Writing: film | theater | television | prose

Film

 

Girls' HighFeature Script
In 1989, a troubled black teenager aspires to make her mark as a hip-hop DJ shepherded by the great DJ Bishop, but her troubles at home, in love, and her best friend's very different course for the future threaten her dreams from coming true. An urban musical drama, more 8 Mile than Save The Last Dance.

Tokyo SystemsShort Story/Pitch for a Feature
A science-fiction story in the vein of Jacob's Ladder about a new drug called Tokyo Systems, which causes one person to concentrate solely on his rage while it causes another to concentrate solely on her lust.

Cry WolfTreatment for a Feature
Frank Kaplan, a sixty-year-old American journalist, enjoys his low-profile life as a local Baltimore reporter. His years as a foreign correspondent during the Cold War have left him satisfied and proud of his achievements, and his weekly columns for The Baltimore Sun support his modest life-style and ego. He lives alone working on his book of his adventures as a reporter and entertains himself by telling these stories to the locals at the neighborhood bar. Frank is fired when one of his articles implicates a group of housing authority investigators as corrupt and he is forced to get a job as a hack reporter for a tabloid. He must uncover the truth behind the story in order to regain his reputation.

JerseyPitch for a Feature
A boy growing up in 1970's New Jersey finds himself ostracized by his peers due to his anglophile obsession with English Soccer and Black Sabbath. The local boys taunt him while his family hysterically comes apart around him. Only his fantasy of becoming an English Premier League Soccer star gets him through the turbulent time.

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Theater

 

WatershedOne-Act Play
A war correspondent's wife, mother, and daughter live together after his death in the field. The daughter wants to tell them that she has secretly been studying in the anthropology department instead of the art department and that she wants to go on a dig in South America as the photographer. The wife's paranoia about terrorism and war comes to a full boil as she tries to stop the daughter from leaving the house. The play takes place in the kitchen of a Brooklyn Heights brownstone and was written in 1998 after a threat of biological terrorism on the NY Subway was covered on the news.

Fist CityPlay
A couple and a young woman live together in a Lower East Side apartment. They have a weekly sketch group set up by their superintendent but are left without a model until an unexpected visitor from the young woman's past shows up to do the job and destabilize the trio's relationship.

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Television

 

86 Prince (working title)Pilot for Television
A series dramatizing the comings and goings of a three star Manhattan restaurant. Loosely based on Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and seven years of personal experience in the restaurant business. The episodes follow the characters' relationships, personal aspirations, and conflicts between the ranks. The employees of a restaurant are like a dysfunctional family and the series can work like a drama/comedy (Six Feet Under, Ally McBeal, Sopranos).

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Prose

Book of RayShort Story
A man who dreams of naming paint strip colors develops kleptomania and falls in love with a woman who works in the housewares department of Kmart.

Life As We Know ItShort Story
A science fiction story about a girl who suddenly realizes she has been hospitalized and has had an operation, but doesn't remember ever being sick.

Brilliant Miami SunsetTreatment for a Feature/Personal Essay
An elderly woman copes with her husband wasting away in their apartment from cancer. Set in Miami Beach and based on the true events of the writer's grandfather's wish to die in secret, the story explores how a distant family lives through the death of the patriarch.

Looking Up Passover Travel Essay
The experience of an American-Jewish woman in Berlin for Passover commemorating the 50th anniversary of the release of the concentration camp survivors. Her first observance of Passover alone and as an adult.

Constellations Travel Essay
While camping in Scotland, an American woman and her East German boyfriend find their relationship falling apart despite the idyllic surroundings. After Marc saves a local boy's life, the couple share a close moment, but they still cannot rekindle their love.

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