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"D O U B L E L I E S" A Family Drama (OUTLINE)
FADE IN: DRAY CANTY stares into the local newspaper of a town he's visiting when he spots a photograph that will change his life forever. He reads about a local businessman, REGINALD LYONS, who has just died, and the family he's left behind. But as Dray stares down into the picture he notices something strange about Reginald Lyons' family, something familiar. So he heads straight to their house. But they are at Reginald's funeral. So the next day Dray returns and is hired as the gardener by Reginald's 18-year-old son, REGGIE. As Reggie shows Dray the grounds, Reggie's mother, ANDREA drives up and notices Reggie talking to tall handsome Dray. Reggie introduces Dray to his mother, but right away Andrea and Dray are distant and cold to each other, seemingly angry. When Reggie introduces Dray to the rest of the family, his 16-year-old sister, RUBY, and his six-year-old brother, BOBBY, and Ruby likes Dray, and Dray likes them, Andrea seems even more aloof and disturbed, and paradoxically a little jealous. Even the simplest things Dray says to Andrea seem tinged with hostility and resentment--stinging, pointed, verbal darts that cause Andrea to bristle. Watering the lawn, Dray starts thinking back to his teenage years, to a country setting, helping his girlfriend climb down from her window so they can elope. Now he and she stand before the marriage official, he and Andrea. When Andrea's father, DR. GATZ (Gates), finds out about the marriage he has it annulled. Then she realizes she's pregnant. Still in love with Dray, she searches for him to make up with him, but finds him with another girl. Andrea then meets Reginald Lyons and marries him, without telling him she's pregnant. She goes back to her hometown to stay with her father to have her baby. While giving Andrea a physical, Dr. Gatzs is surprised to hear two heartbeats. One day while Andrea shops in her hometown, she is spotted by Dray, who is now married to the girl Andrea saw him with, CONSTANCE. Dray guesses it's his baby Andrea carries, so he threatens to take her to court for joint custody. He threatens to have his attorney contact her husband to get things straightened out. Andrea fears this will destroy her marriage. Feeling desperate, the only thing she can think to do to save her marriage and to be fair to Dray is to offer him one baby but not tell him about the other. When the babies are born, Dray takes the baby Andrea gives him to his barren wife, Candance. They raise that twin, BRIAN. Eighteen years later, Andrea tells her husband, Reginald, that the son he's raised, Reggie, is not his. Before she can finish her explanation, Reginald goes into cardiac arrest and dies. That's when Dray sees Reginald's obituary in the newspaper, and is hired by his own son, Reggie, as the gardener. Six-year-old Bobby, expresses the lost of his father by being sullen and hostile, begging for attention by nagging Reggie to take him camping. When Reggie and no one else will do it, Dray finds the time. Fortunately, the kids are well adjusted and able to get on with their lives, but Andrea feels a tremendous guilt associated with the lost of her husband, a guilt she can't shake, and Dray's presence just aggravates it. Her own self-hatred she turns on Dray because he interrupts their lives at such a critical time. When the family learns that Dray has offered to take Bobby camping, they manage to find time to do it themselves, but Bobby insists that Dray come along. Camping turns out to be a disaster when a BEAR enters the campsite, throws Reggie against a tree and injures his brain. At the hospital, they all stand around waiting for a report from the Doctor. Reggie's life hangs suspended, and Andrea has to make a life or death medical decision. Already distraught over her dead husband, Andrea is hysterical and unreasonable, too upset to make a logical decision. Her decision is emotional, only emotional, and blinded by fear. Dray makes a contrary decision, a decision that will give Reggie the slim chance of being whole again. Indecisive, and not wanting to reveal who Dray is in front of her children, Andrea is forced to go along with the decision. But she resents Dray even more for it. Music Professor, Dray, also a renowned novelist, pen named Roger Grey, rearranges his life to stay and help Reggie recuperate. The kids and Dray form a close bond which Andrea resents, but to the kids it, in a way, fills the void of their father's absence. Dray has been a widower for many years, and his son, Brian, is away at college, so the kids fill a void in Dray's life as well. They and Dray come to love one another. Brian finds Andrea's name on his birth certificate, and wants to know why and who she is. He believed, Candace, the woman who raised him to be his mother. So he goes searching for Andrea, since Dray is very evasive in their telephone conversation about Andrea's name on his birth certificate. Candace was loved and cherished by Dray, but he has always been in love with Andrea since they were kids, and now that he's seen her again he grows more in love with her each day. If Andrea has any love for Dray it is buried beneath layers of guilt and inner-conflict. Even when they all go skating and bowling together like a family, Andrea keeps her distance and makes sure that Dray gets no mistaken notion that she is interested in him--even after he confesses his love for her. Andrea, for the purpose of discussing her husband's Company, accompanies her attorney, EUGENE BRODY, to a social gathering. The guest of honor is famous author Roger Grey, aka Dray Canty. At the gathering Andrea is surprised to learn that Dray is Roger Grey and that Roger Grey is engaged to the party's HOST. Fury seizes Andrea, and she orders Dray to move out of the gardener's cottage off of her property and out of her life. Dray, jealous of Eugene Brody, becomes arrogantly cynical, packs his bags and leaves. Now Andrea goes to the bank and opens the security box left by her husband Reginald. She finds a letter he left telling her about his heart condition, and telling her that he's known that Reggie wasn't his for years. She leaves the letter in her coat pocket, and when Reggie takes her coat to the cleaners he finds it. When Reggie asks Andrea who his real father is, she is perplexed and afraid to say it's Dray. So when Reggie keeps asking, out of frustration she screams she doesn't know. Reggie, bolts out of the door and off the property and doesn't return. The next day when everyone is searching for Reggie, Brian arrives in town looking for Andrea and stands knocking at her front door. Of course, they mistake him for Reggie. Andrea tells Brian to go into the kitchen where they can talk, and when Brian hesitates out of confusion, and not knowing where the kitchen is, Andrea assumes Reggie is purposely being uncooperative, and orders Brian, who she thinks is Reggie, upstairs to Reggie's room. Rather than argue, and out of curiosity, Brian obeys. Upstairs in Reggie's bedroom, Brian finds a photograph of Reggie on his dresser. He stares, stunned, at the picture. His whole world is shaken, and his confusion is shown in the flush of his face and the slight tremble of his hand. Realizing that Andrea must be his mother and Ruby and Bobby his brother and sister, and Reggie his twin, he is confused about the parents who raised him. Still, he's not ready to reveal who he is. He will pretend to be Reggie, until he understands more about what's going on, and what kind of people these are, and how he will relate to them and they to him. Obviously, Brian figures, Reggie has run away, but why? Brian comes to love his new family, but keeps pretending to be Reggie, until, one day, Reggie calls and leaves a message, with Brian, for Andrea, that he is coming home. Brian doesn't reveal who he is to Reggie, but makes plans with Reggie to meet with him at Dray's house, although Reggie doesn't know it's Dray's house or why Brian wants to meet with him. On his way to meet with Reggie, Brian swerves to miss a drunk, lands in a ditch, and in the hospital. The hospital thinking, he is Reggie calls Andrea who rushes to the hospital. Brian has a head injury and some bad springs, bruises and lacerations, but for the most part he is stable, though in a coma. Reggie's doctor asks Andrea if Reggie has a twin, and tells Andrea that he can tell from the x-rays that the boy she thinks is Reggie is not. Andrea now realizes that it's Brian. Now Brian arouses from his coma, but he doesn't know who Reggie is. He doesn't even know who he is. Andrea, recently having lost her husband, now with one son in the hospital, and not knowing where the other has disappeared to, loses it, and has to be sedated. Reggie has gotten the key from the hiding place in Dray's backyard as Brian told him to do, and he's gone upstairs to look for Brian's bedroom as Brian has directed him. As Reggie stares at Brian's picture, at an image exactly like his, he hears Dray downstairs unlocking the front door. Reggie comes to the top of the stairs, staring angrily down at Dray, and demanding that Dray tell him who he is. Dray doesn't know if it's Brian or Reggie. Then Reggie asks if Andrea is his real mother or the woman in the picture he's now holding, Dray's dead wife. Dray assures Reggie that Andrea is his mother. But Reggie's heart begins to break as he realizes that the man who raised and loved him was not his real father. Through anger and tears, Reggie demands an explanation. But as Dray begins to tell Reggie that Andrea should do the explaining the phone rings and it's the hospital calling Dray to come and see about Andrea, who has had an emotional collapse. At the hospital the doctor explains to Dray and Reggie that Brian is there and has had a brain injury and that Andrea is resting. In Brian's hospital room, Dray and Reggie sit staring into Brian's face and holding his hand. Andrea comes into the room, rested and calm. Ruby and Bobby have been called to the hospital and enter Brian's room. Ruby clutches her chest, in shocking disbelief, and little Bobby zooms out of the room, slams himself against the wall, runs back in, slides towards the bed with a huge grin on his face and asks which one is Reggie. Brian arouses from sleep, explains that he fibbed about not knowing who he and Reggie are, because he was afraid he was in trouble, and that they would resent him. Now the explanations begin about how everything has occurred, and all the loose ends are tied up, except that when Bobby asks if Brian and Dray can live with them, Andrea's face falls, and Dray can tell that he's not welcomed. So Dray returns home and back to his job at the University. Andrea, sad and lonely, is still grappling with her guilt, but in addition, she must also face her feelings for Dray, that the love she had for him since they were kids has really never gone away. But just like she lost Dray before to Candace, how could Dray tell her he loves her now, and at the same time, be engaged to someone else? Eugene Brody calls and asks Andrea for a date. Andrea refuses but takes the opportunity to ask Eugene about Dray and his fiancee'. Eugene explains that it was done by the party's Host as a deception to cover the fact that she was seeing a married man, and that she and Dray were never engaged, and that Dray fired her as his agent for doing that. Dray, exhausted with Andrea's coldness, resentment, and unwillingness to let him explain, has told Andrea that he's not going to chase her anymore, and that if she wants him, she will have to come to him. One day when Dray comes home from work, he walks into a decorated house filled with excitement, and Ruby, Reggie, Brian, Bobby, others, and even Rory, the family dog are waiting for Dray. Dray walks through the front door surprised and greeting everyone, when Ruby walks downstairs to greet him, but Dray is shocked when Andrea trails behind her. Dray wants to know what all of this is about, and Ruby guides him upstairs to a bedroom decorated with a banner that says "Happy Wedding Day." "Who's getting married?", Dray asks. "We'd hoped Mom," Ruby answers. "To whom," Dray asks, "It couldn't be to me. She hates me," he says. "Well, would you consider it," Ruby asks. "Well, I don't know," Dray responds, "She'd have to ask me." Andrea nervously attempts to ask Dray to marry her. She stops and starts and stutters and fidgets so long, Dray finally takes her hand and proposes to her. They all stand on the steps of a wedding chapel, and bid Dray and Andrea the happy honeymoon they should have had many years ago. THE END Copyright-Tiana Boulet-2000
DISCLAIMER These songs selected for your entertainment in reading, they enhance the scenes, and the scenes give the songs a renewed exposure and greater meaning. They are not sold here or given away. If there are any of these songs that you like, please purchase them at your local record store or at an online store. Thank you.
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