CLAUDIA DURANT
Theatrical Motion Picture
• Synopsis
• Director’s Statement
• Images & Mood
• Comparable Titles
LOGLINE
When the LAPD fails to solve the murder of her teenage client, a haunted sex trafficking survivor turned by-the-book DCFS caseworker embarks on a rouge investigation, causing her life to unravel and uncovering a conspiracy that’s responsible for her own past trauma as well.
SYNOPSIS
Los Angeles, California – Present Day. Claudia Durant, age 35, is an investigator for the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). When child abuse cases are reported to the DCFS, it’s Claudia’s job to find out the truth about what happened and determine whether children are safe to remain at home or if they must be placed in foster care. In her 10+ years of experience, Claudia has seen it all.
Being a DCFS investigator is the most stressful job in the world because you’re overworked, underpaid, and you see the very worst of human nature. They don’t call social workers the “walking wounded” for nothing. Sadly, we live in a world where people really do microwave their babies to death and we need people like Claudia on the front lines. Claudia often spends more time with her clients that she does with her own family.
What makes Claudia exceptional at her job is the fact that she is a survivor of sexual abuse herself. When she was fourteen, she was abducted by sex traffickers on her way home from school. She spent months in captivity before managing to escape. The traffickers were never identified or captured.
To this day, Claudia still suffers with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of her ordeal and secretly struggles with multiple addictions in an attempt to manage her pain.
The reason Claudia became a DCFS investigator was to help other young children and it is because of her own past abuse that she is able to connect with the children in her care on a deeper level than her colleagues. One of those children is 14-year-old Trina Huxley, a beautiful girl from a broken home.
When Trina goes missing from foster care, Detective Al Raymond, who’s Claudia’s counterpart at the LAPD, suspects that the girl is a runaway. But Claudia has a bad feeling that something has happened to Trina and spends her off hours trying to find the girl without success.
Four months later, Trina’s dismembered torso washes up on the beach in Playa del Rey. During the autopsy, the Medical Examiner discovers a unique ultraviolet light tattoo on Trina’s body that wasn’t present before her disappearance.
When Claudia learns of this discovery, she is poleaxed and confides in Al that she was branded with the exact same tattoo by the men who abducted and trafficked her twenty years earlier.
Together with Al, Claudia embarks on an investigation into Trina’s murder – an act that will cause her life to unravel, push her sanity to the breaking point, and culminate in a shocking conclusion that audiences will be discussing long after they’ve left the theater.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Every writer has what I refer to as their “shard of glass” story, meaning a story that is buried deep inside of them, a story that festers, a story that takes years to work its way to the surface before it can finally be extracted. “Claudia Durant” has been my “shard of glass” story since 2007.
It all began when a friend of mine confided in me that he was a sex addict and that his addiction played a major role in his recent separation. I must admit that I thought he was kidding at first. I had never heard of sex addiction before and assumed – rather naïvely, as it turns out – that all men were probably sex addicts on some primal level. “Come on,” I joked, “aren’t we all sex addicts?”
He then told me the story of his rock-bottom moment and, suffice it to say, it was no laughing matter. I was shocked to learn that my friend had been living with so much pain for so long, that he was powerless to stop himself from coping with it in this very unusual way, and that, despite our closeness, I was completely oblivious to the secret double life he’d been leading until it finally became unmanageable.
Immediately, I felt I had stumbled onto an idea for a fascinating character around whom I could construct a compelling story.
My friend was a member of Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) and attended meetings weekly. I asked him if I could go to a meeting with him and observe for research purposes and he obliged me. The stories I heard floored me and made my friend’s rock-bottom moment seem mild in comparison. The meetings I attended were gender-specific: men only. Straight men, homosexual men, even convicted pedophiles. Many were survivors of childhood sexual abuse and, ironically, sex had become their method of coping with the pain and stress of daily life.
I read every book about sex addiction that I could get my hands on and, over the next several months, found that female addicts intrigued me even more than their male counterparts due to their behaviors’ extreme contrast with traditional gender roles in society. So, I decided to make my protagonist a female sex addict.
A small handful of films, like Belle de Jour, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Nymphomaniac, among others, had featured female sex addiction in the past, but I felt like every single one of them scratched the surface and lacked verisimilitude. Making matters worse, other films, like Choke, Thanks for Sharing, Don Jon, treated sex addiction in what I felt was an irresponsibly comedic way. I felt a real obligation to treat the subject matter realistically and do right by the many people whose lives have been affected by it.
In short, I wanted to do it for real and, if that meant being slapped with an NC-17 rating, bring it on.
I knew from my research that stress would need to play a big part in my protagonist’s life as it would serve as the trigger for her acting-out behaviors and, ultimately, be responsible for her inability to continue managing her two lives. So, I dug deep to figure out what was – or is – the most stressful job in the world. It seemed that no matter who I talked to – e.g., policemen, paramedics, firemen, et al. – they all agreed that the most stressful job was that of a social worker who deals with abused and neglected children.
Why?
Because they operate – unarmed, lest we forget – in dangerous environments, they see the worst of human nature, they are threatened constantly, they have weapons pulled on them, they are overworked, they are underpaid, and there are far too few of them to go around because the burnout rate is so astronomically high. When my research led me to the job of Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) investigator, I knew I’d found my character’s stress-inducing occupation.
Also, in keeping with my research, I made the character a survivor of child abuse herself. Because of her past abuse, she would have an ability to connect on a deeper level with her clients than her colleagues. I loved the irony that the character was a heroine to so many abused and neglected children, but a complete wreck in her private life.
Then, I began trying to figure out her name. Like Paul Schrader (screenwriter, Taxi Driver), I believe that the selection of a character’s name is as important as every other element in a screenplay. A well selected name can both reveal character and have a ring to it that resonates in audiences’ minds forever. The selection process should be neither arbitrary nor wasted. Figuring out my character’s name took two weeks. Eventually, I selected Claudia because it is the Latin feminine form of Claudius, which means lame or crippled. And, I selected Durant because it derives from the Latin name Durandus, which means enduring. Therefore, the name, “Claudia Durant,” would represent my crippled survivor of a protagonist and, because it’s so damn good, serve as the working title of the film as well.
So, I had the name, the character, and the character’s profession figured out, but what was the story? Since I was dealing with a female sex addict, I assumed that I should write an addiction movie and began writing scenes of Claudia’s acting-out. However, the scenes, while interesting, weren’t going anywhere and I didn’t know where else to go. I became frustrated, put the script down, and got busy with something else. This would be the first of many such false starts. Then, a year later, I picked up the script again, wrote for a while, ran into some more trouble, became frustrated (again), put the script down (again), and got busy with something else (again). This process repeated itself for over a decade.
Why was I having such problems?
Well, I was having such problems because I didn’t want my character to get better and addiction movies are almost always about people who triumph over their disease. Eventually, I realized that, although my story possessed many elements that are common in addiction movies and appeared to be an addiction movie at first glance, it really wasn’t an addiction movie at all. The addiction was simply part of my character’s “life problem.” The acting-out behaviors were great, but they weren’t a plot. I needed an engine to drive the story.
Eventually, in 2019, I came to the conclusion that this story needed to be a detective story wherein Claudia investigates a case that ultimately leads her to confront her own past in the style of, say, Chinatown. Finally, I’d found my engine: Claudia’s investigation. It would drive everything and create the necessary stress in Claudia’s life to cause her to act out in a very organic way. Things were finally starting to fall into place as the plot continued to take shape.
Still, the antagonist of my story eluded me. After all, for every Jake Gittes, there must be a Noah Cross. I couldn’t crack it. Then, on August 10, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide – or was murdered – while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges and the details of his sordid life and network began to come to light as if they were a gift from above. At last, I had the inspiration for my ending. For the previous twelve years or so, I lamented the fact that I couldn’t seem to crack my story. Now, of course, I realize that this story needed and benefited greatly from that extra time. Contemporary events gave it a pulse, a relevance, and a resonance that it never would have had otherwise and I’m grateful for that. The shard of glass finally worked its way to the surface and, as I write this, we are currently in pre-production.
When people ask me what past films “Claudia Durant” is most like, there are a few that leap to mind for various reasons. The first is Abel Ferrara’s film, Bad Lieutenant (1992), which Martin Scorsese named one of his Top 10 Best Films of the 1990s, because it features a fearless performance by Harvey Keitel and is unapologetically NC-17. The second film I think of is William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), which had the feel of a documentary because of its use of handheld cameras, natural light, and practical locations. The third film I think of is Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) because of the way it makes Los Angeles feel like a character and depicts every stratum of LA society.
At the end of the day, this is a film about obsession and how, under the right circumstances, people are capable of anything. If I can explore these themes with a fearless and committed actress, then I have no doubt we’ll achieve something truly special.
Make no mistake, audiences will watch this film because of the sex, but they will walk away with a deeper understanding of the dark chambers of the human heart.
Dax Phelan
Santa Monica, California
