Script

This is the shooting script for Whatever It Takes, a short film I directed for Kids in the Spotlight, the Los Angeles nonprofit that trains young people from foster care and underserved communities in screenwriting and filmmaking. Six pages. One young woman named Heaven who chases virality and finds something else waiting for her at the end of it.

What this captures is a horror premise dressed as a TikTok rise-and-fall story. Heaven, Kayla, and Destiny are dancers grinding for views in a living room. A repost from a famous influencer named King D pulls Heaven into a warehouse party where the script slowly tilts from aspirational to wrong. Shots she doesn't want to take. A goblet that disorients her. A toast under a symbol the audience has been seeing throughout but hasn't placed. By the time the red robes appear and the altar comes into focus, the film has revealed what it actually is, which is a story about what young women are asked to give up for an audience.

Pay attention to the friend dynamic. Heaven tells King D that Kayla and Destiny aren't her friends when he asks. That moment is the real betrayal in the script, not the cult reveal. The cult is the consequence. The first betrayal is the one she chose.

The ending pulls out to a phone screen. The whole thing was a reel. That framing isn't decoration. It's the argument of the film.

For the young filmmakers I worked with on this project through Kids in the Spotlight, the script was the spine we built everything else around. The genre was the hook. The lesson was the point.