Screenwriting represents one of the most exciting and successful chapters of my professional life. Over the years, I received a number of rewarding script assignments, worked with producers and production companies, adapted literary and historical material, and saw my words brought to life by accomplished actors. There is something uniquely satisfying about watching Mia Farrow deliver dialogue you wrote.
I also wrote and directed a short film that became an early success in the emerging world of online entertainment. Before YouTube existed, it became the most-viewed short film on AtomFilms, then one of the internet’s leading destinations for short-form film content. At a time when no one was quite sure what online video would become, being part of that pioneering period—and reaching such a large audience—was immensely gratifying.
I continue to write scripts because I love the form. Screenwriting is disciplined, visual, and immediate. It allows me to enter other worlds, hear characters speak, and watch entire films unfold in my imagination. I have seen some very good movies in my head, and I intend to keep writing them.
The following projects represent some of the highlights of my screenwriting career.
Purpose
Purpose was inspired by the life of South African internet pioneer Ronnie Apteker. Ronnie and his partners had an outline and several early drafts, but they did not want to make a film that would be perceived by the international market as strictly “foreign.” I was hired to transform the material into an American story and develop it into a practical, shootable screenplay.
The remarkable story of how Purpose was made—the brief window in which the financing, creative momentum, and determination necessary to produce it all came together—is typical of the movie business. Films often exist only because the right people, resources, and circumstances align at precisely the right moment.
Starring John Light, Jeffrey Donovan, Mia Farrow, and Paul Reiser, Purpose captures the excitement and excess of the early internet era. It is very much the product of a particular time, place, and technological moment, when the possibilities of the internet seemed limitless and immense fortunes appeared capable of materializing overnight. The film aired on Showtime in the United States and received a theatrical release in international markets.
Watch the Purpose trailer.
An early version of the screenplay is also available here: Purpose—Draft 3.0.
Cowboys and Angels
The early internet created a new demand for short-form entertainment, long before YouTube and social media made online video an everyday part of life. My friends and I responded by producing Cowboys and Angels, a short Western that I wrote and directed with an outstanding group of actors and skilled production professionals.
One of my casting choices was Jordan Murphy, who was virtually unknown at the time and went on to build a successful career. Recognizing talent early and then seeing that person succeed is one of the quieter pleasures of working in film.
In February 2000, Cowboys and Angels became the number-one most-viewed short film on AtomFilms, then the premier online platform for short films. Its success placed us at the leading edge of a form of digital distribution that would eventually transform the entire entertainment industry.
Watch Cowboys and Angels.
Far Country
I was retained by Echo Lake Productions to develop screenplays based on literary works in the public domain. My assignment for Far Country was to adapt Thomas Hardy’s classic novel Far from the Madding Crowd and relocate the story to the American West.
Hardy’s novel follows Bathsheba Everdene, a young woman who unexpectedly inherits a sheep farm despite knowing relatively little about its operation. Gabriel Oak, an experienced farmer who loves her, becomes her employee and adviser after losing his own property and social standing. The story is shaped by pride, class, romantic misjudgment, economic dependence, and the consequences of Bathsheba’s choices.
Adapting the novel required far more than simply changing the location. I translated the agricultural world of sheep farming in rural Wessex into the cattle culture of the American West. I also had to convert the rigid class distinctions of Victorian England into the American divisions between landowners, business owners, workers, and employees. The goal was to preserve Hardy’s emotional and moral architecture while allowing the story to live naturally in a distinctly American setting.
The screenplay was optioned several times, which is an achievement in itself, but it could never entirely escape the industry’s resistance to Westerns. At the time, the genre was widely considered commercially unviable unless one of a very small number of major stars agreed to lead the project. Because the central character was a woman, the film also lacked the sort of conventional male star vehicle that financiers expected from a Western.
Although the screenplay was never produced, I remain proud of the adaptation. The script stands on its own as a serious reinterpretation of a great novel and as a fully realized American story.
Far from the Madding Crowd has been adapted for the screen several times. The contrast between the acclaimed 1967 and 2015 versions shows how dramatically the interpretation of Bathsheba changed over time. Hardy’s novel can be severe in its judgment of her choices, and my adaptation retains much of that severity: Bathsheba’s independence is genuine, but so are her pride, errors, and eventual reckoning.
Watch the trailer for the 1967 adaptation.
Watch the trailer for the 2015 adaptation.
Bus Ride to Justice
Fred Gray is one of the most consequential civil-rights attorneys in American history. He represented Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., challenged segregation throughout Alabama, and served as the lead attorney for the men who had been subjected—without informed consent—to the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
I was hired to adapt Gray’s autobiography, Bus Ride to Justice, into a screenplay. As part of that assignment, I spent many hours interviewing him and examining the events that helped launch the modern civil-rights movement.
Those conversations produced an especially important clarification of the familiar Rosa Parks story. Her refusal to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955 was not merely an isolated, spontaneous act by a tired woman. Parks was a trained and committed civil-rights activist, and her arrest became part of a deliberate legal challenge to segregation, with Gray serving as the attorney. That challenge helped ignite the Montgomery Bus Boycott and changed the course of American history. Gray later confirmed this fuller account in updated drafts of his book.
My work on Bus Ride to Justice was completed as a work-for-hire assignment, and Fred Gray retained the rights to the screenplay. To the best of my knowledge, it has not yet been produced. Nevertheless, his life is a remarkable American story, and I remain deeply proud of both the screenplay and my association with the project. I hope it eventually reaches the screen.
A short clip of Fred Gray speaking at the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Center appears below.
My scripts, plus many others, are available on request.
