The Wounding

The plan with this feature-length screenplay was to take the thriller genre and turn it upside down.  The protagonist's triumph is at the beginning of the film with the reasons why he is undertaking his quest explained in reverse order back to the trigger point for the whole story.  The protagonist is also an unapologetic killer that you cheer for simply because what you are seeing is a man motivated by love: love for his brother and love for the woman he left behind five years before.  In effect, The Wounding, is also a romance.

The story begins in the highlands of Scotland.  Michael, a former soldier, has been living in self-imposed exile for 5 years, well away from his erstwhile employer, Vic.  A gang of wise boys turn up at the croft where Michael has been hiding.  They are looking for him and the only way they could have found him is if they'd got to his brother.

Michael has to return to London but it is a dramatically different landscape that he finds.  Vic is now in charge of a number of Olympic building projects and is being hassled by the new hard men in town: the Russians.  Vic has other problems and needs MIchael's expertise but they first have to deal with Michael's betrayal: his affair with Vic's younger, Italian wife, Sabine.

Michael is sure that whoever was behind the initial attempt on his life was also behind his brother's disappearance.  Michael is just as sure that whoever is behind this trouble has Vic as the intended target.  With Sabine again distracting him, Michael can only wonder how much time is left on the clock before all his London bridges begin to burn...

To read the first ten pages of the script, please click here *

Battlestar Galactica: The End to The Means

Devised as a one-off, feature-length episode that gives greater background to the storyline and character histories as featured in the 3rd series of Ronald D. Moore's re-imagined version of Battlestar Galactica, this spec script has been knocking around for a while.  Without a UK agent to represent the script to Universal Studios, this script is simply sitting in a drawer though I have thought about re-working it into an online episodic novel for the many fans of the show out there.

The story occurs between episode 3.09 'Unfinished Business' and episode 3.10 'The Passage' of the TV series as originally broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel.  Over the course of the 92 minutes of screentime that this script is written for, we would learn why the Cylons have allowed the Colonial Fleet to remain on the run so long while also getting to see a bit more about the 'farms' that Starbuck and Anders discovered on Caprica.  Also covered in this episode are the dramas surrounding the affair between Starbuck and Apollo, the everyday abuse that Sharon 'Athena' Agathon is subjected to, why Sharon 'Boomer' Valerii became 'anti-Human' and last but not least, the other half-Human, half-Cylon child: Nicholas Tyrol.

Events begin to unfold as soon as Athena leads a mission to explore the space that the Colonial Fleet is about to light-jump to.  The Cylons are waiting for the 2 Raptors comprising the Vanguard mission.  Back in the Fleet and aboard the Geminon Traveler, Vice-President Tom Zarek has taken President's Roslin's place at the unveiling of a new manufactory aboard the ship and he narrowly escapes an assassination attempt thanks to the intervention of Lieutenant Danny 'Bulldog' Novocek (who fans will remember nearly succeeded in killing Adama).  It is however an encounter with the mysterious Oracle Selloi that will propel the story.  The young woman has had a disturbing dream so powerful that it is resonating across the Colonial Fleet.  President Roslin goes to see here and to discover what it is that the Cylons are doing with those captive humans left behind on the colonies and on New Caprica.  What she sees stirs a daring resolve among the bombings of unknown terrorists in the Fleet: to fight the Cylons and if rescue cannot be made, to destroy the means to the Cylon's long-term plan.

If you'd like to read a sample of this spec-script then please click here *

Mundane Atrocities

This is the first attempt to write far beyond (what for me are) the well-beaten track of thrillers and high-adventures.  It is a coming-of-age story set in a northern English town in 1993.

The country is in recession, a failing Tory government has been returned to power and there's a nationwide WTF? about the First Gulf War.  This is also the year that the IRA detonate the Bishopsgate bomb in central London just two days after the murder of Stephen Lawrence.  All this seems like another world and a lifetime away from the teenagers in Blackton where nothing ever happens but on the telly.  There is, however, great music, big dreams and once the A-level exams are out of the way, a great long summer holiday to look forward to.

Danny leads a wild pack of friends through nights of five-a-side football and the occasional fight as they struggle with revision, hormones, parents, part-time jobs and the desire to simply get out of town.  He feels his world is slowly crumbling around him with but he does have one light in his life: Hester.

Into this confusion, arrives one late arrival: Oren.  A young man with a mysterious past and a very out-of-place character, Oren makes friends and quickly and not least with Danny who finds for the first time in a long time, breathing space and a sense of belonging.  But dreams never last long past waking and Danny becomes even more distant on falling-out with Oren, pushing everyone away as the friends fall blindly toward a dramatic denouement and the end of innocence.

To read a sample of this script, please click here *

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