Michael Richards
RichardsMA@me.com
With a PhD in Political Theory, Michael is drawn to stories that explore power, injustice, and the tension between individuals and society. His work blends sharp analysis with compelling narratives, tackling themes of corruption, survival, and moral ambiguity.
Trade Secrets
After spectacularly saving his cousin’s oil empire, an ambitious executive discovers his success only made him a more convincing fall guy.
Sample Script – Coverage (Recommend) – Pitch Deck
A corporate thriller about the price of believing in a rigged game.
When the 2008 financial crisis destroys his family, thirteen-year-old Justin Waverly watches Wall Street executives celebrate taxpayer bailouts with million-dollar bonuses. By 2020, he’s become everything he once despised—a ruthless oil executive who views human cost as just another line item.
As COVID crashes energy markets, Justin races to save his cousin Reese’s oil empire from a predatory hedge fund attack. His brilliant defense not only rescues the company but proves his worth as the perfect corporate warrior. There’s just one problem: every decision that demonstrates his loyalty creates evidence of his crimes.
While Justin believes he’s climbing the ladder of success, Reese is positioning him as the perfect fall guy for decades of environmental damage. His expertise becomes his liability. His family connections become his chains. His greatest triumph becomes the blueprint for his destruction.
In a world where everything is transactional, Justin learns the hardest lesson of all: when everyone is out for themselves, even family has a price.
Set against the real backdrop of oil prices crashing into negative territory during the pandemic, Well of Deceit explores how pure self-interest ultimately strangles its most faithful believers.
- Finalist, Big Apple Film Festival Screenplay Contest, 2025
- Semifinalist, StoryPros International Screenplay Contest, 2024
Burn Rate
A brilliant financial analyst goes on the run after being framed for her husband’s murder, uncovering a dark crypto fraud that connects Wall Street power players to private security contractors—and forces her to decide what justice really costs.
Sample Script – BlackList Link
BURN RATE is an action-thriller about Vera Glean, a forensic analyst who uncovers irregularities in a crypto exchange backed by billion-dollar funds. Just as she closes in, her husband is murdered and Vera is framed for the crime. Imprisoned at Rikers and presumed guilty, she escapes during a violent prison break—only to discover that her investigation may have triggered a cover-up at the highest levels of finance, technology, and law enforcement.
As she’s hunted by a relentless federal agent, Vera races to expose a conspiracy involving synthetic funds, falsified ledgers, and offshore laundering schemes—while reckoning with the personal cost of her pursuit. Along the way, she forges uneasy alliances, uncovers the truth behind her husband’s death, and puts everything on the line to reveal what really happened.
A grounded thriller in the vein of Michael Clayton and The Fugitive, Burn Rate fuses white-collar crime with prison drama and institutional critique. It’s a story about truth in an age of manufactured realities—and what justice means when the system is designed to erase it.
A “captivating and prescient crime thriller that has a decent shot at getting made.” –Blacklist Review
Dark Orbit
When a Stanford researcher and a Taiwanese-American cybersecurity expert uncover a covert space weapons program behind mysterious infrastructure failures, they must defy their governments and expose the truth at the UN—before orbiting nuclear platforms ignite World War III.
DARK ORBIT is a geopolitical sci-fi thriller about Maya Rhee, a Stanford researcher, and Alex Chen, a Taiwanese-American cybersecurity expert, who uncover signs of a covert space-based weapons program after a satellite disrupts civilian infrastructure across Taiwan. When a kinetic strike kills Chen’s brother and the U.S. begins deploying its own orbital arsenal, the two must confront the terrifying reality: both China and the U.S. are preparing for war in space—with no public oversight and no time for diplomacy.
As institutional allies turn against them, Maya and Chen go rogue, racing to expose the truth before escalation becomes irreversible. With the help of a dissident analyst and a rapidly assembled resistance network, they infiltrate the UN General Assembly to reveal the covert arms race unfolding above Earth.
A high-stakes thriller in the spirit of The Hunt for Red October and Andor, Dark Orbit fuses near-future geopolitics with real-world satellite warfare doctrine. It’s a story about secrecy, deterrence, and what it means to resist when truth itself is classified.
Street Smart
Two Jersey brothers hack together a trading system that threatens Wall Street’s monopoly on power, unleashing a battle between DIY disruptors and financial giants desperate to maintain control.
A David vs. Goliath story set in the wild frontier of 1990s Wall Street.
Two brothers from working-class Hoboken respond differently to their father’s suicide after losing everything in the stock market. Antony sees the world as winners and losers—and refuses to end up like his dad. Christopher, a teenage computer whiz, retreats into hacking and bootlegging, convinced the system is rigged.
When Christopher cracks the code to digital stock trading, these Jersey kids suddenly find themselves trading faster than Wall Street’s elite—and eating their lunch. But the old guard doesn’t give up power easily.
As institutional forces mobilize to crush them, the brothers must choose: take the money and join the establishment, or fight to democratize a system designed to keep people like them out. In building something bigger than themselves, they discover that the real victory isn’t beating their father’s fate—it’s refusing to face it alone.
- Quarterfinalist, Atlanta Film Festival Screenplay Competition, 2025
Capitol Crimes
A politician fighting to keep guns off the streets secretly becomes an international arms trafficker.
In the shadows of political ambition, a New York State Senator burdened by mounting campaign debt crosses a moral threshold — exchanging favors for dark money and aligning with a Chinese-American crime syndicate. As he climbs the ladder of power, he descends into a criminal underworld of arms deals, FBI stings, and betrayals.
“Capitol Crimes” is a gripping political thriller that exposes how the hunger for influence can turn public service into organized crime — all under the gold dome of the statehouse.
Inspired by a 2014 FBI investigation into political corruption in California.
Selene
The first Moon-born human, unable to survive Earth’s pathogens, must decide whether to stay in lunar exile or risk a fatal journey to give her child a future on Earth.
Sample Script – Treatment – Astropolitics: A Political Theory for Space
In a future where the first human born on the Moon has never stepped on Earth, a political crisis erupts when the U.S. government privatizes the struggling lunar colony.
As tensions rise between independence-minded settlers and corporate interests, Selene—a scientist and symbol of the colony’s identity—discovers she’s pregnant. Her child may survive on Earth, but she will not.
Faced with a miraculous bacterial discovery and a collapsing political order, she must decide: cling to the only home she’s ever known, or sacrifice everything to give her child a chance at real freedom.
IBIZA (A Movie)
On the final weekend of summer 2007, four British teens land in Ibiza chasing one unforgettable night—but when their plan to see Tiësto at the island’s most exclusive club falls apart, their wild mission to get inside becomes a reckoning with identity, desire, and the lives they’ve been avoiding.
It’s the summer after sixth form, and four British boys—two brothers, a heartbroken romantic, and a self-conscious Welsh outsider—head to Ibiza for one last blowout before adulthood sets in. They’ve got wristbands to see Tiësto at Pacha, the hottest club on the island, on the final Saturday night of August. But when a petty run-in with an ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend (a Pacha manager) gets them blacklisted, they’re left stranded outside the velvet rope.
What follows is The Inbetweeners meets Call Me by Your Name meets Ocean’s Eleven: a chaotic, emotional, and hilarious odyssey as they try—and fail repeatedly—to get into the club. But along the way, each of them confronts something deeper: repressed sexuality, crushing parental expectations, cultural alienation, and the painful realization that not everything can be fixed with one perfect night.
By sunrise, they may not all make it into the club, but they will have found something far more important: themselves.
When They Are Right
In the chaos between World Wars, an innovative economist battles orthodoxy and establishment thinking to prevent economic disaster, while learning that the true value of money lies not in gold, but in human trust and potential.
Michael Richards 