Robert Cohen, Writer
Ioana Uricaru, Writer

Sloan Grant(s) Received: 2024, Film Independent, Episodic Award

Project Type: Pilot

Genre: Political Thriller

Length: 60 pages 

Field of Science: Technology

Stage: Development 

Synopsis: 

It’s 1961. We’re in Huntsville, Alabama, a sleepy southern town famous for watercress, humidity, and a rapidly expanding population of scientists and engineers who have come to work for NASA.

That a numbers of these men happen to be former nazis who once built rockets for Hitler, and were smuggled into this country at the end of the war by American intelligence, is one of those inconvenient truths no one in Huntsville wants to hear.

Michael Newman is an ambitious young American engineer, a lifelong rocket nerd who spent the little he recalls of his childhood blowing up model rockets in the backyard. In a sense he’s never stopped blowing them up. He’s also a bit of a lost soul. He’s arrogant, needy; he doesn’t get along with people; it’s like his own skin doesn’t fit. Other than his wife Kitty, NASA is his only family now.

When Magda, a newcomer posing as a journalist, asks him to help her gather information about the nazi past of his colleagues, Michael is confronted with a chilling scenario: what if this surrogate family is made up of war criminals, and his mentor, Willy Voigt, is responsible for the death of his real parents?

As Michael struggles between his loyalty to NASA, his personal ambitions, and the enormous pressure to find out the truth about willy, he is also torn between his attraction to Magda and his marriage to Kitty. He’d prefer not to choose a side, not to take a stand, not to impose his will, but eventually he has no choice. What he discovers is that NOT to act is to risk losing everything you’ve got..