THE FLORIDA PROJECT(2017)

Title: The Florida Project

Written by: Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch

Draft date: 07/31/16

LOGLINE

A six-year-old girl spends her summer running wild through the run-down motels lining the highway outside Disney World, while her fiercely defiant young mother scrambles to keep them housed — until the state intervenes and threatens to separate them.

Genre: Drama

Sub-genre: Coming-of-Age Drama, Social Realism

Keywords: Child Protagonist, Single Mother, Poverty, Motel, Florida, Summer, Friendship, Child Protective Services, Disney World Adjacent, Found Family, Working Class, Childhood Innocence, Motherhood, Hustling, Ensemble Cast

MPA Rating: R (pervasive strong language, sexual references, drug use, thematic content involving child neglect)

Budget Tier: Low ($1M–$10M)

Pages: 99

Time Period: Present, over approximately one summer

Locations: 80% at and around "The Magic Castle," a run-down purple motel on Route 192 near Kissimmee, FL (rooms, lobby, back office, pool, playground, parking lot, walkways, laundry area, utility room). 10% at adjacent motels along Route 192 (FutureLand Inn, Arabian Nights Motel). 10% at various Route 192 locations (Twistee Treat ice cream stand, Waffle Home restaurant, perfume wholesaler, abandoned condos requiring fire/burn effects, open fields, fancy hotel buffet, ticket hut, theme park entrance and Main Street for the finale). Requires extensive exterior shooting in Florida heat, period-appropriate signage, a working motel or practical equivalent, and brief theme park access or convincing recreation.

Lead: Female, age 6, Caucasian, Moonee — fearless, loud, resourceful, mischievous, and emotionally perceptive beyond her years, raised in transient poverty but radiating joy.

Comparables: Beasts of the Southern Wild (child's-eye view of poverty with lyrical undertones), Kids (unvarnished look at children navigating an adult world), Tangerine (Sean Baker's immersive, empathetic portrait of marginalized lives on the economic fringe), Wendy and Lucy (a woman on the edge of destitution fighting to hold onto what matters most).

SYNOPSIS

MOONEE (6), a brash, fearless girl, lives with her young mother HALLEY (22) in Room 323 of The Magic Castle, a purple, run-down motel on Route 192 near Orlando. Moonee's days are spent with her best friend SCOOTY (7), whose mother ASHLEY (23) works at the Waffle Home next door. When DICKY (7) alerts them to "freshies" at the adjacent FutureLand Inn, the kids run over and spit on a car belonging to GRANDMA STACY (younger than average), who has just moved in with her granddaughters JANCEY (6) and LUCI (4). Motel manager BOBBY (50s), weary and overwhelmed, mediates the conflict, forcing Halley to march the kids over to clean the car. During the cleanup, Moonee befriends Jancey, who becomes her new companion.

Halley's situation is precarious. She has been fired from a strip club, has a criminal record, and receives TANF benefits that require job contacts she cannot produce. A CASE WORKER warns her about compliance. Ashley feeds the kids through Waffle Home's back door and the two mothers party together on weekends, but Ashley is passed over for a promotion that would have let her hire Halley.

Bobby manages the motel's daily crises — a power outage caused by the kids pulling a switch in the utility room, topless sunbathing by resident GLORIA (60s), noise complaints, a brawl in the parking lot, and the comical arrival of a Brazilian honeymoon couple who mistakenly booked The Magic Castle instead of the Magic Kingdom. He lives in Room 101, alone, and his personal life surfaces only when his handyman JACK (28) reveals he wished Bobby's ex a happy birthday on Bobby's behalf, provoking Bobby's anger. Bobby confronts a SUSPICIOUS MAN (70s) lurking near the playground, physically intimidating and expelling him — a rare moment of protective fury.

Moonee gives Jancey a tour of the strip's landmarks — a wizard sculpture, an abandoned castle, a giant ice cream cone where they beg tourists for change. The three kids explore abandoned condos, and Scooty's lighter ignites a fire. The condos burn. Ashley, suspecting Scooty's involvement, forbids him from playing with Moonee and stops providing free food.

Halley's income schemes escalate. She buys wholesale perfume and hawks it at a fancy hotel until security chases her off, destroying the merchandise. She steals MagicBands from a john named JOHN (30s) who visits her room while Moonee bathes behind a shower curtain, then sells the bands to a British tourist family. She pays rent with the proceeds. John later tracks down Moonee on Route 192 and whispers a vicious prediction about her future.

The friendship between Halley and Ashley ruptures completely. Ashley discovers Halley's Backpage ad — the "swimsuit selfies" Moonee photographed — and confronts her. Halley beats Ashley badly. Bobby questions Halley's income sources after scanning large bills under a counterfeit detector. He forces her through the monthly room-switch to prevent establishing legal residency, sending her across Route 192 to the Arabian Nights motel, where a new owner refuses the old discount. Bobby pays the difference out of his own pocket.

For Jancey's birthday, Halley hitchhikes with the girls to a spot near the theme park where they watch fireworks with cupcakes and soda. Moonee shares jelly and bread with Jancey under a giant uprooted tree, declaring it her favorite because "it tipped over, and it's still growing." Even as Halley's world contracts, she takes Moonee on rain adventures, paints her toenails, and sneaks her into a nicer hotel's breakfast buffet, fighting tears while watching Moonee eat joyfully.

DCF arrives. Ashley has reported Halley. The CASE WORKER and a DCF INVESTIGATOR confront Halley at Room 323. Bobby initially shields Halley from the CCTV review, but owner NAREK (50s) overrides him. Security footage shows nine men entering the room over three weeks, and investigators have obtained the Backpage ad. DCF determines Moonee must be placed with a foster family in Polk County during the investigation. Halley alternates between defiance and despair. Moonee, told she is leaving, says goodbye to Scooty with a hug, then refuses to cooperate. She breaks free from the DCF worker and sprints down Route 192, past every landmark of her summer, arriving at Jancey's door in tears. She tells Jancey this may be the last time they see each other. Jancey grabs Moonee's hand and they run together — across Route 192, toward the theme park, through the entrance gates, down Main Street, and toward the castle glimmering in the sun.

COMMENTS

PREMISE — Excellent

The premise positions childhood wonder against systemic poverty with uncommon specificity, setting the action in the shadow economy of Route 192 motels that exist because of — and are invisible to — the Disney tourism machine. Moonee is a protagonist whose age and environment create inherent tension: she is too young to understand the forces closing in on her mother, yet old enough to sense them. Halley is a compelling foil, defined by the same defiant resourcefulness her daughter inherits but deployed in increasingly self-destructive directions. The central dramatic question — whether Moonee will be taken from the only life she knows — gains power precisely because it is not introduced as a ticking clock but emerges organically from accumulated choices. The motel setting provides a closed ecosystem rich with incident and supporting characters while the adjacent theme park functions as a constant, ironic reminder of the American fantasy these families cannot access. Comparable to Beasts of the Southern Wild in its child's-eye framing of precarity and to Tangerine in its empathetic immersion into marginalized communities, the premise distinguishes itself by grounding its emotional stakes in the mother-daughter bond rather than in spectacle or plot mechanics.

STRUCTURE — Fair

The narrative operates as an accumulation of vignettes rather than a conventionally plotted arc, and this episodic design is both its structural identity and its primary challenge. The first forty pages establish Moonee's world through a rich mosaic — the spitting incident, the power-outage prank, the tour of the motel, the perfume hustle — but no single thread emerges as the central conflict until the DCF investigation surfaces around page 84. The midpoint, structurally speaking, falls near the abandoned-condo fire (42-46), which catalyzes the break between Ashley and Halley and sets the chain of consequences that leads to the DCF report. This causal linkage works, but the connection is submerged beneath so many intervening episodes that it can feel coincidental rather than inevitable. The climax arrives swiftly once DCF acts (92-99), compressing enormous emotional payload into seven pages after dozens of pages of relatively low-stakes incident. The run to Jancey's door and then to the theme park (97-99) provides a powerful emotional resolution, though the ending's ambiguity — what actually happens to Moonee — is left entirely open. Every scene individually justifies its inclusion through character detail or thematic resonance, but the proportional weight favors the episodic middle at the expense of the third-act confrontation.

CHARACTER — Good

Moonee is a remarkably well-drawn child protagonist whose voice, behavior, and emotional intelligence are consistent from her first line to her final sprint. Her resourcefulness — begging tourists for ice cream money (18), conning Jancey into cleaning the car (10), navigating adult confrontations with Bobby (22-23) — establishes her as active and specific without ever violating the credibility of a six-year-old's perspective. Halley is equally vivid but functions more as a force of nature than a character with a traditional arc: she begins defiant and desperate and ends defiant and desperate, with the circumstances worsening around her rather than any internal shift driving the action. Bobby is the most complex adult character, his gruff management masking genuine protectiveness — the suspicious man scene (65-68) reveals his moral code without a word of exposition. Ashley's betrayal is motivated and earned through the fire subplot and the Backpage discovery (83-84). Grandma Stacy and Gloria provide texture without overstaying. The ensemble is well-calibrated for a world this size, though Jancey remains somewhat reactive until the finale, where her decision to grab Moonee's hand and run (99) retroactively justifies her quieter presence.

CONFLICT — Fair

The central conflict is between Halley's determination to keep Moonee and the institutional forces — poverty, the law, DCF — that will eventually separate them. This conflict is formidable but diffuse for most of the runtime, operating as ambient pressure rather than direct confrontation. The perfume seizure (49-50), the john's return (77-78), Bobby's escalating warnings (79-80), and Ashley's discovery of the Backpage ad (83) all function as incremental escalations, each raising the likelihood of intervention without any single event serving as a clear point of no return until DCF arrives (84). Scene-level conflict is abundant and well-executed: the spitting incident (3-4), the Arabian Nights negotiation (60-63), and the parking-lot brawl (48) keep individual sequences taut. The internal conflict — Halley's awareness that her choices endanger Moonee versus her inability to survive any other way — is powerfully present in the buffet scene (91), where she watches Moonee eat while suppressing tears, but it is shown rather than explored, leaving the question of whether Halley could have chosen differently largely unexamined.

DIALOGUE — Excellent

Dialogue is the material's most consistent strength, achieving sharp differentiation across a large cast while maintaining naturalistic rhythm. Moonee's voice is precise — her "Damn non-tippers!" (23), "You know, selfies are actually when you take photos of yourself" (58), and "Don't look at me, she said it" (63) all sound authentically childlike while carrying comic timing. Halley's dialogue is distinct in its combative cadence: "I've failed as a mother. Moonee, you've disgraced me!" (23) deployed with dripping sarcasm against Bobby, and "You're literally asking me to help you take away my fucking kid" (97) delivered with genuine desperation. Bobby's speech patterns — clipped, managerial, exasperated — differentiate him cleanly from the residents: "You gonna redo my expense reports with your whatevs?" (24). The Brazilian couple's Portuguese dialogue (31-34) and the sign-language family check-in (43-44) expand the world's linguistic texture. Subtext is strongest in the Ashley confrontation (55-56), where the waffle-ordering scene weaponizes hospitality, and weakest in the DCF scenes (87-88, 92-93), where investigators deliver exposition somewhat flatly.

PACING — Fair

The pacing mirrors the rhythms of a child's summer — unhurried, digressive, punctuated by bursts of energy — which is thematically appropriate but creates a long, relatively even middle section between the establishment of Moonee's world and the DCF intervention. Individual scenes are well-timed: the suspicious man encounter (65-68) builds tension expertly through Bobby's forced politeness, and the fireworks birthday sequence (52-53) provides a perfect moment of release. However, the stretch from roughly page 40 to page 84 contains numerous episodes — the perfume hustle, the MagicBands sale, the Arabian Nights negotiation, the rain adventures — that individually charm but collectively delay the narrative's forward momentum. The final fifteen pages (84-99) move at a markedly faster pace than anything preceding them, compressing the DCF investigation, Halley's confrontation, and Moonee's flight into a rapid sequence that carries enormous emotional force but also feels proportionally rushed relative to the leisurely build.

TONE — Excellent

The tonal achievement is precise and sustained: a child's-eye warmth layered over adult desperation, with neither register canceling the other. The spitting incident (3-4) establishes the pattern — grotesque behavior rendered joyful through Moonee's perspective — and it holds through the fire (42-46), the parking-lot brawl (48), and even the john's whispered cruelty to Moonee (82), which lands as chilling precisely because the surrounding tone has been so buoyant. The one moment that risks tonal disruption is the "swimsuit selfies" scene (57-58), where Moonee photographing her mother's escort ad images is played with a lightness that the later narrative consequences make uncomfortable in retrospect — though this discomfort is arguably the point. Gloria's topless poolside protest (27) and the Brazilian honeymoon couple (30-34) provide comic relief that never undermines the gravity accumulating beneath the surface. The finale's shift from realism to something approaching fantasy — the sprint through the theme park gates (99) — is the most radical tonal move, and it works because it has been carefully prepared by the castle imagery and Disney adjacency threaded throughout.

ORIGINALITY — Good

The premise occupies territory adjacent to Beasts of the Southern Wild and Tangerine but distinguishes itself through the specificity of its setting and the structural choice to filter systemic crisis through episodic childhood experience rather than through conventional plot escalation. The Route 192 motel ecosystem — existing in the literal shadow of the world's most famous destination for childhood fantasy — is a setting no prior film has explored with this level of granular detail. The execution surprises most in its refusal to sentimentalize or demonize Halley: she is neither a noble sufferer nor a villain, and the material resists the redemption-arc conventions that comparable films like Precious deploy. The finale's sprint into the theme park is a genuinely unexpected structural and tonal choice, breaking the realist contract at the precise moment when realism would be most painful.

LOGIC — Fair

The narrative's cause-and-effect chain is generally sound, with one significant structural logic issue: the DCF investigation hinges on Ashley's report (referenced at 86), but the connection between the fire — which Ashley blames on Moonee and which triggers the friendship rupture — and Ashley's eventual discovery of the Backpage ad (83) is never made explicit. Ashley could have discovered the ad independently, but the timing and her stated motivation ("everybody knows") suggest information circulated through the motel community, which is plausible but underexplored. The room-switch residency-prevention routine (58-59) is a convincing legal detail that grounds the world's logic. Bobby's decision to protect Halley from the CCTV review (89) but then acquiesce when Narek overrides him is consistent with his established character — loyal to individuals but ultimately subordinate to his employer. The finale's dash to the theme park (98-99) deliberately breaks realistic logic, as two six-year-olds could not plausibly enter a secured theme park, but this break is clearly intentional rather than careless.

CRAFT — Good

The writing operates in a lean, observational mode that trusts physical detail over exposition, and this approach is highly effective for the material. Character introductions are economical and specific: Bobby is "focused, overwhelmed and cynical" with a wedding ring noted (6), Halley is "in pajamas and lying on the bed, smoking and watching 'The Price is Right' on an old 19-inch tube television" (5) — both descriptions that convey entire lives in a sentence. Action description favors behavior over interiority: "Moonee seems indifferent. She's been through this before. Never good to get too emotional over anyone. Like her mom taught her" (38) is one of the rare editorializing moments, and it earns its place. The directorial notes — "Shot 'candid camera'-style with a hidden camera" (36), "This scene will be shot holding on Moonee's face as she eats" (91) — are unusually specific for a production draft but appropriate given the co-writer is the director. Formatting is clean throughout, though occasional inconsistencies appear: Halley's name is spelled "Haley" at least twice (51, 84). The closing pages (97-99) demonstrate the craft at its peak, using cross-cutting between Halley and Moonee's parallel agitation to build urgency without dialogue, then releasing into the wordless sprint that closes the narrative.

OVERALL — Recommend

The Florida Project is a social-realist drama about a six-year-old girl's summer of adventure and mischief in the motels outside Disney World, set against her young mother's increasingly desperate efforts to keep them afloat. Its strongest categories are dialogue, tone, and character — Moonee's voice is authentic and indelible, the tonal balance between childhood joy and adult crisis is sustained with remarkable precision, and the ensemble populates a richly specific world. The episodic structure is both the material's signature and its primary limitation: the vignette-driven middle section captures the texture of a child's endless summer but delays the central conflict's emergence until late in the narrative, creating a proportional imbalance between setup and payoff. The craft is confident and precise, deploying observational detail in place of exposition and trusting behavior to convey what characters cannot articulate. The finale's break from realism into something closer to fable is a bold choice that transforms a painful separation into an image of defiant escape — whether literal or imagined — that resonates long after the last page.