SWINDLE
A screenplay
Written by Kate Duhamel
108 pages
It's 1929, and being stuck doing back-office accounting in her father's small-town bank in Colorado is far too stifling for a smart girl like Faye Waggoner. Her father, a pillar of the community, eventually gives in to her desperate pleas to go to college like her older brother, Bobby. His untimely death thwarts her plans though, and her older brother must even return from his plumb job as a banking trainee on Wall Street to take over the family bank. Desperate to keep her dreams for college alive, Faye figures out that she can make small brokerage fees investing her friend's money in the soaring stock market for them. When Walter, Bobby's handsome friend from New York, visits, Faye is smitten. She has no idea Walter has convinced Bobby that he can make an easy fortune by illegally borrowing the bank's deposits to make short-term investments in the skyrocketing market. While Faye is a savvy stock picker and her small business thrives, Bobby is secretly losing everything on his illegal gambling scheme. When Bobby skips town, Faye discovers that the stock market is crashing and their bank is wiped out. Her college savings and the savings of everyone else in town are gone.
As she pieces together what happened, Faye realizes a few forged signatures is all it would take to reverse some of her brother's illegal transfers. It would depend on a series of perfectly timed transactions to stay ahead of bank auditors, and she would have to rely on the help of an incompetent assistant whom she'd have to pump full of bootlegged alcohol to keep calm. It's a crazy scheme likely to fail. Faye must decide if she is willing to commit her own crime in order save the people who had trusted her father with everything.
