Drama

The Dodo Man

The saga of the last dodo.

A wine-merchant and amateur ornithologist in Portugal, 1681, abandons his provincial life to charter a voyage to an exotic island in the Indian Ocean where he hopes to save the rare and flightless dodo bird.

Awards: Placed in top 15% of the Nicholl Fellowships 2007 and semi-finalist Writemovies 2009.

Blood Royal

The brief and tragic reign of the last Anglo-Saxon king. Co-written with eminent historian, Mark Ellis.

Harold Godwinson, eldest son of an Anglo-Saxon warlord, is ship-wrecked on a diplomatic mission to rescue hostages from William, a powerful Duke in Northern France. Harold forges an uneasy kinship with William, until he returns to England and accepts the English crown, re-igniting the Norman Duke’s fierce rivalry.

Awards: quarter-finalist WOTS 2007; website here.

Tom, Huck & Twain

Psychological fantasy based on the work of Mark Twain.

One snowy winter in Connecticut, 1910, Sam Clemens -- aka Mark Twain -- wakes on his deathbed to see a balding gent who claims to be the grown-up Tom Sawyer. Tom and the ghost of Twain’s deceased daughter, Susy, warn Twain that characters from his fiction are about to storm the house, wanting revenge against their creator for literary crimes against humanity.

Awards: UCLA Advanced Screenwriting class, tutor Sy Gomberg.

Science fiction

Arby

A home-help robot becomes a runaway rogue.

A mute, mechanical, bipedal worker-bee robot -- a heavily modified RB-40, ‘Arby’ -- works at a desert gas station as a grease monkey, home help, and companion for its owner’s five-year-old daughter. After a freak accident, the robot adapts its owner’s unfinished novel into a bedtime story for the girl.  The novel wins a prize.  The robot and the little girl run away.

Awards: early draft optioned 1990.

Arc of the Phoenix

A long-lost space pilot is catapulted to fame.

Sergeant Virgil Pinback -- aka fuel technician Frank Puge -- returns to Earth, 60 years after the disappearance of his scoutship “Dark Star”. United Planets Space Corps hails Pinback as a hero, despite a case of mistaken identity that landed him on his mission, and they draft him into service on a new and terrifying assignment.

Awards: unofficial sequel to John Carpenter’s 1974 cult film “Dark Star” and, so far, John Carpenter has not sued me.

Hypernauts: Cold Comfort

Space cadets seek refuge on a mysterious ice planet.

I wrote this children’s TV sci-fi episode at the invitation of the series producer. It was an ambitious show, combining live-action with digital environments, and achieved cult status. Unfortunately, they decided they wanted a cheaper monster -- giant heat-seeking worms, not ice crabs -- so that was the end of my involvement. But it was a fun exercise, wrote the whole thing in a week.

Awards: Aired as “Icebound” and earned its writer a 1996 Writers Guild of America award nomination.

The Glitch

An insomniac discovers another dimension.

I’d made 70-something (now 140) short films, but hadn’t made a proper narrative for a while, then this little story leapt into my head -- a twisted little ten-minute Outer Limits -- and, three years later, I managed to shoot it, we got into a dozen film festivals around the world, and had some nice recognition online. Website here.

Awards: Opening film and and best science fiction nominee at DragonCon ’08, finalist at BAFTA/LA Short Film Festival.

Horror

Banshee

Fantasy anthology based on five stories by Ray Bradbury.

In 1990, I wrote to one of my heroes: the great American fantasy author Ray Bradbury. To my surprise, four days later, he wrote back. Attached is our correspondence (here and here) and my proposed treatment for a feature film, based on five classic Bradbury short stories (click the castle), presented in celebration of Mr. Bradbury’s 90th birthday.  R.I.P. Ray.

Awards: A special personalized autograph here.

Wolfsbane

Life lessons from an ancient lycanthrope.

This story idea came to me almost fully-formed in a dream on the eve of attending Dragon•Con Film Festival 2008, perhaps because I was imagining what I’d shoot if someone let me make a low-budget horror flick. As well as the whimsical description above, the story resembles an old Amicus horror classic -- with teeth. Click the wolf to read a little more.

Awards: Winner Script Frenzy 2010 -- which means I completed writing 100 pages in 30 days. The horror... the horror....

Pie in the Sky

Alien: Sentinel

A mission to destroy the alien-infested planet, LV-426, reawakens an ancient sentinel.

I became obsessed with “ALIEN” after sneaking in, underage, to see Ridley Scott’s 1979 film on its U.K. release. I wrote my first sequel story shortly after that. James Cameron blew my idea out of the water with his 1986 follow-up. I tried to forget about the others, which seemed (3) misguided and (4) just all wrong. My more recent treatment (click the egg) inadvertently included a reference to Ridley’s prequel.

Awards: My treatment trailer here.

Indy 4

The famed archeologist-adventurer becomes embroiled in post-WWII witch-hunt for South American Nazis.

This is a synopsis of a treatment that I worked on with a friend, Matt Singer, in 1998. When news broke that a fourth Indy Jones film was really happening, with a screenplay by Frank Darabont, we shelved it. We were thinking along the same lines -- 1950s setting, overtures about Roswell -- but we took ours in a darker direction.

Awards: I lived to tell the tale, and wrote the Cinefex story about Lucasfilm’s real sequel.