Popsicle Death - A Short Horror Screenplay

Too much fun. I do love this story. Short screenplay, really.

Popsicle Death

I guess I'm kind of known for my titles. Colorado Lobsters is another. I have some simple ones like my novella Death of heaven is based in part upon, or Andrew and Sarah. But my most notorious title is my medieval surreal tale of horror: "Poor Lord Ritchie's Answer to a Question he Knever Knew on the Knight that the Knight Lost All. [Music: Henry Purcell's music for the Funeral of Queen Mary]"

Now that's a hell of a title. But then, it's a hell of a story that I've expanded forward and back. It's a short story and a short screenplay. Actor Rutger Hauer chose it once as a winner in a short story contest he held. It's also a short screenplay now. I also wrote a prequel to it called, Breaking on Cave Island that was in an anthology. But? I digress...

I worked on a poster for the screenplay of Popsicle Death with Marvin Hayes, a great artist who has done some of my book covers. You can tell his, they're not just all black with a graphic in the center. I had seen another artist's concept and ran with it, solving the longtime problem I'd had about a cover or poster for it.

I originally wrote this short screenplay in a scriptwriting theatre class at Western Washington University in my last and senior year. I was in a class with seven very talented and funny people. At least one of them, Dave Skubinna, is no longer with us.

I was sad to hear that as Dave was always enjoyable company. I remember him taping away on his "notepad" device in class. The only one I'd ever seen and never saw another before I graduated. I'm still in contact with another friend in that class, Mike Rainey.

A few years after I graduated they, along with a few others started the Annex Theatre (originally on Bainbridge Island), still running in Seattle. Their most famous alum perhaps is one of my favorite actors, Paul Giamatti. I went into more detail in a previous blog post in 2011.

I had felt honored to be studying and working with those other students in that class and to be accepted by them. Even though I was older as I'd been in the service before starting college. My university and college years are some of my best memories and that series of classes under Bob Schelonka some of my favorite. Writing in a team environment, producing scripts of all many and short screenplays. It was a kind of magic.

When the idea came up for Popsicle Death, we were each to write a short paragraph and pass it to the one next to you around the table, I got mine from Chris Brooks who was a dancer in the theatre dept. He reminded me of David Bowie in some ways.

I immediately loved what he wrote. I came back to the next class and after reading what I'd come up with, they were all over it. I tried to say it was all Chris but he looked at me surprised and said, "No, I didn't take it where you did. That was all you." Still, the initial idea and I think the name were his.

The story is about a boy who buys a popsicle, goes in to get the money from his widowed mother and gets in trouble. He never returns. The vendor is in dire straights, having a bad time of life. He leaves, goes home and kills himself. The non-payment was his last straw. In retribution, Death Himself comes to reap payment. From the boy. And from there, everything goes to Hell.

I was loving this story idea. And my time working on a team of other creatives. While my girlfriend, whom I lived with, seemed to hate it all. Possibly because I was breaking off from my intense focus in psychology by getting a minor in creative writing through my senior year. We had been up to that point, side by side as psych students and quite well known in the psych department.

Actually, she did kind of start it, as she had taken a class in programming FORTRAN. Maybe there were other issues she had. I never knew. But once I started hanging in the theatre department, around those intensely creative, talented and possibly certifiably insane students, I was taken. Smitten with the creative arts. Always had been really, just never brave enough to invest myself in overt creativity with others. Like in theatre in high school. As my cousin had done. In fact she got a degree in costume design or something and went on to be a costume mistress on a big production in Seattle.

As for programming, I'd first taught myself BASIC the year I met my girlfriend in college (we ended up as lab partners in a chem/physics class my first quarter out of the military one summer, and the rest is history).

Before I got out of the service, I had sold my guns and bought a Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80 (the so-called and notorious, trash80). I taught myself to program in BASIC and wrote my first batch command files and had some fun with it in writing a fake AI.

When I got into that first college class with her, we were tasked with learning the entire periodic table which intimidated me (all of us really). I had an idea. I wrote a couple of programs that taught it to me. It worked. I was the only one in that class to get 100% on the period table test.

After three years of our studying psychology together, a great deal of that under the amazing Dr. Rod Rees, she started programming on the side and I started to hang with theatre types. In high school, I'd always loved hanging around my cousin's theatre friends with her. They were just... fun. We'd had different high schools and though she was a year behind me, she's only three months younger than me. All because MY birthday is near the end of August.

Anyway, I couldn't figure out back when why my girlfriend seemed so negative about my theatre classmates. She was actually kind of rude about it when they visited. We were working on a script and she came in from school one afternoon and she was so dour, they took the hint and left.

Anyway, Popsicle Death.

I think Chris just wrote that Death was a popsicle vendor and something about a kid. I went off the deep end and got very dark and added in his mother and a dead father, an Uncle priest and other surreal elements of horror.

Even though Chris had started it all as a tossed off joke, it turned into not a joke at all but rather... "Mom, help! No, no, you can't! Stop, let her go! Stop, no, no, no..."
"I am Death, little boy, back off!"
"But I didn't mean to it wasn't my fault! HONEST! Please! Don't!"

And the rest, as I'd said...is history.

#screenplay #PopsicleDeath

The Teenage Bodyguard - A True Crime Biopic Review

This is a couple of reviews for my true crime / biopic, The Teenage Bodyguard. I lived this story, I researched this story, I wrote this story. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but not the criminals.

Ruger Blackhawk .357 magnum I carried

I have an alternate title for this story, Slipping "The Enterprise". Because what we were trying to do, was to slip by the Tacoma Mafia family who called themselves, "The Enterprise" and was referred to as such in local and national newspapers all through the 1970s. The question is, could someone like me, at eighteen years of age, protect a murder witness from an organized crime enterprise who was looking for her, and actually live to tell the tale?

Shoulder holster for the magnum

Obviously, I did survive. So the question remains and the intrigue is, who else might have, or didn't survive. And how did this all work out? Because the fun is in the telling of the story of how all of this came to be and how it ended up for everyone involved.

Was a magnum too much against a bunch of guys mostly carrying 38s and 9mm and shotguns? I'd argue, no.

My esteemed self partying at a drive-in theater with the friend in the screenplay the year previous

This is a story that oddly enough, involves and aside from the typical mafia environment and activities, parties, drugs, sex, skydiving, fast cars, flying planes, and... finding dead bodies.

In the end, the Pierce Country government near Tacoma, Washington, had to be changed so another crime or mafia family could not get their hooks so easily into those who were supposed to be involved in crime prevention and prosecution and not criminal support. Here are some photos of the actual things, vehicles, weapons, criminals and weapons involved in the story.

 

--

From BlueCat Screenplay Contest:

The story picks up relatively quickly after the explosion in the Carbone party—leaving Lena a few permanent scars. After witnessing the scenes involving [our protagonist's youth] Air Force background, we realize just what kind of a character he’s raised to be: someone who couldn’t really care about his own safety, but as witnessed with his reaction with Lena’s injury (as well as his eagerness to help Sara much later on), someone that has the capacity to care for others.

But it didn’t just stop there. Even with a skydive malfunction, it seemed like [the protagonist's] own life doesn’t even seem to be worth two dollars and fifty cents, as the repack itself was a bit out of his budget.

All this makes [the protagonist] quite the exciting character to follow given his astounding complexity. His nonchalant approach to life is intoxicating mainly because it’s like watching fire: although dangerous, it’s still alluring. The initial hook of witnessing [the protagonist] potentially murder someone, as well as echoing his words “do it” as he did with his first jump, is very well played out—as it shows parallels between one world and another.

The writer also seems to have done quite the research, and it’s impressive to know that the events are chronologically accurate. I was pleased to find out [the protagonist] actually made it out of everything and even had a family of his own. Given that it was a real story based off real events, I could’ve never predicted that he’d make it to that kind of life.

Overall, The Teenage Bodyguard is one heck of a life story that I’m surprised isn’t on the big screens already—a well-done thriller that knows how to lure you into a story about two unlikely people, the protagonist and Sara, and how they took a turn for the unexpected.

John Joseph "Handsome Johnny" Carbone, head of the Tacoma Carbone crime family

From The Blacklist Coverage:

The premise of a coming of age crime drama, where an eighteen-year-old protects a witness fleeing the mafia, could have solid commercial appeal, particularly as it is based on a true story. The narrative's period setting is rendered with a strong degree of authenticity and a specificity, through details like that of the commune, that makes the film's backdrop of the Pacific Northwest feel grittily alive and real.

[The hero] is an intriguing teenage protagonist, who is well-characterized, particularly on a physical level. His courage in protecting Sara from the Tacoma mafia is credibly rendered. The dialogue is well characterized as each member of the core cast possesses a clear, identifiable voice. The down ending, featuring the harrowing final scene of Sara in the mafia car, where she "closes her eyes, puts head back and hears sounds of children happily playing baseball.", right as the hitman next to her takes out a garrote, is chilling, surprising (in a good way), and sure to have a powerful effect on audiences.

Prospects

THE TEENAGE BODYGUARD has a viable premise and core concept that could have commercial potential, likely in the indie space and is overall a solidly written script.

--

Every industry type who has read this screenplay so far has really liked it.

I am obviously moving forward on this project.



#producers #studios #screenplay #biopic #truecrime

Writing the True Crime Biopic, The Teenage Bodyguard

Yesterday afternoon I should have had my consult with screenplay and overall film creative consultant Jen Grisanti. More on that below. So I thought I should blog about what's going on with my current primary project.

Lately, I've had a few projects, one being my short little 8 minute macabre horror film, The Rapping (an homage to Edgar Allen Poe and sorry, not Rap music). Here's the trailer as I've submitted it to several film festivals.

I have also produced a shorter short titled, Below in the Dark.

Back to the bigger and cooler project. In 1974 something very unique happened to me. I was eighteen years old at the time. It took place during a single week in my hometown of Tacoma, Washington. A week I never talked about to anyone. That next year I traveled some, my younger brother died, I went into the Air Force, through basic training (always fun stuff), technical school, and got married.

All in that next year of 1975. And then I forgot all about that week.

Until about five years ago when I was looking for a personal story to base a new screenplay on. In running through my mental catalog of things I could draw upon, I came up with several. Stories about my childhood, that week in 1974, my years in the USAF, various orientations on my life related to subcultures, my years during college and for a while working at Tower Records at three stores (Posters, Records and what were the new Video stores), in two different cities and, a few other stories.

I easily settled on that week in 1974 as the most marketable.

Obviously. I needed a working title so I called it Teenage Bodyguard (later, The Teenage Bodyguard, that "The" has an important reason as it's very specific). I thought about it, did some brief research on it and realized, I had something. So I spent some months researching it in depth. It started with a murder, the local mafia and a witness who was female. The more I researched, the more I uncovered, the more fascinating the story became and t more I realized I actually had some connections, more than the one I thought I had.

I realized a couple of my "friends" especially one in particular whom I had known for years since I was in about tenth grade, sort of threw me under the bus to save himself. Now I haven't spoken to him since I started doing this research, so I haven't heard his side of this story. But at this point, it's pretty damning.

This whole thing started with giving a woman a lift to a new home, and a newspaper clipping.

This is a copy of the actual article she handed me that day.

The story is a simple one: damsel in distress asks for help and gets it.

She contended that the mafia types were after her for having been there and witnessed the murder. A murder which she said was of one of their own by one of their own. It was to this day labeled a murder by unknown suspect. She was adamant that it was a murder her bosses committed and they wanted to "talk" to her about it. She was pretty sure if that happened, she would never do anything else ever again. And would I protect her for a week until she could escape and leave town, forever, for her hometown in another state far away.

I agreed. The rest is history and now, a feature film screenplay. Which by all accounts to date is a very good and timely story that needs to be on the big screen. Well? Cool. Right?

This wasn't an easy story to write or an easy screenplay to produce.

So for a while, I put the story away. There were other more immediate things to work on. A year or so later I get a request to contact a producer in London about an adaptation I did for an author on her book. She said it was optioned once and expired and now there was renewed interest. So we converse via email this producer and me. I send him a copy of the screenplay adaptation, a spy romance titled, "Sealed in Lies", by Kelly Abell.

Then the producer asked if I had any other projects of my own. So I make a list of written screenplays and ones I was considering writing. He quickly zeroed right into the Teenage Bodyguard screenplay concept. He said he liked the title and the idea and if I ever write it to please think of him first.

I take that as a green light (as any screenwriter should). I spend the next nineteen days writing it and then sent it to him. He was surprised by the speed at which I got him a copy of a previously unwritten screenplay and sent it on to his readers. He now had two of my screenplays. And I never heard from him again. So, I tucked the situation under my arm and moved on with other things.

The upside in that? I had a new screenplay that I had been too intimidated before to write. Having a work you can work on is always better than one that doesn't exist and may never get written in the first place. Once you have a finished draft it is far easier to work it and it almost has to get better.

I put it away, again. In part because I was bummed at the prospects of having a producer with TWO of my screenplays and then, nothing came of it. Same old story for any kind of a writer really. I'd been through things like that before and more than once.

Then one day I took up the screenplay again. I sent it to a screenplay contest and got notes back on it. I had to pay extra for notes but I researched the contests and found one that was considered good and got the notes back. They were good notes. I got notes from another contest and they had good notes and other considerations.

I took the notes and rewrote the screenplay while doing more research on it and finding more. I contacted the Pierce County Sheriff's office and had them search for the murder report. They couldn't find it. Which fits how corrupt that era was in that area back in the 70s.

I sent the screenplay to another contest and updated it appropriately. Then I found The Blacklist. I spent $75 for coverage and did a new draft and posted it. Then I got another coverage again, this time two. I fixed the issues and reposted it. It sat there for a while.

Then one day I met someone who had a friend in the industry. We were able to get him to read the latest version of my screenplay. He liked it! Although he was an entertainment attorney with long standing in Hollywood, he said now was the time to hit with this kind of screenplay but he wasn't the one to get me there.

I realized after years of not spending literally thousands on one screenplay, as some have done and some have done getting nowhere, it was time to spend some money and get to the next level.

That was when I contacted Jen Grisanti. She isn't cheap, but there are others out there costing a lot more who just aren't worth it. Jen is. I have a meeting on Zoom with her tomorrow but just her screenplay notes alone were worth a bundle.

BLACKLIST's own coverage said, "pursue to production." BlueCat contest: "Why this isn't on screen yet!" Well-known entertainment attorney said: "It's the perfect time for this story." Sex, drugs & rock-n-roll meet sex, drugs & mayhem. For a week in 1974, a naive but well trained & savvy young man is asked by a more experienced woman to protect her for a week from local Mafia-type crime family for witnessing their murder. of one of their own.

And here we are today. I have a screenplay that is almost polished enough and ready to go. I have the rights to the screenplay, the story no one else knows about and my own story.

I'm ready to go.

Almost....