It’s the pitch meeting for a Newspaper Movie, only it’s an Urban Fantasy
It’s going to be Twilight meets All the Presidents Men! Exploring themes of freedom of the press, corruption, truth, and the undead.
It’s called All the President’s Vampires where one intrepid reporter will get the tip of a lifetime from the ghost of Calvin Coolidge’s pet raccoon Rebecca, which breaks the story that will take down a president.
We open on a grizzled old reporter moving out of his DC brownstone because his wife is an angel, like literally, but it turns out even angels have a limit — and being married to a fairy who can always detect the truth who went to journalism school is hers.
That night, as he’s guzzling beer at the local bar for journalists, (different than the pub for cops, the cafeteria for politicians, the steakhouse for lobbyists, the blood bank for vampires, and the morgue for zombies), he gets a tip through his anonymous email to meet a source in a parking garage.
There are a lot of parking garages in DC, so it takes him a while, but when he finally finds the source at the Dulles Airport long-term parking facility, he learns it’s a janitor who can talk to ghosts. And the janitor has brought along a ghost of the long-dead Coolidge White House pet, Rebecca the Raccoon.
This janitor also speaks raccoon, being both an animal whisperer and a ghost talker and she says that the President has been drinking blood in the Oval Office.
Now that he thinks about it, the grizzled reporter realizes it’s a little bit strange that no one covered the fact that the President didn’t show up to the Iowa State Fair until the fireworks started, and no one has seen him since in the light of day, but he knows for sure there is a story here.
The meeting with his editor doesn’t go great because it’s right before lunch, and she’s a zombie and tries to eat his brains. And she’s worried about the reputation of the paper with such a bombshell accusation. She tells him he has to find a corroborating source who isn’t the ghost of a raccoon or a janitor.
And so begins a long montage of seeking a source and not getting eaten or hexed or cursed. There will also be shots of opening refrigerators in empty apartments to reveal a solitary half-eaten pizza and more shots at the bar and even at a different bar. At one point he even hears about a super secret project in the wilds of New Mexico, but reluctantly lets that go, because it’s the wrong genre.
Finally, after five minutes of tracking shots, set to a score by the same guy who does all those disaster flicks, he tracks down the ghost of Zachary Taylor, who died in the White House after consuming insane amounts of green apples and cherries.
He takes the corroboration back to his editor, who agrees that the ghost of a dead president is slightly more trustworthy than the ghost of a raccoon, but since the same janitor translated for both ghosts, they still had work to do.
And so begins yet another montage of pavement pounding, but this time various to various psychics and magical creatures around the city until he finds a tarot card reader in Chinatown who does not tell all of the politicians she sees that they will win the next election with her help, and does not tell all of the tourists she sees that museum esoterica that the costs $20 bucks, half of which goes back in her pocket, is better than any Smithsonian. Sometimes she mixes up the two messages, which results in quite a few politicians in photo ops at the esoteric museum, but the reporter deems her trustworthy enough to translate.
A dramatic meeting is arranged, this time on a park bench beneath bare tree limbs, which takes some doing because it’s the middle of July. But finally, the tarot card reader and the ghost of Zachary Taylor confirm that yes, the president is drinking blood.
And now, it’s all over but the writing, and the click click of the printing press, which is weird in a movie about an online blog, but the big bold headlines are the same crying the president is a vampire. After a last-minute call for comment to the White House press secretary who says she can get back to them after sunset. In the final editorial meeting, the editor says to go with that quote and that they are going to change the world, speak truth to blood-sucking power, and a few more inspirational cliches.
And as the reporter sits watching the news of the President’s address, the screen fades to black while small white letters tell you that this one article forced the President to say sorry and for one moment tell a little bit of the truth, before going on to win reelection by 20 million votes and two electoral college votes.