"This Is My Mall" - a movie idea...

Okay, I've had essentially the same dream *twice* now, so I felt like I should write it down as a sort of movie treatment, altered a bit to give it a plot. It was an intriguing dream, and vivid enough that I remember both versions well.

So, here is my movie treatment, which I call "This Is My Mall."

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"THIS IS MY MALL"
A rough idea by Steven Worek

A college-aged boy named Michael finally gets his license, and eventually, his own junker of a car. To celebrate his newfound freedom, he drives a car full of his friends to the nearby city where he used to live, so that he can revisit the places that defined his childhood. One of these places is the Kenton Peaks Mall.

Upon arriving at the Kenton Peaks Mall, Michael and his friends make a horrific discovery - the mall still stands, but is long closed. Standing amidst fancy office complexes and apartment buildings, its once majestic exterior is dirty and broken, and the police-taped two-level parking lot has collapsed, leaving a treacherous cave where the underground parking and lower entrance once were.

Depressed, Michael begins obsessively researching Kenton Peaks Mall, finding articles that reveal its unsafe structure, untested ground, and slow commercial death. However, upon posting about the mall on a number of forums, he learns that the citizens of Kenton miss the mall dearly, because like Michael, their childhood developed within its walls. Michael locates contact information for the property owners, but finds that they lack the money to restore the mall to glory. Michael announces to the population of Kenton that he wants to collect money to help the owners pay for its proper renovation and reopening.

Eventually, Michael is able to raise a hundred thousand dollars from friends of the mall, but it is nowhere near enough. Making a televised plea, he asks the city government for aid, and receives two million dollars, promising to reshape the once weak mall into a bustling center of commerce. The owners agree to rebuild the mall, and Michael is given control over its attractions.

Time passes, and the mall is renovated into a grand complex, with each storefront successfully filled. The grand opening arrives, and shoppers pack the complex from wall to wall. Within a year, however, Michael finds that his mall is dying once more; the shoppers find the renovations to be untrustworthy and unsafe. Complaints that the two-level parking lot seems to be crumbling into pieces onto cars below, and that the mall's floors seem flimsy and unsteady, lead to widespread paranoia about its safety. By the mall's one-year anniversary, most of its stores are closed.

Michael desperately scrambles to lure shoppers back, but he is unsuccessful. One of the property owners tells Michael he has something to show him, and they go for a drive. In the nearby town of Halliwell, on a rarely used back road snaking through the hills above the town's major road, which is lined for miles with successful restaurants and shopping centers, Michael discovers a pathetic, rusted metal building. The owner unlocks the door and takes him inside, where he finds a former mall, rotted, overgrown with plants, and disgusting. The owner tells him that this used to be called Knight's Ridge Mall, and that before the main road in town gained its wealth of successful businesses, this is where everyone came to shop and eat. In 1980, after nearby developments began to draw people away, the owner's company desperately tried to bring back its fading crowd, but found that there was nothing they could put in that the main road's developments couldn't top. One day, they gave up, and closed the doors for good. Leaving Knight's Ridge Mall, the owner tells Michael that nothing in business lasts forever... sometimes things are successful, sometimes they're just meant to fail. Kenton Peaks failed once, and it was destined to fail again.

By its final days of operation, the corridors of Kenton Peaks begin looking dilapidated. Michael attempts to call the owners again and again, first attempting to get a broken escalator repaired, and then repairing a railing that seems to be breaking away from the second floor walkway. The owners never answer his calls. Eventually, a safety inspector arrives to tell Michael that the mall has to be closed by the end of the week.

Word about its unsafe environment has spread throughout the entire town and its neighbors, and on the final gloomy day, Michael is left standing alone in the atrium of his mall, sadly staring at the empty displays, countless metal gates, and powerless neon signs. Late in the day, as a storm builds outside, Michael's friends arrive with other friends in tow, and the group all vows to stay in the mall until the last second.

The storm becomes serious, however, quickly growing into the worst storm Kenton has had in years. Numerous locations of the city are flooded, and the mall loses its power. One of Michael's friends tells him that the upper parking lot is running thick with water, and in a panic, Michael rushes to the lower entrance, where the underground parking has a foot of water that is desperately trying to break through the door. The walls of the parking area are crumbling, and as Michael watches, a cement barrier floats into the glass door, smashing it, and flooding the lower floor with water. Michael tells everyone to stay upstairs, and breaks open the boards now covering the former food court. Everyone takes a seat, and Michael tells them that the parking lot is collapsing, so the only option they have is to stay safe in there, and that he'll go out for help when the rain stops.

For a few moments, the frightened group of friends and remaining employees sits in silence, while Michael and a couple others retrieve flashlights from each of the closed restaurants. Faint metallic groans are heard echoing though the empty corridors. The group looks around, and the groans become louder. All of a sudden, as Michael and his two friends rejoin the group with a box of flashlights, the mall shifts, and the group drops several feet. Below, the flow of water into the bottom floor becomes even stronger, and soon, the group is looking over the banister at a muddy, putrid lake.

One of Michael's friends panics and vomits, and staggers to the restroom close to the food court. Michael follows him, holding a flashlight. When the friend turns a corner to reach the stalls, Michael suddenly grabs him and pulls him back - the floor inside the restroom has collapsed, and the friend nearly falls down a twenty foot, pitch black hole into the restroom below. The friend instead dashes towards a remaining trashcan, and when he is done, they rejoin the group in the food court, who are now sitting desperately still. Another friend tells Michael that they just heard the entire food court creak, so they're afraid to move. Someone suggests that maybe they should all sit near the banister, so that if the food court begins to collapse, they can jump into the now-deep water below. Carefully and slowly, everyone edges over.

Time passes quietly, as everyone stares at the growing lake below, and their possible future destination. To keep everyone in high spirits, Michael starts telling stories about what the mall was like when he was a child. He points to now-submerged locations from his youth - a former toy store, a former music store, a former pet store. He tells them that he wanted the same types of stores that he remembered, so that a new generation could discover the joy he found there.

Not long after Michael's stories end, the front half of the food court suddenly shifts and angles downward, sliding everyone quickly towards the railing. He tells them to back up towards the still-stable restaurants, and when they get there, to disperse evenly across them and stay *completely* still. He is going to get help no matter what, and grabbing a hold of an unsuspecting friend, moves towards the upper entrance of the mall.

Upon reaching the entrance, the two discover that they now have several feet of wet, weak ground in front of the door to contend with. Michael has his friend help him in dragging a bench to the door, and lifting it over their heads, they begin to ram the asphalt barricade. Breaking through a couple feet, the two discover a very unstable but possibly usable tunnel to the surface through which water is pouring. The two struggle up through the slippery tunnel, bursting upward through a torrential waterfall at the end in order to reach the surface. The pair swim over to one of the flooded office complexes and bang on the door. A terrified office worker, trapped on an upper floor, opens a window. Michael screams that if anyone in the building has a cell phone, to please call for help, because everyone else is trapped in the mall. Before too long, workers with rafts arrive to dig a clearer path to the upper entrance, and retrieve those trapped in the food court as water rushes into the upper floor.

In the waiting area of an emergency room, looking stunned, Michael stares at a television. Local news is covering "Chaos at Kenton Peaks Mall", reporting that all individuals made it out and are in stable condition at Eastern Kenton Hospital, but showing a horrible sight - the mall is now nothing but rubble, with large chunks washing out into the city. The reporter states that caretaker Michael was in no state to be interviewed, and that the property owners could not be reached. The city is calling for the arrests of the owners, as this is the second time one of their malls became dangerous due to a lack of proper construction and maintenance - the previous incident concerned Knight's Ridge Mall in nearby Halliwell, which was closed in *2000* after a lifetime of severe neglect and unsafe conditions. Michael hears a nearby elderly man tell someone that he hated Knight's Ridge Mall when he lived in Halliwell - you needed a goddamn tetanus shot just to go into their filthy grocery store. An old woman tells the man that when Kenton Peaks was open years ago, she couldn't even go between floors - the same handicapped elevator was broken for fifteen years. The old man laughs and tells her that he supposes nothing is meant to last forever. Michael is seen looking over at them, and then slowly turns his head back to look at his feet. Slow fade to black.