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In 3 DAYS, three women friends wake up in their tent on a camping trip to a noise outside. They tease each other, tamp down and rationalize their fears, and excuse away their instincts for an encroaching threat. Once it can no longer be denied that they are in danger, we realize, horribly, that we have been experiencing the fear of one woman, alone, imagining the voices of her friends to keep her feeling safe and brave, but that love is not enough to keep the man outside at bay.

In media culture, this script is a dissection of a growing conversation about the "DEAD GIRL SHOW," or the pop culture theme that we've come to expect from our hunger for murder and true crime. Most of these stories originate from the bodies of dead young women, whose own fear, independence or experience is never explored, but whose injury, assault or death is is engine for someone else's experience or fulfillment, usually men's. I love many of these shows, but from Twin Peaks, to Serial, to True Detective, to Law & Order, there is a long obsession with cruelty or harm inflicted on women's bodies and the absence of women's voices in the story that ensues, and 3 DAYS is an examination of one woman's fear, love, independence and surrealist coping in the lead up to her unwilling participation in her own doom. This is a also short film script about the growing fear and danger of being a woman alone, expressing freedom through travel and adventure. As women have become more independent, it has led to an uptick of travel, athleticism, and curiosity that has led women on their own paths, but unfortunately the spirit of the world is humming with violent toxicity and we hear stories all the time of women killed on vacation, hikes, or just out running the roads of their home towns. If this script can bring one enlightening perspective to the challenges women face in being the agents of their own unharmed autonomy, it will have succeeded.

Julie Sharbutt
Creator
Julie is a Genre and Comedy filmmaker and humor writer from New York now based in LA. Her 2023 short film SCAM has screened at RiverRun, Fantaspoa, Bucheon Fantastic, LA Shorts, Cannes Film Festival American Pavilion Emerging Filmmaker Showcase and more, and won Best Short Fiction Film at the Nevada Women’s Film Festival. Her script BOTTLECAP was optioned in early 2023 and HALLOWEEN PARADE in 2022. In 2021 she co-wrote the short film CUPIDS which premiered at Tribeca and was nominated for a 2022 NAACP Image Award. Other recent works include her feature screenplays EXCELLENT FANCY (2023 Writers Lab Finalist, 2022 WScripted Cannes Screenplay List, 2022 Stowe Story Labs Finalist), GHOSTIES (2021 Nantucket Film Festival Finalist), RETREAT (2022 FilmQuest Finalist), as well as her pilots SALVAGED (2022 Broad Humor Film Festival Best Pilot), THE SKID (2021 ScreenCraft Drama Finalist), SECRETARY OF ARTS, PLAYERS and others. Her 2019 short film 3 DAYS screened at Fantastic Fest and is now on ALTER. Her 2015 dark comedy feature MOVED is on Amazon. Julie is a 2018 Warner Bros Discovery OneFifty New Storytellers alumni, where she developed her feature comedy screenplay COOL NEW TOWN as an episodic series. Prior to filmmaking she was a TV, film and theater actor in New York, and performed improv at UCB and The PIT. Her humor writing can be seen in The New Yorker and McSweeneys. MFA in Acting from NYU, BA from Vanderbilt, member of Film Fatales, WIF, and AWD. She loves hiking, volunteering, and ghost stories.

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