Screenwriter / writer-director · Atlanta
Different stories.
Same handwriting.
I write movies about people who cannot accept what has already happened to them and make the very human mistake of believing there must still be something they can do about it.
There usually isn’t.
They do it anyway.
These are the scripts I would hand somebody first.
Not because a spreadsheet told me to. They’re the ones where I think I got closest.
Full slateStill carrying guilt over ignoring his suicidal brother’s final calls, a young man hits and abandons another desperate stranger on a rain-soaked road; ten months later, her ghost begins calling, forcing him to choose between the life he rebuilt and the truth buried in the woods.
A contained, performance-led ghost story where haunting is a demand that someone finally stay. The footprint is manageable; the moral pressure is not.
A punk Army Reservist ordered to deploy to Iraq seeks guidance from his active-duty younger brother; when the brother is killed in action, he prepares to disappear under a fake identity but must decide whether refusing the war means abandoning everyone who still loves him.
An Iraq War movie beginning with a punk kid who believed the Guard was a loophole. It lives in the ugly space between recruiting-poster duty and romanticized desertion.
A broke Atlanta couple take over a murdered Black hardware owner’s storefront to launch a vintage shop, then uncover a gentrification scheme linking their benefactor to the killing — and turn their business into a public trap before the town erases them too.
The dream storefront is also the crime scene. An Atlanta social thriller where building the business, exposing the scheme and becoming its next target are the same action.
When Glen Powell comes to his Missouri hometown to shoot a movie and starts dating the woman he has loved since high school, a stalled factory worker and failed screenwriter launches one last pathetic campaign to win her — only to discover the movie he needs to rewrite is his own life.
A lonely repairman discovers a door where the dead can be reclaimed at the cost of twenty-five living years per hour; after bringing four family members back, he spends a lifetime trying to defeat the one loss the bargain cannot undo.
The rule fits in one sentence and generates a lifetime of consequences. Every trip through the door succeeds, turning wish fulfillment into the engine of the tragedy.
When her husband’s estranged father dies, a Korean-American psychologist tries to keep her depression-prone spouse connected to life as funeral debt, a faith-based inheritance ultimatum, and their elderly dog’s medical crisis turn one loss into a test of how much grief a marriage can carry.
The depressed husband is not the center of gravity. The wife everyone assumes can keep him alive is. It is a marriage drama about the cost of making one person the perimeter around another.
The voice
Somebody loses a person, a marriage, a place, a future, a version of himself. Then, rather than accept it like a well-adjusted adult, he starts fucking with the problem.
Sometimes that produces a ghost. Sometimes an AI wife. Sometimes a door to the dead. Sometimes it’s just two people in an apartment doing funeral math because saying what they’re actually afraid of would be impolite.
I move around genres because I get bored.
The damage appears to have range.
AboutCURRENTLY DEVELOPING
These are the things that have not become finished scripts yet. Some are outlines. Some are research. Some are ideas I am still trying to break before I spend six months writing them.
See everything in development →A Christmas Carol for somebody who thinks A Christmas Carol is bullshit.
A filmmaker turns a financing delay into a thirty-six-hour disaster trying to save a movie that was never actually in danger.
James Murphy before LCD Soundsystem worked, when taste, envy and getting older were still doing most of the talking.
I miss movies where the poster basically told you the whole fucking movie.
My family became a national legal story. The book is about everything that happened while everybody else was arguing about the headline.
SELF DEVELOPMENT / LIFE 401
I saw myself in a stadium bathroom mirror and realized I had become passive in more ways than I cared to admit.
Naturally, I responded by making a syllabus.
Open projectSelected Journal
My dad had a pillow. It’s mine now.
Growing up, I thought acceptance was one of the highest things you could earn.
There are two things I want to do with my life as a writer.
The first movie that made me want to make movies was not the kind of movie filmmakers usually cite when they are trying to sound impressive.
Some scripts have done well in rooms I was not in.
In development / short film
A depressed Atlanta rideshare driver accepts a lucrative late-night fare into rural Georgia. When the signal dies and he realizes his passenger intends to die at the destination, keeping the stranger alive means admitting that he needs help too.
Want to read something, make something, hire me, interview me, or tell me exactly where I got something wrong?
