Screenplays

The following screenplays are available for review by any producer, director, actor, or enterprising filmmaker:

 Comedy

Daniel is a dermatologist who treats wealthy dowagers in Orange County and street hookers in San Francisco.  His wife, Alice, is a criminal psychologist who treats patients at San Quentin.  Their marriage is stressed to the breaking point by Daniel’s Uncle Harry who believes all things that don’t function properly should be terminated.  In this case, one of those things happens to be his stroked-out wife, Aunt Dora.  Daniel tries and comically fails to stop Harry, while Alice, as a hostage of an escaped convict, resorts to extreme therapeutic measures to save Daniel from what she sees as pathological dementia that runs in his family.

Richard Pryor renewed his option twice on Harry the Mercy Killer before he stopped making movies.

Comedy

When Julie comes to Opalaske to bury her cranky Aunt Ida, she finds herself caught up in a tug-of-war between deceased bodies and discarded trash vying for real estate. Pulling for each side, assorted members of the living try to out-con each other to make a bundle. Most of them only dig themselves some unexpected graves.  Race relations, environmental justice, land development, and strange burial habits in the rural South all lay about six feet beneath the humor of this outrageous comedy.

This screenplay was offered a Christopher Columbus Society Discovery of the Month Award and was a Fade In semi-finalist.

Action-Adventure/Love Story

Have you heard of “The Donor Plan?”  You know, about all the rich and powerful who are dropping off the organ donor waiting lists?

I know about it.  My screen moniker is Spider-Hanging-by-a-Thread. You’ll probably think I’m paranoid because I know a certain artificially inseminated descendent of Dr. Joseph Mengele is harvesting pre-adolescent organs at a kid’s camp up some backwater of the Amazon.  Yeah, and that broomstick-up-her-butt boss of mine at N.I.H. may be in on it – wiping out all the stats I’ve compiled.  What do I care?  I couldn’t give two armadillo turds if all the street kids in the world donate their lungs.  People ain’t my thing anymore…  What’s that?   You want me to go down there with Miss Broom-butt to find proof?  Well, now we’re really hanging by a thread.

Okay, okay.  I’ll go down to the World Organ Transplant Surgeon and Survivor Conference in Rio with that tight-ass.  That’s where they’re going to try to eradicate all my backups I’ve hidden in cyberspace.  And finally both of us will be fighting for our lives along with abducted street kids at that phony fantasy camp up the Jari River.

In the vein of Romancing the Stone, this screenplay is action-packed and very topical.

 Dead Duck River

Thriller

After failing at everything, as a last resort Mark Selden returns to his childhood Tennessee home with his pregnant wife.  Settling into his strange dead mother’s long vacant cabin in the woods, he takes a job in public relations at his corporate tycoon cousin’s pulp and paper company.  Peopled with environmental activists, mill workers, executive pragmatists, and downstream victims, it isn’t long before Mark’s midlife crisis turns explosive in this battle between profits and pollution.

Resonant of On The Waterfront, this screenplay won Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest Competition.

 The Neighbor Hoods

Thriller

What starts out as a comic clash of mentalities turns hellish when a pacifistic Chiropractor and a megalomaniacal Mafia Capo go head to head in their attempts to learn how to live together on the same suburban cul-de-sac.  A geriatric Don orders the Capo to make nice with his new Chiropractor neighbor.  Without asking, the Capo has his construction company start digging a swimming pool in the Chiropractor’s back yard.  The construction is stopped when Chiropractor refuses the bizarre present.  The Capo’s son is killed in the swimming pool hole when he tries to operate the dormant earth mover.  Blaming the chiropractor, the Capo’s distorted psychology sees the only way to redeem his son’s death is to have the Chiropractor’s son die also.  The pacifistic Chiropractor ultimately finds himself in league with factions of the mafia to save his son and wipe-out the Capo. 

In this screenplay, the Mafioso mentality serves as a timely metaphor for any group of people whose only method of co-existing is to forcefully impose their will on others. Whether they be theocratic, ethnic, or political opponents, revenge seems to be their only option when resistance leads to tragedy.

Psychological Thriller

This reality-shattering thriller is about a lazy and cynical heir of corporate America who becomes consumed by an alter-ego from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The alter-ego seeks redemption for his failure to confront his culture of slavery, and will only release the heir when he takes on today’s cultural equivalent – the crimes of corporate supremacists in his own family.  As if struggling with an increasing psychosis, the heir sees family members, associates, board trustees, and more keep morphing with the fictional characters from the novel to the point where he doesn’t know whether he is real or they are.  In a Groundhog Day variation, he keeps waking on a journey matching past and present until he learns that his own redemption can only come through laying his life on the line against the sins of his heritage.

Located in the mystical environs of New Orleans and upper Louisiana, The Resurrection of Augustine St. Clare could not be timelier.

Action-Adventure

 A woman with extraordinary powers steals an unearthly icon from New York’s Museum of Natural History, which legend says sent conquistadors and Nazis to their death.  Coercing funds from an eccentric Beverly Hills billionaire, she assembles an arrogant team of mercenaries to search for the icon’s source in the deepest heart of the Amazon. These include the curator archeologist from the museum and an exceptionally lithe octogenarian seeking redemption by returning the icon to its holy site.  Drawn on a hair-raising journey down the quickening tributaries of the Amazon, each of these egotists comes face to face with individual personifications of Nature’s judgment for hubris.  In doing so, Nature itself exacts retribution from the likes of man: the mammons, narcissists, nihilists, self-righteous arbiters, power-mongers, and heedless destroyers of Earth’s “Life Force.”

 Won Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest Competition.

 Modoc

Docudrama

Captain Jack’s is one of the most tragic and dramatic tales of the wars against the American Indians.  It’s a story of arrogance, betrayal, confusion, and incomparable idiocy, bordering on slapstick.  A tiny band of friendly, mostly teenage, Indians just can’t accept they aren’t free to roam their native Northern California lands.  The army pursues, the youngest braves retaliate by killing friendly whites, and the most costly American Indian war ever erupts.  In the middle of it all is Captain Jack who talks sense until he’s blue in the face.  Then, against his own better judgment, he commits an unpardonable act (assassinating the only full U.S. general ever killed by Indians) and becomes everybody’s scapegoat.

This historically accurate and instructive screenplay is adaptable for a powerful two-part mini-series.