These are the scripts I’m willing to put in front of somebody else. They have been submitted, read, recognized, requested, or are moving through outreach now.
The genres move around. The thing I’m usually after does not: put enough pressure on a person that the version of their life they have been surviving inside finally stops working.
Not sure where to begin? Find a script to read.
Featured screenplay · Current priority
Craig comes home certain he is the one his brother’s death damaged most. Then he spends a week with the father, friends and town he left behind and discovers how little he knows about what happened to any of them after he left.
This was Christopher’s MFA thesis screenplay. It has been through festival submissions, outside feedback and years of revision. It is still changing because the movie is finally close enough to matter.
FEATURE · PERIOD COMING-OF-AGE DRAMA / MILITARY DRAMA
Eliot thinks disappearing will keep the Army from owning his life. Then his younger brother dies, and escape starts to look like another form of abandonment.
FEATURE · SUPERNATURAL REVENGE HORROR
Colin has built a decent life over things he refuses to name. The ghost does not need to kill him. It only has to make the life he built impossible to keep.
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FEATURE · SOUTHERN GOTHIC FANTASY / FAMILY DRAMA
A man gets the thing almost everybody who has buried someone has wanted: one more hour. The price is twenty-five years of his own life, and knowing the price does not make him rational.
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FEATURE · NEAR-FUTURE SCIENCE-FICTION DRAMA
The AI works. That is what makes it dangerous. Elliot can keep correcting his dead wife until the version on the screen stops contradicting the marriage he needs to remember.
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FEATURE · SOCIAL THRILLER / DRAMA
They think they have been handed a storefront. What they have actually been handed is the crime — along with a lease, a business plan and no clean way to give any of it back.
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FEATURE · INTIMATE DRAMA / MARRIAGE DRAMA
A marriage can survive grief, money problems, religion, family obligation and a dying dog. The harder question is whether it survives two people protecting each other from the worst true thing.
FEATURE · ENSEMBLE DRAMA / GRIEF DRAMA
Vanessa asks six friends to tell her daughter who her dead father was. The camera stays on long enough to expose a different question: where were all of them while he was dying?
FEATURE · ADULT DRAMA / ANIMAL RESCUE THRILLER
Lazarus was bred for violence and refused the job. Wes has spent years making his own life smaller. Building a refuge forces both of them into a fight neither one was looking for.
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FEATURE · ENSEMBLE DRAMA / DARK COMEDY
Five veterans come to a cabin to clean out a dead friend’s life. The old jokes and roles return immediately. By morning, one of the living men may need the squad more than the man they came to bury.
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FEATURE · CONTEMPORARY SHAKESPEARE ADAPTATION / URBAN DRAMA
Prospero wants one controlled storm to put the block back into the shape he thinks it should have. The people living inside the storm have their own ideas about who gets to stay.
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FEATURE · DRAMEDY / ROMANTIC ANTI-COMEDY
A man spends years believing the wrong guy got the life he deserved. Then the actual movie star comes to town and has the nerve not to be the villain.
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SHORT · APOCALYPTIC DRAMA / TONE POEM
The world is ending. There is nothing left to fix. A dying man walks to his family’s graves anyway because someone, somewhere, might one day need proof that people were here.
SHORT · CHARACTER DRAMA / TWO-HANDER
Two strangers get into a car believing the other one is the problem. Only one of them knows where the ride is supposed to end.
SHORT · BLACK COMEDY / DRAMA
A man schedules the end of his life. Then a tiny dog wrecks the evening badly enough for another choice to exist.
Drafting and development, separate from the finished screenplay slate.
DRAFTING
When a solitary atheist becomes dangerously ill days before Christmas, he must decide whether life’s impermanence makes connection meaningless — or urgent.
This is not a conversion story. Marty does not discover God, receive proof of an afterlife, or learn that Christmas was secretly religious all along. The dramatic argument is almost the opposite: if this life is all there is, wasting the people you love becomes even harder to justify.
DRAFTING
Forty-eight hours before cameras roll on his first feature, Eli discovers a hole in the financing and begins borrowing, lying, forging, stealing and counterfeiting his wife’s consent to keep the movie alive — only to learn that the money cleared exactly as promised.
A contained Atlanta filmmaking movie about a man destroying his movie while trying to save it. The production ultimately survives. Eli is the thing that nearly kills it.
DRAFTING
Before LCD Soundsystem became the coolest band in the room, James Murphy spent years convinced the room had already moved on without him.
New York, 1999–2002. DFA, aging, envy, taste, failure, the Strokes, the Moldy Peaches, Interpol, Karen O, the Rapture, Radio 4, 9/11, and the long runway toward “Losing My Edge.”
This is an unauthorized dramatic writing sample involving real people. No authorization, participation, endorsement, music rights, life rights or attachment by James Murphy, LCD Soundsystem, DFA Records or related parties is implied.
Narrative nonfiction, not part of the screenplay slate.
FIRST READER
A family case became national news. The book is about what the headline left out.