In God We Trust

"In God We Trust (Everyone Else Needs References)" is a screenplay by Pawan Bhatia that follows Ethan Price, a risk-averse, deeply ordinary accountant working in the basement of a municipal building. His life of processing invoices and rejecting laminator requests is upended when a mailroom flood routes ten thousand letters addressed to God to his desk. Ethan, who narrates with weary, precise humor, initially treats the letters as absurd—until he reads one from a nine-year-old girl named Sophie asking for her lost dog, Rufus, to come home. Acting on impulse, he finds the dog and returns it, and Sophie's mother posts about the "miracle" on social media. What begins as a coincidence spirals into a movement. Ethan starts answering more letters—reconciling feuding neighbors, helping a nervous teenager ask a girl to prom, saving a struggling bakery through overlooked tax deductions—each small act of practical help interpreted by the city as divine intervention. He assembles an unlikely team: Cyrus, his cynical best friend; Penny, an overenthusiastic mailroom clerk; and Dorothy, a retired grandmother with quiet wisdom. As Ethan's reputation grows, so does the pressure. The mayor seeks his endorsement, a televangelist named Pastor Morton denounces him as a fraud, and requests escalate from the mundane to the impossible—ending droughts, healing the sick, saving marriages. The midpoint brings a massive community food drive, where Ethan reframes his role: not performing miracles, but asking people to help each other. But fame breeds complication. A public debate with Pastor Morton ends in humiliation when Ethan admits he is not a miracle worker, prompting the city to turn on him. In the aftermath, isolated and disgraced, he finds clarity through Dorothy's counsel and a letter…