Brilliant software engineer Julia annoys everyone with her compulsive truth-telling. But when her best friend & business partner convinces her to stretch it a little to get their start-up into an accelerator, it becomes clear that her problem isn’t that she’s bad at lying — it’s that it’s what she was born to do.
Julia Levitt and her lawyer Andrew McMann face the FBI, saying they have come to expose fraud at Julia’s tech company. When pressed, Julia confesses that she’s a “humongously fat fucking liar!” and begins to tell her story. Three years earlier: Among start-up founders pitching their ideas to a VC, 23-year-olds Julia and Ellis Townsend stand out — but not in a good way. Julia’s obsession with telling the truth about what their fact-checking program, RealityCheck, can’t do, tanks the meeting. Afterwards, Ellis convinces Julia, against her better judgment, to incorporate AI into their project. At home, Julia works feverishly on both RealityCheck and a freelance job she needs to pay her rent, but her roommate, Andrew, finds her obsessing over strange texts from her estranged parents. Her stress is compounded when she meets with Ellis and their mentor, Dr. Rani Ghosh, and finds out that Rani recommended them for the NYCLaunch Start-Up Accelerator, and their final interview is in four weeks. To make her deadlines, Julia spurns nutrition and sleep in favor of bootleg Adderall, while trying to now ignore threatening letters about eviction — which turn out to be for her parents’ apartment. Then she sees that RealityCheck’s new AI is making up facts instead of checking them, and installs industrial-strength hardware to speed up its development. But this blows out the power for her building, leading to a confrontation with her irate landlord, and a panic attack. With Andrew and her medical resident ex-girlfriend, Danielle, worried about her, Ellis forces Julia to have a real meal courtesy of his parents, Ophelia and Bernard. Julia begs Ellis to wait for the next round of interviews, but he convinces her to just get the app functional, then let him do the talking. At the NYCL Weekend pitch event, things go swimmingly, with Julia able to quickly hide the one RealityCheck fact “hallucination” that occurs. When an axe-grinding NYCL board member hits Ellis with questions he can’t answer, though, Julia is forced to step in — and instead of truth-telling, brilliantly weaves lies so convincingly that the duo gets word within hours that they’ve been accepted. Ellis and Rani are elated, but Julia is so terrified by what she’s done that, after vomiting up her breakfast in the bathroom, she decides to finally confront the source of her problems: her parents, Murray and Vera, and sister Helene, all of whom, it turns out, are pathological liars.
Betsy is an award-winning Brooklyn-based writer and director. Since receiving her MFA from NYU, she has criss-crossed the country producing and directing documentaries (FLAT DADDY, about the impact of the war in Iraq on four military families from around the U.S., premiered at DOC NYC in 2011), produced and directed for hire on projects ranging from pieces for the Working Families Party and the Code Liberation Foundation, to those animal videos for The Dodo, to video letters for Nickelodeonʼs BLUE'S CLUES. Her editing credits include voter education videos in five languages and fund- and awareness-raising work for Family Equality, Brick Education, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and Swing Left. Her most recent doc, THE HALLOWEEN HOUSE (2021), about how one man's (Tony Award-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire) obsession with scariness brings together his diverse neighborhood, will play at Lincoln Center's Diversity and Inclusion Film Festival in November 2024. Her episodic experience comes from 25+ years miking everyone from Carrie Bradshaw to Elmo as a location sound person on shows that include ELEMENTARY, THE SOPRANOS, THE MARVELOUS MRS MAISEL, and POSE. As a screenwriter, she writes thrillers and comedies with a dark side centered around women who won't take no for an answer. Her one-hour thriller pilot PRICELESS was selected in 2023 for the Stowe Narrative Lab & the Writers Lab NYC, and in 2024 for the Nostos Screenwriting retreats and The Women’s List. Her comedy-thriller screenplay SHE DONE IT was a semi-finalist for the 2024 Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship and was selected for the 2024 Cinestory Feature Retreat.
