A young girl in a conservative Christian boarding school grows tired of the monotony and abuse she suffers on a daily basis and begins planning something truly shocking.
Coup High Online
A young girl in a conservative Christian boarding school grows tired of the monotony and abuse she suffers on a daily basis and begins planning something truly shocking.
The current script is actually a slight period piece, the story starts out in 2005 with the titular rebellion happening in 2006. This is because Carrozza came up with the idea and began writing the story in summer of 2005. However, Carrozza is reconsidering this thanks to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and for its TV mini-series format may well "Trump it up" and make it set in a dystopian near-future where the Trump administration refused to give up its power.
Originally the film was simply to have been called Coup D'Etat, but due to Carrozza realizing that several films, both past and upcoming, have similar titles. He then added a "Or the Rebellion of Young Ellen" subtitle to differentiate it but after deciding to revise the project into a TV mini-series decided on the catchier and less convoluted "Coup High".
The character of Rufus the Player was originally invented for another script Carrozza started writing and then scrapped. Carrozza liked the character so much that he decided to work him into this film, making him the means in which Ellen and her friends more realistically get their weapons.
Writer/director J.L. Carrozza calls this story his "ultimate exploration of the darker side of the human condition". The film's themes are of the choice between violence and pacifism and in a sort of microcosmic way explores how revolutions tend to fail through human frailty. A big influence on some of the film's plot beats and themes was the Japanese film _The Man Who Stole the Sun (1980)_.
Ellen and the other students' climactic resistance against the police and S.W.A.T. teams was inspired by the Japanese defense of Okinawa at the Battle of Okinawa in World War II. Like in the battle, there are three factions: Ellen and the rebellion's leadership who wants to fight to the death, the innocent students caught in the crossfire who just want to surrender and law enforcement. Like the Okinawans themselves, a number of students, rather than be tortured and brutalized by the police, choose to commit suicide. The movie Gekido no showashi: Okinawa kessen (1971) is a favorite film of J.L. Carrozza's.
Around the time he was working on his debut short Little Red Riding Hood (2009), J.L. Carrozza wrote some of an early draft that was very different from the final version. Some of the elements deleted or changed include the original draft having a narration track by Ellen over it which Carrozza deleted because he felt it played better minus it but may add back into the TV miniseries version in certain contexts. Also Pastor Hill was a Chinese covert named Pastor Yu and Ellen's mother was dead and her father was still alive, a free man and a racist hick (whereas in the new version their roles are largely reversed). The idea of Ellen's father being a revolutionary and his diary spurning her to action was added to the new version, whereas in the old version she just goes postal, more or less. The character of Rufus the Player wasn't in the old version either and Ellen steals a smaller batch of weapons from her father.
Between his project _Alison (2015)_ being less successful than he had hoped, the state of the industry and Trump's election which was unexpected to Carrozza, J.L. Carrozza has reconsidered pitching it as a feature and has decided to rewrite and pitch the project as a TV Mini-series instead so it can be made for cheaper, be longer and allow for more character development as the length of the script was an obstacle to having it made as a movie. Carrozza expects it to run five or six 50-60 minute episodes.