Short Story Turns on Self
Future Intense
Screenplays
Original Ideas
A Guide for the Easily Confused
Practice to Preceive
Remakes
The Prisoner
The Exterminating Angel
Teleplays
The Love Box, episode 1: "Family Values"
The Love Box, episode 2: "The Family Way"
A family sitcom about the sex industry.
Forever Live and Die, episode 2: "Things Lost"
Forever Live and Die, episode 5: "Where There's Life..."
Not your parents' vampire series.
Spec Scripts
Strictly speaking, anything you write without a contract is a spec script (which would pretty much cover everything I have written). However, I use the term here to refer to scripts I have written for existing television shows or otherwise using pre-existing material as their basis.
Sylvia: "The Secret Life Of..."
I love a writing challenge. I love Nicole Hollander's comic strip Sylvia. It was only a matter of time before the former led to my adapting the latter.
Unlike many comics, Sylvia doesn't contain anything approaching an ongoing storyline. There are a variety of characters and their unique situations, through which Hollander makes witty observations on the politics and social mores of the day. This was the challenge: how to develop a narrative out of material which didn't didn't originally contain a narrative. My answer was to create a "Walter Mitty" type of story: we follow Sylvia as she does some mundane task (in this pilot episode, it's going to the store to buy salsa); the humour develops in the actions of the characters around her (and, to a lesser extent, as she goes about her work). I don't know if it works, or if it could be sustained for an entire season or more, but it was a lot of fun to write.
I like to think Hollander would have enjoyed it.
Passion Cove: "Restless Spirits"
Passion Cove is a T&A show. You can tell any story you want as long as it has the following elements: 1) it takes place in one of the bungalows in Passion Cove; Samantha, the owner (administrator?) of Passion Cove appears at least once to call the guests to see if everything is going well, and; 3) the episode features attractive young men and women who must get naked and get it on at least three times per episode. I had seen a couple of episodes and, as sometimes happens with me, although I wasn't looking to write for the show I got an idea that I liked and, suffused with a feverish creativity, wrote a script over a weekend.
I found it interesting to write to the specifications of this show. Alas, while I have managed to incorporate the three main elements, I have written a script that likely wouldn't have been accepted for production if the show was still being produced. For one thing, the main characters are an elderly couple; to my knowledge, the series has not only never dealt with the sexuality of the elderly, but has never actually featured any old characters. For another, the prevailing emotion of my script is melancholy, not exactly a turn-on. For another, the ending is ambiguous, open to a certain amount of interpretation, and I don't recall any ambiguity in any of the episodes I saw. For another, people talk over the sex scenes in my script -- again, not exactly hot date material.
The reason to write spec scripts is to show that you can work with other people's concepts, since few writers will be fortunate enough to create their own shows. I have mixed feelings about this script. On the one hand, the sexual element is overdetermined, allowing us to get to know the characters only superficially outside of their sexuality -- a hazard for this type of show. On the other hand, it is complex and, I hope, emotionally affecting. Although I do ultimately like it, I suspect it wouldn't pass muster as an effective spec script.
The Simpsons: "Eek! and Ye Shall Find"
I love cartoons because they give a writer the freedom to truly recreate the world in a comic image, to bend, fold, mutilate and otherwise shape it in funny ways (unlike live action, where there has to be some grounding, however tenuous, in reality). This script has the hallmarks of a vintage Simpsons episode, although it was written after the show dropped some of the features reproduced in the script (especially the clever film and TV references, which I used to love). This was just a lot of fun to write, and is probably a better example of how I can work within the parameters of a show created by others.
Interactive Fiction
Close Encounters of the Nerd Kind