**FINALIST NATIONAL LMPOON CONTEST!!**

After a blow to the head, a Brit in LA is forced to confront a wicked booze habit, her obsessive blaming of Reneee Zellweger for everything wrong in life, and the appearance of her dad. Which would be OK - if he hadn't been dead for years.

Up Yours is a comedy that comments on the so-called Brit/Yank 'special relationship', Hollywood and the 'business we call show', but at it's heart is an unusual, offbeat father-daughter redemption story.

**Page quarter-finalist, still in running, 2016. Have UK producers interested in a UK/US co-pro - so looking to find a producer here (80%LA set, 20%London) and to attach comedy director, female, maybe.

SYNOPSIS:

SYNOPSIS – UP YOURS, BRIDGET JONES.

BRIT (a Brit) is in LA on a final fling for a better career than she has managed at home, before she is finally all 4 F's; Fat, failed, forty and f****d.

Having been a moderately successful actor in the UK, at times hailed in magazines and recognized (usually in the supermarket hungover and looking like shit) Brit thought she'd get to be in movies that more than 6 people see, at some stage, via a great part in that rare Brit-flick that actually is a hit in America too and so take her to movie mecca: Hollywood. But things have not gone to plan. Ever since she was denied the part that would have done all of this for her and more; the part she was utterly born-to-play and which she was about to be screen tested for ....when they decided to cast a stick-thin yank, not even old enough, to play the cute, busty and a little bit chunky, hilarious, iconic & very British heroine, Bridget Jones!

Well, yes, OK Renee's A list status would get the movie seen in America but... really? She's a twig! Brit's dad also drops dead at a stupidly young age around this time but they'd barely spoken a sentence in years, mostly due to the constant belligerent haze of alcohol surrounding dad, and so really what was there to miss? No, it was definitely Renee who screwed up her entire life.

So feeling she may be 90 or dead before she gets a gig that resonates loudly enough across the pond, Brit has sold her beloved motorcycle, moved to the 'hills', discovered her visa lawyer is an actual crook, gets a great job and then is refused it because of said visa, is forced to create own web series (youtube all female sketch show with funny friends NANCY and HEIDI) in order to get into the damn actor's union even though she's worked for NBC and Warner Bros in Britain! and somehow she hasn't noticed the rampant boozing that has crept up in the last years now causing half her life to be spent very hungover and really a bit 'low'. Hmm.

She does notice, however, that very 1st gray hair in her rearview and proceeds to crash into an entire street of parked cars. MIKE, a beautiful black motorcycle cop is very sweet, as he tries not to laugh, but the judge sentences Brit to a fine she can't pay and community service until the end of time. Great.No car, no way to get to auditions, so no way to earn money to buy another car.. to get to auditions.

Having got absolutely hammered after the bad news, Brit wakes up - literally in the gutter. There's a massive bump on her head, her purse is empty and …. wtf?! her DAD seems to be watching her from the corner of the street.

In fact - he's loitering all over the place in the next weeks.

THREE of him to be precise. At different ages. A cool 20 year old Jimmy Dean type dad with his classic motorcycle, who of course she never knew, a 30-something dad looking straight out of Mad Men, and the slurring 50 year old she'd had no time for before he keeled over and had no more time for her either.

Mike the Cop seems strangely intent on helping Brit, seeing the funny, attractive if a bit lost, woman that clearly she's struggling to see herself. He sends her to BENJI, a Jamaican African American, who makes bicycles out of dead bicycles and lets Brit have one.

Brit tells no one about 'dad' nor does she get her head bump looked at - due to lack of free healthcare in this strange new country that causes much praising of the national health service one had often moaned about before.

But a new phase begins when she sees she needs to cut back on the beer if she is to cycle everywhere. Thereby she improves looks daily and begins to work at an old folks home for her community service - where she meets and then enchants the incredibly pissed-off-with-being-deaf-and-near blind and old, POPS, (Jamaican), giving him the gift of stories he hasn't been able to enjoy for a year, and at least utilizing her skills! Her voice is so trained she can hit the back of a 2000 seater auditorium even in a whisper! She does her hours entertaining the whole home, Pops she just does as an extra.

His 'Reading Angel', he calls her and if he wasn't like, 80, she could totally go for him.

Brit hangs with Mike and Benji - who are brothers it turns out and begins to at least know how to put a bicycle back together – she's never had anyone to teach her how to fix her motorcycle and it pisses her off. She works hard on editing their latest sketch with her 'girls' and god forbid, she applies for a 'civilian' job for the first time in her life at coffee chain, Starfux, (because they actually do employee healthcare!)

And one night cycling home she has a conversation with her 20 year old dad, who is surveying the wreckage of his motorcycle at the side of a road.

He crashed it because he was drunk, it seems. It changed things. He was just one of 6 RAF pilots being taken to the USA for the space program. But he was in hospital for weeks and couldn't go. Brit asks if he needs help fixing the bike. They start to work on it together.

Pops has told her about the wife he still misses so much, the boys he adopted who come when they can but both have full on jobs, how he used to be an ace TT racer but insists AGAIN that Brit needs to deal with her 'shit'. 'Bite me' she replies as she reads him a motorcycle mag followed by some wicked Jamaican poetry.

She gets the job at Starfux – fuck - now she's actually going to have to work there.

AND she gets a fabulous TV audition, a lead, recurring, career changing, and so is faced with a huge challenge: Diagonally crossing LA using a bike and public transport to get to the interview – just not possible, says EVERYONE.

Rehearsing the audition scene between serving coffees at 5am the next morning only to discover her bike's been stolen. So begins a day of extreme practical trial to test her in every way. She borrows Heidi's brand new bike only to see it disappearing down the road on the front of the bus she just got off and as the time ticks on, sees she can't possibly make it now without another bike, and comes face to face with a bar. Inside all 3 dads are boozing. And arguing with each other. Its really getting to her now. Brit orders a beer. She takes a tiny sip. Pushes it aside.

When the bartender sees her conversing with thin air he calls the cops and they take Brit 'home' – The address she gives is Pop's.

And Mike suddenly appears too - he and Benji are Pop's boys. Once Mike's discovered that Brit is the much adored 'Reading Angel', Pop's correctly reads love in his eyes. Refusing to let Brit give up, he grabs Benji's bike-he-doesn't-lend-anyone off him & sends her back off to Burbank.

2 buses and a manic cycle later, she finally arrives looking like total shit and does an extraordinary (and super weird) audition where the casting director and producers think she's improvising, but actually she's talking to all 3 dads, seeing at last how alike she is to ALL of them and making her peace with older dad who's least attractive side had eclipsed a vibrant, funny, intelligent but bitterly disappointed man.

They say they'll 'let her know'. We all know what that means. Brit finally admits she is seeing dead people and Mike takes her to a doctor. The blow to the head – or hallucinations from alcohol detoxing are possibles – but Brit feels like the conversations were real. Didn't they make peace?

The gang all rallies round Brit at Starfux as the girls edit their latest web sketch and hope it gets hits.

Renee Zellweger comes in for a coffee. Brit stares. She's really....NICE.

Renee sees the sketch, laughs and tweets!

The rest is history.

Mike the Cop gives Brit a box of motorcycle bits and says its from Pops - he's going to show her how to build it, what she always wanted to do with her dad but never could. And they have a massive KISS. Natch.

As the end credits play Brit and her sketch show girls are being interviewed by Stephen Colbert.