Okay, here goes... A prissy female journalist is preparing an article on how her grandmother was the perfect American: a down-home mom and grandma, polite, kind, and old-fashioned. Grandma dies, the saddened journalist submits the article for next week's magazine - But at the reading of the will, a statement from Grandma is read out confessing to all the mischievous things she did - robbed a bank, smoked dope at Woodstock, had an affair with a man who then became President, etc. To save that article and her reputation, the journalist has three days to cross America destroying evidence and swearing witnesses to silence. On the way, of course, she learns lessons about living life to the full, the lessons she can now see Grandma was always trying to teach her... In keeping with the current crop of sweary, eye-catching titles, how about Grandma F*cked The President? (Too much? Yeah, maybe.)

The very funny British funeral comedy (??) used that by revealing the deceased as gay, shocking everyone. Remember the midget with the photos they tried to stuff in the coffin?

I'm thinking the information in the confession could be used to generate a fresh character that gets involved in some sort of ID scam/dilemma. For example: A young actor discovers he's adopted and that his biological father has just died. There's the confession... and the actor hires the services of an elderly actor friend to bring his dead father back to life, based on the confession. The actor performs his role too well and becomes embroiled in the legacy of the dead father's misdeeds.

"Grandma F*cked The President." Ha! There was a spec script called "Bastards" that sold in June 2011: Fraternal twin brothers find out that their mother’s been lying to them for years about their allegedly deceased father. She confesses she slept around with politicians, athletes and movie stars she met at Studio 54 in the 1970s, one of whom may be their father. The twins set out to find their real dad. That script sold for nearly $1M.

There you go, a switch on a switch. Good brainstorming.

death at a funeral. peter dinklage!!!!

I'm actually kind of shocked that this gets printed at all. Who the hell writes this??? Do we write it before we die, the newspaper caches it, then publishes? Or does some writer gather up a little bit of info then spin this into something more "meaningful", in effect putting words into our mouths after we're dead. What if this guy couldn't stand his wife? What if she was the worst thing that ever happened to him but he stepped on those feelings his whole life... and now even in death it's a lie? Anyhow, this is what I'd do with this: a newspaper wants these "meaningful" obituaries, something that really lets readers know who the people in the community were. So they ask for them. Except when they ask the protagonist (either an older guy or someone in his late middle ages who is facing some sort of terminal illness) he realizes he'd done plumb-fucking-nothing remarkable, was spotlessly good, and essentially missed his own life. So he then goes on a make it remarkable bender, trying to cram as much living into his dying as he can.

Honestly, it's the first-person thing. An obituary written in the first-person is asinine, unless the dead person actually wrote it. You can do a lot with the deeper implications of that alone.

Ha! Reminds me of myself.....after completing my Masters, my University sent me, yep, a fully signed PhD Certificate. It took me a year to get the actual certificate from them and they never requested the PhD back....so its Dr Walker to you.... ;-) Maybe it is the start of a slippery slope to being banned from DisneyLand? On a slight tangent (I think) I am thinking about the near future where technology has developed to a point where "memories" can be retrieved from the deceased, although the quality of these memories is dependent on the "quality" of the corpse. So it is used in an attempt to draw images from the recently deceased to identify murderers...a slightly less glamorous version of Minority Report.... Then someone decides to use it to shake up an ages old conspiracy - Lee Harvey Oswald....something of that magnitude. The age of the case making the information unreliable and very "bitty" but could open out into and interesting thriller. Probably a lot of holes to iron out in the plotting, but could be interesting to play around with.

This makes me think of both Citizen Kane and My Name is Earl, so I'm pushing myself to think of something different. How about we set up an old curmudgeon on his deathbed with the estranged and annoyed people of his life around him... He knows death is at his door and he writes his own obituary. But it's full of lies! He writes the lies in order to stir things up with the people he cared about in life. And it works. Great consternation ensues. After the set-up, the body of the story takes place in the week between his death and the date set for the reading of his will. His lawyer makes it known that there is a condition in his will that only the most "successful" survivor (or some such) will inherit the entire, sizable estate. And all the lies in the obit put them at their worst. Accusations of embezzlement, infidelity. But some of the lies are pleasant: credit where credit is not due. And some of the obit is true, but no one knows which parts. Relationships and personalities are tested. Yes, we have King Lear, after a fashion. The Cordelia figure is the mousy one who has always longed for the acknowledgement and approval of the family--and never received it. She's the victim of one of the positive lies in the obit. It turns her life upside-down, in a good way, and delivers everything she ever wanted: love, affection, attention. But she knows it's a lie and it's eating away at her... Finally we get to the reading of the will. A few people have dealt with some (but not all) of what the obit stirred up for them. They receive small tokens from the estate in exchange--and are quite miffed that they haven't got the whole pie. After the will is dealt with, it's like the ending of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Miss Mousy confesses to the lawyer that she's been taking advantage of the lie in her favor but she feels awful and it has to stop. She asks for his help to set things to rights. Those are the magic words. She gets the estate, builds a good and meaninful life away from her awful family, and maybe winds up with the cute lawyer to boot.