Screenwriter
Feature Film · Television
Complex characters. Questionable choices. Always a takeaway.
Selected Projects
RANCHO MIRAGE
Neo-Noir Thriller
After losing her family to corruption following a deadly earthquake, a Haitian immigrant engineers an elaborate reckoning in Rancho Mirage, taking revenge on its robber barons while staying one step ahead of a dogged detective.
DARK MOTHER
Psychological Thriller
A desperate woman's quest for a child through surrogacy spirals into paranoia and madness when her seemingly perfect surrogate harbors dark secrets and a hidden agenda.
VAMPIRE TRUCKERS
Horror Comedy
After a trucker is found drained of blood at a lonely desert rest stop, a hard-driving rig jockey, his truck-stop girlfriend, and a washed-up preacher uncover a vampire preying on America’s highways.
A Life in Stories
I've been telling stories for most of my life, although I didn't always know that's what I was doing. I've played in bands, gone to film school, written for television, developed other people's projects, produced movies—and discovered that real life routinely comes up with things a screenwriter would be told are implausible. Fortunately, almost everything eventually becomes material. Here are three stories I couldn’t make up.
On one of my films, a marquee actor playing the villain arrived on set having spent months perfecting a Yiddish accent that made absolutely no sense for the character, which was an alien. It was too late to recast, so we made all his dialogue telepathic, dubbed in an insect-like chirp and subtitled everything he said. Reviewers later lamented that he was “under-used.”
VERKLEMPT TELEPATHIC ALIEN
I once had a general meeting with a Hollywood executive who clearly had better things to do. The more I spoke, the more nervous I became. Eventually I rose to leave, reached across his desk to drop off my business card—and knocked over a styrofoam cup full of water, which spread slowly across all his papers. He looked at me. I looked at him. I turned and left without another word.
WORST MEETING EVER?
I was recently on a consultation call about Time Tourists, a comedy about a family visiting our time from the distant future. One conceit of the sci-fi story is that humans had continued to evolve and therefore no longer had hair. The consultant shared that she had taken an inclusion course in college and warned me that my script might offend a certain group. “Who?” I asked. “Bald people,” she replied.
OFFENDING THE CHROME-DOMED