His beat is ordinary people who run out of exits.
Before the fiction: a police scanner, a notebook and a camera on the passenger seat. Bylines and photo credits for USA Today, UPI, Reuters and the Associated Press, and opinion pages in The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times and Der Spiegel. Freelance, all of it. The scanner was the assignment desk. Filed the UPI eyewitness account of the last judicial hanging in the United States.
Feature · Contained horror · 88 pages
Log
When a defective control timer drops a mall's steel gates hours early on a busy Saturday, paranoia turns ordinary shoppers into a bloodthirsty mob that targets an ailing grandfather and forces him to hold them off while his eight-year-old granddaughter draws them a way out.
One location, one afternoon, no monster in the building – except the people already inside. A phone video, a sealed exit, and a mob that's sure.
Comps
The Mist × The Purge
Feature · Revenge thriller
In packaging · Not available for option
Log
After his wife's vaping death, a shattered man unleashes a cyanide-laced guerrilla war on a tobacco giant, hunted by a tormented ex-FBI agent who understands him better than anyone alive.
Freudberg's own adaptation of his novel Find Virgil (1,110 reader ratings across Amazon and Goodreads). Under a packaging agreement.
Comps
John Wick × Zodiac × Michael Clayton
Will keep readers riveted until the final page. If a movie version turned out to be as riveting as the book, it would be a big winner.Amanda Davis, Associated Press, on Gasp – revised and reissued as Find Virgil
Feature · Magical realism
Log
A photographer who turns invisible when she's ignored has eight weeks to smuggle her dying uncle into the sealed lab that ruined him and photograph the glowing tree nobody believes he saw.
She didn't choose it and she can't explain it. It happens on its own, whenever being ignored cuts deep enough, and it takes her until twenty-nine to learn to switch it on herself. Then it becomes the only way to get a dying man past a guarded gate before the building is sealed for good.
Comps
Everything Everywhere All at Once × Frances Ha
Feature · Neo-noir
In packaging · Not available for option
Log
A grief-scarred CPS investigator, driven to protect children, is seduced by a calculating mother into staging a crash that frames her husband – then learns her escape plan has no room for him – or for the kid he thought he was saving.
Freudberg's own adaptation of his novel Baby Please Don't Go (1,841 reader ratings across Amazon and Goodreads).
Comps
Gone Baby Gone × Body Heat
Feature · Crime thriller
Optioned · In packaging
Log
Under option. Active packaging. The title and production company are withheld at the producer's discretion.
Details available to qualified inquiries.
I couldn't hold a job, never could.
That's not a bad-break story, it's my resume. And it's why I spent my nights on the streets of Philadelphia listening to a police scanner. The 911 dispatcher told me where I might find my rent money. She didn't need to tell me twice. I grabbed my keys and took off.
The reporters and photographers I had to compete with had editors, company cars, travel budgets and equipment I couldn't afford to look at. What I had was a half-tank of gas and a head start. The head start was the trick. A story doesn't care who pays you, it cares who's there to see it.
I got there first often enough. Local bylines stacked into photo credits, photo credits stacked into assignments from USA Today, UPI, Reuters and the Associated Press. Later, opinion pages: The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel. Nobody hired me into any of it.
I just kept showing up until showing up was the only press credential I needed.
Screenplays now. Same job: find the scene while it's raging out of control, shoot it fast and file it before somebody says you can't.
Two published novels, Find Virgil and Baby Please Don't Go, carrying 1,110 and 1,841 reader ratings. Fourteen books ghostwritten in other people's voices. Five completed features, two of them adapted from those novels, two currently in packaging and one under option. Freudberg controls all rights.
Producers, execs and financiers: name the title and I'll respond same day. Screenplays are not posted publicly. I control all rights to the screenplays and to the novels behind them.
ff@freudberg.com