A live-action eight-episode one-hour action-dramedy. Young Indiana Jones meets Stargate meets Bill & Ted with Laura Croft in this globe-trotting adventure.

SYNOPSIS:

GATEWAY OF THE SUN LIMITED SERIES SYNOPSIS

It’s spring 1998 at a fixed point in the ever-changing techno-geo-political world. At America’s Stonehenge in New Hampshire, (a megalithic site of astronomically aligned stones.) A troop of Boy Scouts has camped out to observe dawn at the ‘The Summer Solstice Stone Monolith’. The troop oversleeps, except for two….

HERSCHEL “BUGGSIE” HOUGHTON is 18, handsome, overconfident, and intensely focused, (like his father, a surgeon.) He hopes to become an entomologist and his friends know him by his nickname, Buggsie. Science is his passion but he’s popular at school and the captain of the football team. His keen analytical mind, more fragile, than his physique, is broken by the paranormal events. His desperation to understand things science can’t explain becomes an obsession and propels him blindly into danger. He’s driven like a teenage Captain Ahab, but this obstacle is greater than any giant whale.

FRANKLYN “FRANKIE” FATONE is also 18, an intuitive, street-smart kid from Brooklyn. He was a total misfit in Yuppie NH until Buggsie befriended him. He dreams of being a famous musician. His family moved to the sticks to open a Pizza Parlor, and Buggsie helped him make the transition to small-town life. Now, his best friend needs his help and he’s there despite the dangers. His passionate, comical reactions don’t always reflect the bravery of this emotionally deep hero. If Buggsie is logos, then Frankie is pathos.

As the two Eagle Scouts watch the sunrise over the megalith, Frankie plays a song he wrote on a miniature musical keyboard. The ancient stone responds with an eerie green glowing light and sucks the teens into its vortex. In a flash of light, they find themselves at the Gateway of the Sun in Bolivia, ruining the bizarre ritual of a tribal blood cult. After a harrowing chase, the boys escape with their lives and return home.

Meanwhile, in England, HENRIETTA WELLESLEY, similarly 18, has been raised in seclusion by her father, a British lord turned spy. She’s a brilliant, sophisticated, and refined, but lonely girl who longs for adventure. She dreams of inventing things that can change the world. She is the Princess Leia of this tale, the ethos to the boy’s logos and pathos, and like Hermione Granger, the brains of the trio. Tragedy befell her mother, in a car bombing meant for her father when his cover was blown. Heavily trained in self-defense meant to protect her, she reacts without thought. During target practice, she shoots down a drone bomb headed for her father’s car, Col. Wellesley, (retired from field duty and now head of MI6’s R&D.) She traces the drone to a Satanic Cult at Stonehenge and goes there to spy on them.

In ACT ONE (EPISODES 1-2), Buggsie and Frankie’s teleportation changes their lives. Buggsie’s former interest in insects turns to an obsession with understanding the phenomena, and the two friends are scoffed at and ridiculed. When they teleport to England Henrietta witnesses their arrival and saves them from nearly becoming human sacrifices of the satanic cult. She agrees to help the boys to unravel the mysterious anomaly. Her father agrees to finance a legitimate scientific experiment despite his disbelief in their tale. The phenomenon manifests ghostly images of hooded priests walking about. Henrietta attempts to pull the boys back from the phenomenon but gets sucked into the vortex.

In ACT TWO (episodes 3-5) the teens appear in Australia inside the highly restricted Pine Gap U.S. Air Force Base at a top-secret launch pad. There, DR. HEINRICH BETHEM, a brilliant German scientist, (whose research in gravity deprivation attracted the interest of the U.S. Airforce that funded his research), uses the Earth’s geo-magnetic-gravitational field to launch heavy payloads into space near Ayer’s Rock, (the world largest natural standing stone.)

The teens try to sneak off the base but are captured by COLONEL RICHARD WEEDLESON, a gruff, hardened military lifer who never married, and worked his way up the ranks, to a top security level. He has secrets he keeps for the military, and himself. Privately he leads a kinky sex life with loose women, hates kids, loves cigars, and drinks heavily. Frankie calls him Col. “Dick Weed.” They are questioned and released, pending further investigation but agents secretly follow them on their commercial return flight to the UK.

Their next teleportation sends the teens to Kashmir’s “Temple of the Sun” where terrorists attempt to assassinate the Laozi, the ascended master of a covert martial arts force that foiled an illegal arms sale. LT. COL. MASOOD MIKHAILOV is a Moslem from Kazakhstan and a former soviet officer who heads a Kazakhstani weapons depot. With the corruption that followed the collapse of the USSR in 1991, he’s now a shrewd and ruthless arms dealer who supplies Jihad terrorists. He’s there to settle a score with an interfering Chinese group. At the Sun Temple, he witnesses the teen's paranormal arrival and sees its weapon’s potential, remarking: "Tayy al-Ard! The ground folds beneath their feet!” He peruses the teens, wanting this perceived Islamic mystery of traversing the earth without moving as a new weapon.

With the wise Laozi’s help, the teens escape Masood and teleport to the King’s Chamber of Egypt's Great Pyramid. A hidden passage has been opened by MOHAMMED ABDALLAH, the leader of the Hurras Alharam, an ancient cult that guards the secrets of the pyramid. As he performs a resurrection ritual, his dead comrade vanishes and the teens appear in his place. With knives drawn, they hunt the teens who have witnessed too much and enlist the help of The Egyptian Islamic Jihadists to find them.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, the military shuts down the whole experiment and wants to know the teen's whereabouts who they believe are being hunted by Masood and his cronies. Masood arrives in Egypt and conspires with Mohammed and the Jihadists who kidnap Henrietta and ransom her for Frankie's keyboard and secret musical composition. At the point of exchange in the King’s Chamber Frankie hits the auto play button and the keyboard activates the phenomenon and the teens teleport, despite the Laozi’s warning that if they “rode the wings of the dragon too far they would dwell with the gods.”

In ACT THREE (episodes 6-8) the trio appears inside a pyramid amidst a hoard of mummies, Egyptian treasure, and the dead Hurras Alharam member. Outside the USAF is excavating the Pyramid and the panicked teens hastily fashion ad hoc space suits from the artifacts. The teens emerge resembling Egyptian gods inside a pressured dome to the astonishment of Astronauts and scientists who at first believe they’ve disturbed an ET UFO base. Via Satellite communication, Col. Weedleson recognizes them and exclaims: “It’s those damn kids again!” It seems like the end of the line for our adventurers with nowhere left to run until…

The Moon Base goes on alert with only minutes before a Solar Flare hits. The teens run for cover inside the Moon Pyramid, and the keyboard accidentally falls and activates the play button. The tremendous power of the solar flare sends them back through all their previous sites momentarily and then back to the Moon Pyramid and beyond until…

Henrietta throws the keyboard ahead into the vortex and they land under an archway at ‘The Face on Mars.’ The vortex of the wormhole closes along with the last of Earth’s lifesaving air pressure as they meet their doom. Then a hooded monk, seen in ghostly form at Stonehenge, stands before them in flesh and blood. Striking musical crystals, he opens a new vortex that teleports them back to Stonehenge and disappears. Agents of the USAF and MI6 immediately apprehend them.

A military tribunal between MI6 and the USAF is held to determine the fate of the three teens who have witnessed Project Horizon’s Moon Base and simply know too much. Faced with permanent confinement or enlistment the boys are inducted into the USAF and Henrietta, (as a British citizen), is enlisted into MI6 as an assistant to her father in R&D. The three teens become lead researchers in a new Black Op project to explore the military potential of the megalithic teleportation network. ‘Project Gateway’ is based at RAF Fairford, a joint RAF/USAF base in Gloucestershire, England.

With countless megaliths spanning the globe, there are endless episodes of legendary locales on Earth and beyond. The two nerdy Boy Scouts have become hero-scientist, gunrunner-hunted interplanetary travelers with powerful allies and teachers in and out of their sphere of understanding. Henrietta has found more than her share of the adventure she longed for, and no longer needs the protection of her father.

The storyline has much to explore. Who built the megalithic teleportation network? Who was the mysterious hooded priest who rescued them? How far does the network go beyond Mars? Is there a way to control it? Can it be mapped?

Megalithic sites account for over 40% of all tourism which is now estimated at a half-trillion USD value! The entertainment industry is now a global market. What better story could enthrall viewers in every country than one that brings an adventure to a national tourist attraction that embodies their heritage? Every megalithic site has its lore and legend of strange associated phenomena. So much of these lore and legends can be incorporated into future episodes. Gateway of the Sun offers such potential. The adventure has just begun.

GATEWAY OF THE SUN (TV PILOT PITCH DECK)