Breakout

Project Overview

For nine summers at Stone Hill, a Jewish sleepaway camp in the Pennsylvania woods, golden boy NOAH HERMAN and fiercely competitive HALLIE GLICK were inseparable. Their last summer together, they’re named co-captains of the Olympics, the camp’s legendary color war: five days of chaos, rivalry and tradition that end with the winning captains ringing the old brass bell on the hill. Somewhere between the events, they finally fall for each other.

But Noah is secretly coming apart. His father is under investigation for embezzlement, and Noah is getting through the summer on pills he smuggled into camp. When Hallie catches him with her best friend, she takes the stage at the closing ceremony and exposes everything in front of five hundred people. Their team wins. Noah is suspended. Hallie never comes back. The bell goes unrung.

Five years later, their best friends SARAH and MIKE bring the old crew back to Stone Hill for a joint bachelor and bachelorette weekend. Sarah is quietly scheming to put Noah and Hallie back together. She doesn’t know that Noah’s father is up for parole that same weekend, or that the camp director who walked Noah off the grounds has left him a note: I owe you a conversation. Before you leave Sunday. Sarah has a secret of her own, too: she’s pregnant, and Mike doesn’t know.

A scavenger hunt, a beer-soaked three-legged race and old grudges pull Noah and Hallie closer, until one night everything detonates. Noah calls Hallie out in front of everyone, and she lashes back by spilling Sarah’s pregnancy in front of Mike. She has done to her best friend exactly what she once did to him. On the hilltop where they used to sit, Noah and Hallie finally say the things they’ve each owed the other for five years, and both learn that summer was never what they thought it was.

WHY BREAKOUT?

• Made for streaming. A dual-timeline mystery built to keep viewers watching to the end, a premise that grabs from a single thumbnail, and a built-in audience of camp alumni and their families who share it with each other.

• A world with a proven appetite. Streamers have already shown the demand for Jewish stories with Nobody Wants This and You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah. Jewish sleepaway camp is a rite of passage for generations of families, and it has never been the center of a film like this.

•. Built-in spectacle. Color war events, a midnight “breakout” with fireworks, a helicopter and skywriting give it big, trailer-ready moments on a contained budget.

•. Contained and producible. One primary location, an ensemble of young adult roles, and a story that plays across a single summer and a single weekend.