Proposed Film Treatment

Proposed Movie Synopsis 

for fiction-based-on-fact film treatment

of Taking Aim at the President

Film consultants have noted that there aren’t redeeming features in the actions of Sara Jane Moore that would make her a likely film heroine, even on the dark side.

The treatment, therefore, interweaves two plot themes -- the life story of Sara Jane Moore, a double agent FBI informant and leftist radical who evolved from being a suburban doctor’s wife to an attempted presidential assassin -- and the uncovering of her story by researching and exposing deeply secret lies, by journalist Geri Spieler.

When journalist Geri Spieler receives her first note from the attempted assassin of President Gerald Ford, Sara Jane Moore, Spieler had no idea that it is to be the beginning of dozens of jailhouse interviews covering nearly thirty years.

There is no issue of doubts about Moore's guilt, since she has been caught red-handed after firing a shot at President Ford, missing his head by a mere six inches. Only the quick action of a nearby retired Marine prevents her from taking a second, more accurate killing shot.

During twenty-seven years of letters, phone calls, and personal visits, Moore has presented herself to Spieler as nothing more than a middle-aged Southern housewife gone awry.  Spieler’s role during that time was that of a friendly ear and someone who, as a mother herself, would send birthday and holiday gifts to Moore’s one acknowledged child, on his mother’s behalf.  The focus of Spieler’s writing was research articles on technology; she did not see herself as a biographer or novelist.

After 27 years, in prison, however, Moore convinces Spieler to write Moore's life story. The contradictions immediately begin to come clear as Spieler begins to grind away on peeling away Moore's multiply- complected layers. As soon as the real facts begin to emerge in Spieler’s investigations, however, Moore clams up, and cuts Spieler off.

Spieler moves forward on her own, and she is able to identify, locate, and get the cooperation of people who have never gone public before -- ranging from FBI agents to Moore’s own abandoned family members.  Spieler vets her sources and double and triple checks facts with documented evidence to catch Moore in her bouts of falsehood, as well as to support her when some grains of truth slip out.

Spieler uncovers the years-long saga of a disintegrating life of a woman devoid of empathy and compassion, a woman living free of any sense of obligation to anything or anyone other than herself.  She follows Moore through five marriages to four men, some lasting as briefly as a month, to men ranging upwards in age to two years older than her own father.  She bears five children, and abandons four of them; she leaves the fifth as a nine-year old child whose mother goes to prison for attempted assassination.  A smart and charming woman, Moore who knows how to be socially attractive enough to draw in an Oscar-winning Hollywood figure and a successful suburban doctor among her husbands.  With recognizable Southern charm that rests like cake frosting over a heart of ice and an empty hole where her personal character ought to be, she exists from moment to moment as unreliably as the next emerging whim.  

As the facts unfold, Spieler suffers massive self-doubt about her task, but refuses to let go of her pursuit of the truth. Using a fiction-based-on-fact approach allows the film to draw upon the extensive content of Moore’s letters to Spieler, in which Moore never gives an accurate or complete version of anything, and to match up Moore’s manufactured version of history with Spieler’s revealing of the truth.

The story elements range from Moore’s upbringing in a solid southern home with education and music as major elements to her joining with radical elements who tried to bring down the United States government in the 1970’s, including the unindicted co-conspirators in her assassination attempt whose existence was affirmed by the Assistant U.S. Attorney on the case.

In the end, Spieler wins the battle -- as we do through her – giving us a portrait that emerges through the layers of San Francisco fog to reveal a human being unconnected to a sense of consequence for others, a woman who was so far outside the Secret Service profiles that Secret Service protocols changed forever. 

Contact Geri's agent,  Sharlene Martin,  to discuss film opportunities!