PROCESSING...
Story by Dan Lawless
David is a middle-aged underachiever stuck at a PR firm, disconnected from his son Alex. The firm's secret: time travel to create celebrities. David hijacks the tech, travels to the '90s, tries to fix his younger self. Every change transforms him instantly and absurdly. The traits he's trying to fix are the ones worth keeping.
Or maybe he just daydreamed the whole thing at his desk.
RE: RE: RE: I know what the company does
David, I told you to stop replying all. The celebrity monitoring array is NOT a toy. Whatever you did to [REDACTED]'s younger self cost us a Maserati and a Grammy nomination. They're at a McDonald's now.
P.S. - Don't touch any notebooks in the '90s.
847 hours and he's never once asked what I'm hunting.
A Comedy • Drama • Science Fiction
0% — please do not turn off your computer
Scroll to begin
You can’t go back in time to change the future.
You can only see it. And hopefully learn something about yourself.
Story by Dan Lawless
The Heart
The comedy is the vehicle. The story is a man who can’t connect with his son, who travels backward and discovers that the kid he’s been trying to fix is basically who he was — and that who he was wasn’t broken. The recognition isn’t that Alex needs to change. It’s that David needs to see. His younger self was weirder, wilder, and objectively more of a concern than Alex ever was. The kid is fine. The kid was always fine. The dad just couldn’t tell, because he was too busy looking at his son and seeing his own failures instead of his son.
Modified today at 3:41 PM
PROCESSING…
David can’t connect with his son. Alex is a teenager consumed by gaming and computer parts and a world David doesn’t understand. David sees waste where Alex sees purpose. He sees laziness where Alex sees freedom. He sees a kid going nowhere — and it terrifies him, because it feels familiar.
David is a middle-aged underachiever stuck at a PR firm, coasting on a job he got through his college roommate. What he doesn’t know: the firm secretly uses time travel to manufacture celebrities, sending adults back to coach their younger selves into greatness. When David stumbles onto this secret, he hijacks the technology and travels back to the ’90s to meet himself at age ten — convinced that if he can fix the kid, he can fix the man.
His attempts hilariously backfire. Every change to Young David instantly transforms Middle-Aged David — muscle mass from one pull-up, vanishing dinosaur knowledge mid-sentence, involuntary tap-dancing in board meetings. Meanwhile, a mystery builds: cryptic phone calls to a teenager on a landline, going unanswered, then answered, then feared.
But the real discovery isn’t in the past. It’s in what David sees when he looks at his younger self: a weird kid. Cynical. Imaginative. Pushing people away. Content with an outdated NES and a journal full of nonsense equations. And David realizes — slowly, reluctantly, then all at once — that he’s looking at Alex. That Alex is basically who he was. That who he was wasn’t broken. That the kid he’s been trying to fix didn’t need fixing. He needed a dad who could see him.
Or maybe David just daydreamed the whole thing at his desk while a progress bar crawled across his screen. Either way, he goes home. He asks Alex about the game. He sits down. He plays. He’s terrible. He stays.
PROCESSING… • Story by Dan Lawless • Comedy / Drama / Sci-Fi
Last opened 11:47 PM • Do not sync
Tuesday. Late.
I don’t know what to do about Alex.
He’s not failing. He’s not in trouble. He’s not on drugs or running with bad kids or whatever it is parents are supposed to worry about. He’s just — somewhere I can’t reach. Sitting three feet from me in the living room, headphones on, hunting monsters for the eight hundredth hour, and I might as well be on another planet.
I told him to do his homework tonight and he looked at me like I’d asked him to explain why the sky is blue. Not angry. Not defiant. Just — bored by me. Bored by the request. Like he’d already run the numbers on whether school mattered and come up empty, and couldn’t believe I was still running the old math.
The thing that kills me is I remember that look. I GAVE that look. To my dad, who came home every day and disappeared into the bathroom with a Stephen King novel because he didn’t know how to talk to me either. I swore I wouldn’t be that. I would be present. I would be interested. And here I am, forty-three years old, and I don’t even know what game he’s playing.
Sometimes I wish he could meet me at his age. Not me now — me then. Ten years old, taking apart a stereo I couldn’t put back together, convinced I was a genius, writing fake equations in a journal. Maybe if Alex met THAT kid he’d see himself in him. Maybe they’d get along. Maybe that kid could explain to Alex that the world isn’t going to wait for you to feel ready, in a way that doesn’t sound like a lecture, because it’d be coming from a peer and not a parent.
Or maybe — and this is the part I don’t want to write down — maybe if I met that kid again, I’d finally see what everyone else apparently sees: that Alex is fine. That Alex is basically me. That the problem was never Alex.
I should close this and go to bed. The progress bar on that update has been at 97% for twenty minutes.
Sophia is typing
David,
I told you to stop replying all.
Come to my office. Use the side door. Don’t talk to Marcus on the way. He’s been asking about your “extended bathroom breaks” and I can only cover for you so many times before someone notices you’re disappearing in a very literal sense.
Also — the celebrity monitoring array is NOT a toy. Whatever you did to [REDACTED]’s younger self yesterday cost us a Maserati, three endorsement deals, and a Grammy nomination. They’re working at a McDonald’s now, David. A McDonald’s.
We’ll fix this. But you owe me.
— Chris
“CAN YOU PLEASE JUST DO YOUR HOMEWORK”
847 hours and he’s never once asked what I’m hunting.
1994 • Page 47 • Found in a moving box
Mom says I should write about my day but my day was boring so I’m going to write about what I SHOULD have done today which is figure out time travel.
Here’s the thing. If you could bend time like a piece of paper and poke through from one side to the other you wouldn’t need to GO anywhere. You’d just need to fold it right.
Gabriel got a Super Nintendo. I don’t even care. The NES is fine. The NES is GREAT actually.
The old guy says I need to study more but he literally couldn’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning and I’m supposed to trust HIS life advice??
He did know about Rachel’s cornrows before she got them though. That was weird.
Characters
The Dry Everyman. Deadpan frustration as reflex. Self-aware enough to know he’s stuck, not enough to know why.
40s. Cubicle drone at a firm he got into through his college roommate. Whimsical, formerly ambitious, a little too full of himself. Persuasive but lacks gumption. Shifts blame, makes excuses, always the victim in his own retelling. Pop-culture references perpetually from the wrong decade — too old for the 2020s, too new for the 90s. Deeply loves his family but doesn’t know how to show it. Watches Alex game for hours and sees waste where Alex sees purpose. Late at night, in a journal file he’d never show anyone, he writes: “Sometimes I wish he could meet me at his age. Maybe that kid could explain things in a way that doesn’t sound like a lecture, because it’d be coming from a peer and not a parent.” That sentence is the seed of the entire movie.
The Mouthy Prodigy Who Isn’t Actually a Prodigy. A real kid, not a movie kid.
Happy, playful, imaginative. Fancies himself an inventor and a genius — disassembles a stereo, fails to reassemble it, declares victory. Smart and sensitive but not actually a genius, though he’d argue the point. Content despite knowing his family is broke. Cynical beyond his years. Pushes people away — a trait Middle-Aged David still possesses and is irritated by in his own son without recognizing it in himself. Writes in a journal with unbridled, un-self-aware ambition, including a fake equation that will accidentally become the foundation of a time-travel empire. Objectively weirder and more concerning than Alex ever was — but David can’t see that until he’s standing in the same room with the kid he used to be.
The Digital Native Who’s Quietly Hurting. The audience should feel his want before he ever voices it.
David’s teenage son. Into gaming (goal: 1,000 hours in a monster-hunting game), computer parts, and online communities. Doesn’t try at school because he feels he shouldn’t have to. Not a secret genius, but just as hopelessly un-self-aware as Young David was. Wants his dad’s involvement more than anything but would never say so. 847 hours into the game and his dad has never once asked what he’s hunting. When Alex walks in on David video-chatting with Young David — a boy who looks just like him, talking about computers, the thing Alex has been begging his dad to care about — it’s the quietest, most devastating scene in the film.
The Commanding Blowhard with a Secret. Authority as costume. Underneath: a brilliant man who spent his original life as a failed talent agent, watching other people’s clients get famous from the next table over.
David’s college roommate. Runs the firm and its secret time-travel division. What he doesn’t know: his entire life was engineered by his own future self — a bitter old agent in 2060 who glimpsed David’s childhood journal in a YouTube video, built a crude landline prototype, and called his teenage self with one instruction: “MBA. Find Dem Boys.” The genius was always there. The paradox just gave it a better address. He doesn’t create new celebrities — he already knows who the biggest stars will be, because he spent forty years watching them. The almanac isn’t a book of sports scores. It’s a failed agent’s mental Rolodex.
The Sharpest Person in the Room Who Chooses Chaos. Not a love interest — a foil.
Feisty, whip-smart, doesn’t need the job. Uses the position to mess with people and connect with celebrities. Knows the firm’s secret before David does and becomes his reluctant guide and conscience. Warns him he’s not celebrity material — real candidates know exactly where they went wrong, and David’s problem is a cascade of half-hearted commitments and mixed metaphors. She delivers the hardest truths in the film with a precision that stings and lands at the same time. David grows to respect her for it. She grows to respect him for ignoring her advice and doing it anyway.
Mom: The Relentlessly Positive Enabler. Dad: The Quiet Resignation — an actor known for charm, playing deliberately against type.
Mom is loving, hopeful, and in over her head. Genuinely believes David is a genius. Her science-fair idea — “will more weight on a string cut through ice faster?” — is mediocre, but she and David give it everything they’ve got, and the project melts before fair day because neither thought to take photos. She is also completely oblivious to a grown man hiding in her son’s closet, which is either a comedy gag or evidence that none of this is real. Dad is a quiet librarian who retreats to the bathroom with Stephen King novels. He’s about had it with society, feels left behind by culture. The house is full of bookshelves. He loves David but can’t reach him — the first link in a generational chain of fathers who don’t know how to connect with their sons.
The Lifelong Friends. Their bond is the one thing in the movie that time travel can’t touch.
David’s two best friends since middle school. Ethan (the “E”): charismatic overachiever, adventurer, nonchalant about his own success. Michael (the “M”): ordinary in the most admired way — clean house, nice wife, capable kids. Their initials spell DEM; a sleepover flashback reveals the naming of “Dem Boys,” a joke that amuses only them. They go for sushi on birthdays. David hates sushi but takes one for the team. When David confides his time-travel story over sake, they think he’s lost his mind — until scars from a childhood blood-brothers oath appear on their palms mid-meal. They’re too drunk to process it. Despite all of David’s timeline meddling, the friendship remains perfectly unchanged. Meant to be. Impervious to the supernatural.
Structure
YOUNG DAVID: Dismantles a stereo. Declares genius. Alone by choice. MIDDLE-AGED DAVID: Traffic mistake. Blames the other driver. Same person, thirty years apart.
90s: Science fair. Ice melts before fair day. No photos. 2020s: Alex games. Wife monologues off-screen. 90s: Dad. Bathroom. Stephen King.
Software updates. Motivational posters. Marcus the suck-up. Sophia: sharp, unimpressed.
Closed-door presentation. The firm creates celebrities via time travel. The indicator watch on famous faces. Sophia catches David. Alliance forms.
No invitation. No understanding. Wrong location. No Uber. Mom’s bike.
Doc Brown monologue. Rapid-fire identity tests — all forgotten. The cornrows. Mom freaks. Trust established.
The NES. “It doesn’t get any better than this, David.” Both spot each other’s blame-shifting. Neither sees their own.
Software update won’t complete in the 90s. Accidental zapping. Mystery thread: Young Chris. Cryptic messages. First dismissed. Then feared.
Michael and the watch. Sophia: “There is no obvious path.” David watches Alex game, concludes wrong priorities. Wife keeps talking to empty room.
MUSCLES: One pull-up. Shirt rips. DINOSAURS: Mid-analogy evaporation. CHAOS: French. Tap-dancing. Magician. DARK TURN: Body bag. Watch flares red.
Forgotten handwriting. Starts to fade. Mom doesn’t notice. Rachel crushes at the mall. Bitcoin peaks at $1. Buttcoin skyrockets.
Video chat with a boy who looks like him. “Video game AI.” Almost connects. Not quite.
Blood-brothers scars appear at the restaurant. Too drunk to process it.
Celebrity array. McDonald’s uniforms. The paradox: the whimsy IS the load-bearing wall.
The emotional climax. Cynicism, creativity, pushing people away. Not flaws. Features.
Responds to his wife for the first time. Journal returned. Watch normalizes. Asks about the game. Sits down. Plays. Terrible. Stays.
2060. An old man. A YouTube video. A landline. His own voice. “MBA. Find Dem Boys.” The loop closes. Or maybe it was always just a story David told himself, waiting for something to finish loading.
Themes
David’s father couldn’t reach David. David can’t reach Alex. The pattern doesn’t break through correction — it breaks through recognition. The moment David stops trying to fix his son and starts seeing him is the moment thirty years of generational disconnect finally ends. Not with a speech. With a controller in his hands and a game he’s terrible at.
David travels back expecting to find the version of himself he should have been. Instead he finds a weird, cynical, stereo-dismantling ten-year-old who is objectively more of a concern than Alex ever was. The recognition isn’t that Alex needs to change. It’s that David has been looking at his son and seeing his own failures instead of his son.
Every attempt to optimize Young David destroys something essential — the whimsy that produced the journal entry, the creativity that made the time travel possible in the first place. You can’t fix yourself into someone better without killing the person you actually are. The whimsy is the load-bearing wall.
Nothing in this story has an origin point. Chris saw the journal because he went back to find the journal because he saw the journal. Characters try to explain this and trail off. The movie treats logical impossibility as a running bit — and never resolves it, because it can’t be resolved, because it might not be real.
The celebrity-creation subplot satirizes the idea that greatness can be engineered. Guiding Futures doesn’t discover talent — it manufactures it, owns the result, and calls it destiny. The glossiest industry in the world, built on a paradox that can’t exist, by a failed agent who couldn’t let go of a commission spreadsheet. David is the one person who hijacks the machine for something it wasn’t designed for: not fame, not money — just trying to understand his kid.
The title is the thesis. A progress bar that never finishes. A man stuck at 97%. Whether David actually traveled through time or just sat at his desk and finally thought — really thought — about who he is and who his son is becoming, the film doesn’t say. It doesn’t need to. Either way, he goes home. He asks about the game. He sits down.
Feature film. 100–115 min. A comedy that doesn’t know it’s going to make you cry — in the tradition of Click, where a broad sci-fi premise becomes the delivery mechanism for a genuinely devastating family story. The audience is laughing until suddenly they’re not, and they don’t know how it happened.
Mid-range studio comedy. $25–40M. Comparable to Click, Extract, The Kid. Star-driven with practical locations across two timelines.
Suburban homes, malls, schools, backyards. Ambiguously 90s — a kid’s memory of childhood, not a prestige period piece.
Cubicle farm, suburban home, sushi restaurant, boardroom. Flat, fluorescent, real.
Minimal. Transformations are prosthetic/wardrobe gags. One digital “fading” effect. Celebrity montage is mixed media. The comedy is physical, not pixel.
Mike Judge’s observational patience. Todd Phillips’s ensemble energy. Click’s emotional ambush. The workplace scenes are dry and cubicled. The 90s scenes are warm and heightened. The father-son scenes are played straight — no winking, no safety net. The recognition scene in Act Three earns its weight because the comedy never once signaled it was coming.
Lead: frustrated intelligence without superiority. Must play physical comedy (the transformation gags) and emotional stillness (the Alex recognition) with equal conviction. The role lives or dies on the moment David stops trying to fix his kid and just sits down next to him. Young David: genuinely funny, slightly abrasive, real kid — not precocious, not adorable, just real. Chris: physically imposing, vocally commanding, plays authority like a costume. The audience buys his confidence until the epilogue reveals the failed agent underneath.
Every parent who’s ever watched their kid disappear into a screen and felt the distance grow is the audience for this film. The time travel is the hook. The comedy is the engine. The father-son recognition is why people tell their friends to see it. Click proved this model prints money: $237M worldwide on a premise no one took seriously until they were crying in the third act.
The indicator watch, the celebrity mythology, Dem Boys, the journal, the bootstrap paradox — all built for expansion. Post-credits Buttcoin ticker. Guiding Futures corporate site (already built). Young David’s GeoCities page. David’s private journal as a standalone piece. This pitch ecosystem is the proof of concept.
PROCESSING...
A film by Dan Lawless
He asks about the game. He sits down. He plays.
He’s terrible. He stays.
© 2026 Dan Lawless • All rights reserved