Synopsis
Fresh out of county jail, Harry Dutton breaks into his ex-wife's house in the middle of the night and wakes his three young daughters, Vicky, Rachel and Rebecca, for what he calls a family vacation. By morning, sober and ashamed, he knows it is a terrible idea. But their mother has disappeared, leaving the girls with him, and Harry has no choice but to make the trip work.
As Harry and the girls bicker, con, shoplift and improvise their way north in a battered family station wagon, something unexpected begins to happen. The sisters, long divided by the instability of their home life, begin to find one another. In quiet rituals and odd roadside adventures, they also begin to see the wounded man beneath their father's reckless charm. For the first time, this broken group starts to feel like a family.
But Harry cannot outrun himself. When drinking, bad luck and the family history he has buried finally catch up with him, he crashes the car and shatters the trust the girls have only just begun to offer. Broke, bloodied and fleeing in a stolen car, he is drawn back to Ludlow, the depressed Northern California logging town where his own wounds began. There, Harry must face the past that made him, and decide whether he can give his daughters one honest act of love before he loses them for good.
The role
Harry Dutton is a showcase role: funny, infuriating, self-invented, and finally exposed by the daughters he is trying, far too late, to save.
Honors
- Final Draft Big Break Feature Grand Prize winner, 2012
- Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting Quarterfinalist, 2009
- Scriptapalooza Screenwriting Competition Quarterfinalist, 2009
- Optioned by independent producers