This page is a grab bag of the unused, the malformed, the rejected, the deposed. These are various little items that popped up over the years and for various reasons were discarded. More often than not it's because they were bad or half thought out ideas. But because public space isn't really the most appropriate place to put up my best work (for all sorts of copyright / legal / paranoid reasonings), then these little rejects can hang here for awhile.
Please forgive some of the formatting on these early ones.
1997 - This first one was an assignment - we had to write and storyboard a short film as a requisite for our entry into the London International Film School. I've got the storyboards and will scan them when possible. My friend had given me a book of Russian science fiction from the 60s and my mind wandered... There was this amazing sense of stoic heroism in their genre fiction from the period that flew in the face of the American sense of heroism for an astronaut. Hence...
1997 - The next one was a film I wrote for someone else - our first project in school was a three minute, black and white silent film in 16mm. We all went about writing scripts. I wrote a simplistic little thriller piece about a sniper having to choose between their intended target and a violent scene they accidentally happened to observe. My unit thought it was unfilmable. In the meantime, I'd written a script for a girl who wanted to direct a film involving having crushes - but she couldn't come up with an idea of her own so I churned this out in one night. It ended up being the first film I directed in film school... If you want to talk rejects, let's just say no one will ever, ever, ever get to see that film. I'm still slightly fond of the script.
1997 - This one never got past a few people reading it. A one joke comedy that I threw together just because I got sick of telling the true story. I put it out there in case anybody wanted to do a comedy in our later terms, when we got to make 10 minute color films. I wasn't trying to write a toilet comedy - this was something that happened, and I wrote it as an ode to the friends I had back in the small town I grew up in.
Read The Fishtank And The Boy Who Could Drive
1998 - Angel Falls was actually made. I've just got it here until I get the film encoded and up on the site with its proper pages. This is the later, refined draft. I'll try and find the earlier one. We had to write, direct, and edit a one minute film with no sync sound... My cheat was to have a girl who was psychic. Didn't work. Check out my millennial ennui.
1998 - This was written purely out of spite. Me and buddy in film school were getting very, very tired of seeing subpar efforts at ambiguity. There was this one guy at our school who said his goal in life was to make a film that would make everyone leave the theater. My girlfriend said, "Yeah, well based on his current work he's going to achieve it." Basically - genre, structure, action, humor, and anything resembling a coherent plot were frowned upon in our school. We came up with this as a reaction. We were going to force feed them exactly the opposite of what they were making, in a rather tongue in cheek, extreme way. Then we realized we'd written a ten page set piece and the chances of us making it successfully with our school's equipment and film stock ratio killed it for good. I guess the last, best thing I can say about this piece is that it shows exactly what I was watching as a reaction to all the highfalutin discussions at school... And how when I really want to be, I am the worst dialogue writer in the world.