the horror angle: the volcanic activity forces the escapee onto mountain roads and deep into Bigfoot country, whose denizens have been forced into a feral rampage :) We haven't seen Bigfoot in this latest route of horror genre movies.

I was thinking of that as the teaser. Midpoint: the bus arrives at the maximum security prison, the gates open, only our reaver gets out, company wants to see what he can do in a population of about 2000 of Earth's nastiest and most homicidal people. Think Alien meets Mean Guns.

This is great stuff to read, think I am going to enjoy this series! And you can never have enough Zombies! :-)

What if the governemnt uses this company to transport/house Gantanamo prisoners? No state wants them in their prisons. The government wants to get rid of them once and for all so it "arranges" for the bus to break down in a town particularly hostile to muslims (because a muslim man is responsible for a horrible crime on one of the citizens).

Instead of a bus, why not have a floating prison on a disused supertanker, roaming the Pacific? Kind of like a mobile Devil's Island.

SUBMERGED: When a maximum-security prison transport plunges into a river following a botched escape attempt, the inmates must fight to stay alive below the surface while, above them, a battle rages between law enforcement and a dangerous gang of thugs intent on completing the rescue mission.