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OVERPASS

When a workaholic cosmetic surgeon survives a highway catastrophe thanks to a cement truck driver’s fatal act of kindness, he’s rewarded not with gratitude—but with a dead man in the passenger seat, demanding apologies, confessions, and a crash course in how not to waste a life.

DR. CARL BATES, 42, fixes faces for a living and ignores everything else—marriages, daughters, consequences. Time, to Carl, is a commodity best booked solid.

RAY TUBBS, 36, measures time differently. He works to live, loves his wife TONI and their newborn son TONRAY, and pilots a battered Carney Bros. cement truck through brutal heat and worse safety standards.

Their lives intersect for half a second on the interstate.

When Ray’s tire explodes, he has two choices: obliterate a sleek black Lexus… or roll his truck and die alone. Ray chooses the option that saves a stranger. Carl feels the tremor, calls 9-1-1, and drives on—already late for a nose job.

Ray dies. Carl barely slows down.

Carl’s attorney best friend, STEVE RIDGELY, assures him he did “everything right.” Life continues beautifully—until the next morning, when Carl finds Ray sitting calmly in his passenger seat, looking like death with better posture. Ray, it turns out, is stuck haunting the interstate and can’t move on until Carl delivers a final message to Toni: an apology for leaving that morning without a goodbye kiss. Something Ray never forgot… and Carl has never once said out loud in his own life.

Carl declines. Apologies are not his specialty.

Then Ray explains the truth—that Carl’s lane was his escape, that Ray chose death over inconvenience. The haunting intensifies. The mission becomes mandatory.

What follows is a series of increasingly uncomfortable encounters: a grieving widow who doesn’t believe in ghosts, a dead man with inconvenient secrets, and a cosmetic surgeon learning—much too late—that people are harder to repair than faces. As Carl digs deeper, he discovers Ray wasn’t quite the saint he appeared to be, and that the cement company’s negligence, not fate, may have killed him.

With Ray hovering, Steve lawyering, and Carl’s own life quietly unraveling, the unlikely duo take on Carney Bros., forcing justice out of corporate indifference and into a settlement big enough to make grief blink.

At last, on an overpass suspended between here and elsewhere, Ray gets to apologize in person, Toni gets to believe, and Carl—haunted, humbled, and oddly reborn—faces a future where time is no longer something to outrun… but something to finally show up for.

Some lessons come gently. Others ride shotgun.

Script Excerpt
Written by:
Format:
Screenplay
Budget:
Low
Starring Roles For:
JUDE LAW
IDRIS ELBA
MARK WAHLBERG
In the Vein Of:
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
GHOST
SIXTH SENSE
Posted:
06/07/2021
Updated:
01/21/2026
Author Bio:
Art D'Alessandro co-founded and ran one of the Southeast’s most highly regarded talent schools for over 22 years. His love of movies has led to nearly 50 screenplays bearing his name as writer, including the produced feature films “The Final Season” (1100 screens, Sean Astin, Powers Boothe, et al), "She Drives Me Crazy" (Lifetime, Winner of CTV's Gemini Award for Best TV Movie, Melinda Clarke), "Mayor Cupcake" (Showtime, Lea Thompson, Zoey Deutch, & Judd Nelson), "Letters to God" (900 screens, Ralph Waite), “All Shook Up” (Sarah Chalke & Frank Gorshin) and the award-winning indie thriller “ZZYZX”, starring Kenny Johnson of The Shield and SWAT fame.

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