Murder mystery script

Movieland Mayhem

Lights, camera… mayhem! Your audience is the extras on the closed set of a big-time director’s latest movie. Into the middle of it barges John Gladstone, the world’s greatest defective, who has come to Hollywood to find out what happened to his manuscript “The Gladstone Files,” and has discovered that things in Hollywood are not only not as they seem, they are positively unseemly. The suspects: Astoria Desmond, a product of Hollywood’s golden days when there was never a hint of scandal (plenty of scandal, just never a hint); Reginald Gamble, the hero in all his movies and a tad of a cad backstage; his better half Serena, who makes movies with him to keep him on the straight and narrow; and Cha Cha, who is profoundly Brazilian and whose body of work so far has been more body than work. She’d like everyone to know it’s a closed set (“Chess!”). Then a body turns up, and it isn’t a prop. Guests bribe the stars for clues, help Gladstone interrogate them, and fill out an official resolution form before the solution. A Hollywood send-up in two acts, written for five actors.