The Songbird: Diana

Diana Lester, once known as "The Fashion Plate of Song" was a night club singer of the forties and fifties. Born poor and Jewish, she created herself, designing her clothes, her face, and her pedigree. Her drive was steely, her desires never ending, her tantrums ruinous, her interest in her only daughter close to zero.

Widowed in middle age, with a defunct career, no savings, and a teenage Karen in tow, Diana had married an elderly man with serious money. He died soon after, leaving her ensconced in a huge mansion in Manhattan.

Plotting her conquest of New York society, Diana closed her doors, hired a crew of construction workers and seamstresses, and for the next twenty-five years ripped the mansion apart. Never satisfied, increasingly hermetic and panic stricken, she created one of the most expensive piles of rubbish in Manhattan. It was there that she died.

The Songbird's Daughter: Karen

As a child, Karen had created a cast of Imaginary Characters; a wiley Muse, a demonic Murderer, an Imp, and a hanging Judge who indicts Karen at every opportunity. These Imaginary Characters have aged with her, and now fear they're dying with her. In a last ditch effort to save Karen and themselves, the Muse and the Murderer try a desperate scheme.

As the screenplay opens, her daughter, Karen, is an adult and a writer who's been struggling since her mother's death to tell the story of her childhood. But no word has been true enough, no image compelling enough. Countless false starts and dead ends have brought her to the edge of breakdown. She sits in her studio day after day writing notes, smoking, sleeping, starting over.

EXCERPTS from THE SONGBIRD's DAUGHTER

Leaving her studio after a night of serious drinking and drugging, Karen finds that her front door no longer leads to a familiar stairway, but rather to the Palladian foyer of her mother's mansion. Terrified that she's going mad, Karen runs back into her studio where the Muse and the Murderer explain that together they have magically transported her studio into Diana's house. Karen begs to be released but it's too late. None of them is going anywhere, says the Muse... until Karen finishes her work.

SCENE: INTERIOR DIANA'S NY MANSION - FOYER

This excerpt opens as Karen, once again, enters the foyer of her mother's house in a state of quiet shock. Karen stands in front of her studio door. At the other end of the room, the ghost of DIANA walks in, looking exactly as she was in her early seventies; a surgicized woman with a fifty year old body. She wears an old jump suit, destroyed slippers, a wig and a scarf tied behind.

She enters talking......