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Showing posts with label pitches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pitches. Show all posts

Sounds Like An Asylum Movie to Me

From the taxidermy bird production of Matrix Reloaded
I don't know if you guys have been checking the news out this past week, but there've been some pretty weird goings-on going on, the sort of stuff that would make Charles Fort, god rest his soul, sit up and take notice. Check this out:

  • December 31st, Arkansas - thousands of red-winged blackbirds are reported to fall dead from the sky over an area roughly a square mile. No diseases are found, no toxins, only blunt force trauma as though the entire flock was started at once and flew madly into one another. Officials speculate fireworks frightened the birds.
  • January 1- 5th, Brazil - 100 tons of dead fish wash ashore. As of yet, no cause has been determined.
  • January 3rd, Louisiana - 500 red-winged blackbirds, starlings and sparrows are found dead on the side of the highway. No fireworks are suspected.

  • January 3rd - 5th, England - 40,000 - that's not a mistype, 40,000 - small crabs wash onto the shore of the English coast, all of 'em dead. Officials suspect cold weather is the culprit. 

  • January 5th, Maryland - 2 million fish go belly-up, mostly small guys but, still, 2 million of them. Again cold weather is the supposed culprit, as previous cases can be cited in the same area from 1976 and 1980. 

  • January 5th, Sweden - hundreds of dead birds fall from the sky. As in Arkansas, blunt force trauma from "external blows" killed the bids. Once again they are found to be free of disease or toxin. Just beaten to death. 
  •  January 5th, Kentucky - hundreds of grackles, red-winged blackbirds, robins and starlings fall dead from the sky, again disease-free and non-poisoned.

Pretty weird, right? I mean, when you put it all together, this stuff is just a couple former teen-idols short of a Saturday night on SyFy. But does it really signify the beginning of the end, the first tremors of the fabled apocalypse? Probably not. Shit, even Kirk Cameron doesn't really think so. Most likely this kind of shit goes on all the time and we just don't notice it, kinda like how you never notice how many Volkswagens there are on the road until you play punch-buggy. The only ones who should be truly nervous about these events are red-winged blackbirds; someone's really got it out for those guys.


But you see what I mean? This one could go anywhere: it could be a religious-themed end-of-days epic, a Hitchcockian creature feature about a war between birds, an eco-terror thriller, metaphysical horror, paranoid psycho-drama, bad porn, anything! Five bucks says even if it isn't The Asylum who makes this movie (and it probably won't be), you'll still see a Bird Rain or some similar shit pop up on DVD by year's end.


I'm just hoping it stars Kirk Cameron. Ooh, and whichever Baldwin got himself born again.

977's Pitch #7: "Committed"

This pitch is going to be a little different than usual in that this time I'm not pitching a movie, but rather a television series. What's more, a reality series. What's even more, a SyFy original reality series. 

I think, given the network's continuing success in this market - from "Ghost Hunters" and its various incarnations, up through "Destination Truth," "Beast Legends" and, most recently, "Hollywood Treasure" - and given the network's ongoing relationship with a certain independent film studio, that it would make perfect sense, to me at least, for SyFy to commission an original documentary series centered around the fine folks at The Asylum. And what should be the name you this series, you might be asking? What else?

"COMMITTED"

The gist is this: each season of "Committed" contains ten, one-hour episodes, and focuses on the complete development and release of one Asylum film. Each step of the process is covered, from concept to script to production crew to casting to shooting to editing to marketing, allowing loyal viewers an inside look at The Asylum's unique, efficient and economic filmmaking style. Shows would air on Saturday nights at 8 p.m., and each season's finale would be immediately followed by the world premiere of the film that season focused on at 9 p.m., this being, of course, the standard time-slot for SyFy Originals.

As the shrewdest, most-talked-about little studio since AIP, the folks over at The Asylum have a unique perspective on the Hollywood system and subverting it that I think would absolutely appeal to the creative, nonconformist types glued to SyFy on a Saturday night. And just imagine: what if there had been a camera crew following around Arkoff, Nicholson and Corman in the early years of AIP, giving us a first-hand glance at the tricks of the trade that made them one of the most successful and beloved independents in American film history? Imagine watching the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, Johnathan Demme, James Cameron, et cetera as they learned and honed the skills that would one day make them legends? It would be a cinematic artifact of immeasurable worth. And it would be pretty fucking awesome, too. 

This is exactly where we are, I believe, in the development of The Asylum: almost fifteen years under their belt and production has taken over distribution, at least as far as public consciousness is concerned, and now "Asylum-film" is quickly becoming a genre in and of itself. The ripple of awareness is expanding beyond this one, small, niche pond, and the time to make a bigger splash is now. Everyone watching SyFy knows who The Asylum is, and at least 80% of them are curious, one way or another, to see just how these flicks are hatched. I might be estimating those numbers, and I'm certainly no expert, but it just seems to me that a show like this on a network like that at a time like this couldn't help but succeed for at least a few seasons.

I mean, really, who doesn't want to watch Jaleel White screentest? Or Eric Forsberg explain to Paul Logan where and how to kick the yet-to-be-added Mega Piranha? Or exactly what goes down at an Asylum staff meeting? 

Bottom line, people love movies, and more and more as technology is becoming more and more available, the die hard fans want to know how movies are made, perhaps looking to inform their own endeavors. SyFy fans in particular, I would wager, engage in creative projects of their own - from writing to art to filmmaking or animation - more than most other network fanbases. This makes them, in my mind, the perfect audience for a series showcasing the inner workings of a low-budget genre filmmaking juggernaut and Hollywood outsiders on the brink of exploding into cultural consciousness in a major, lasting way. I, for one, would be glued to my set.

And if producers should want to introduce the company to viewers through a new employee that comes on in episode one, a "Dr. Carter," if you will, through whose energetic, enthusiastic eyes we see the magic and marvel of filmmaking unfurl, I might know a guy willing to quit his day job and force his wife southward from Oregon. I might.

I'm just sayin'.

Crocaloctopus Hoping to Strike!

As a guy who's pitched a project or two (see bottom) in his day, I can truly appreciate the campaign launched this week by Geek Tyrant writer Brian Shirley, to get his creation, Crocaloctopus, in a SyFy Saturday Original or an Asylum creature slugfest. Dig this press release:

      "Brian Shirley has his hands in everything these days. He not only has cemented his name with the geek culture that is GeekTyrant and Alien Bee, but he's also attached to several movie projects scheduled for 2011 including Witches Playground, and he'll be voicing the character GT along with scream queens Deneen Melody, who voices Valkira, and Kitsie Duncan as Anara for Jason Heath’s upcoming animated web series "Astronoir: The Fixers" scheduled for spring 2011.

     Shirley also has a scarecrow movie in the early planning stages along with his pet project simply titled Crocaloctopus. What started out as a joke has gotten attention from Syfy, comic book publishers and key entertainment suits. So what did Brian do? He has started a Crocaloctopus campaign geared towards Syfy and also The Asylum.
 
     With some help from genre artist Dennis Willman, the creature was brought to life in living color (so to speak). The campaign launched at the Dark Carnival Film Festival in Bloomington, Indiana on November 19-21 with T-shirts, etc. Brian was quoted as saying, “T-shirts makes the coolest business cards, and what better way to start a fun campaign and have the fans wearing a Crocaloctopus shirt. It’s also just fun to say!”

     Crocaloctopus’ goal is to have a Saturday night movie on Syfy (aka the new creature features the channel is putting out) or having The Asylum pick the story up and pit the hybrid creature up against one of its already familiar monsters in the stable.

     To keep up with all things Crocaloctopus, you can find the creature on Facebook and on Twitter. Yes, the monster is on Twitter! Brian wants to hear from the fans because he says, “Being a fan of these kinds of movies, this would be the pinnacle of my accomplishments so far.”

     If you are interested in a Crocaloctopus campaign T-shirt, just head on over to FastCustomShirts.com and pick one up for just $15.00 bucks!

A comic book is planned for spring of 2011. Look for more on Crocaloctopus soon."

Pretty cool idea, and a pretty daring self-marketing plan. Check out the Facebook and Twitter links and throw Shirley your support; if we can get Sam L. Jackson's dialogue in Snakes on a Plane tailored to our wishes, and get "Jericho" back on the air (we did our part, at least), then we can get Crocaloctopus locked into moral combat with a school of Mega Piranha. Believe it!



for more unsolicited suggestions, check out these:

Man-O-War
The Forgotten City
The Run
Casual Encounters
The People That Time Forgot
The Mystery of Flannan Isles

977's Unsolicited yet Copyrighted Pitch #6: THE MYSTERY OF FLANNAN ISLES


So the backstory is this: in 1900, seemingly in the middle of a meal, all three lighthouse keepers manning the lonely lighthouse on Scotland's Flannan Isles mysteriously disappeared without a trace, leading to more than a century of paranormal speculation and rational investigation that has still yet to produce a suitable and satisfactory explanation of events. Using this historical anecdote as a jumping-off point, I humbly present the pitch for The Mystery of Flannan Isles: A Charles Fort Adventure.

We open with our three, ill-fated lighthouse keepers enjoying the above-mentioned meal. Outside the weather is frightful, a strong storm is blowing off the sea and bringing wind and rain and crashing waves against the Isles' stone cliffs. Suddenly a frightful sound is heard, a cry like screeching metal or something mammoth screaming. The keepers are startled and exit the lighthouse to investigate. At the west landing, they find significant structural damage to iron railings and wooden platforms, too high above sea level to have been caused by waves. Then the sound again, and - without seeing their assailant - we watch the three keepers picked off one by one by something whose appearance turns the expressions of the hardened men to those of terrified children. The men dead, the sound slinks away, the storm rages on unwatched.

Cut to Eastern Europe, a small village in a mountainous range, gypsy-inhabited but for two men, both dressed in the academic fashion of the day, both in their mid-thirties. They are Charles Fort, paranormal investigator, and his assistant, Stanley Pelkington (who I'm picturing being played by Rhett Giles and Jay Gillespie, respectively), and they are here to investigate some supernatural phenomena such as red rain or strange lights, any of the myriad phenomena detailed in "The Complete Books of Charles Fort," (an outstanding read) that serve to introduce the man and his particular field of study, as well as his assistant's rational, scientific, skeptical and Scully-esque counter-approach. As he is wrapping up his research, a cable comes from London informing him on the occurrence at Flannan Isles. His curiosity piqued, they leave at once.

Once in Flannan Isles, CF finds the locals not at all eager to share what they know about the disappearance, any other disappearances on the island or their suspicions as to the cause of the disappearance, almost as though they are guarding a secret for their own, superstitious curiosity. Every small town distrusts outsiders, especially rural citizens against a cosmopolitan denizen like CF, but they are especially distrustful when they are a centuries-old small community isolated from the rest of the world on a small chain of islands in the North Atlantic. So CF will find little help here. His first obstacle is Finn, the caretaker of the Flannan Isles Lighthouse and a former keeper himself, not returned to the job until the Northern Lighthouse Board can find a suitable, more permanent replacement. Finn won't give any details other than to stir CF's preternatural leanings by admonishing that there are some answers better left undiscovered, some things man wasn't meant to be able to understand, only fear and respect. 

CF begins to study his books on local lore and tests or researches the possibilities rational (washed away, murder/suicide, abducted by pirates) and irrational (ghost ship, sea serpent, fabled monster bird) but it isn't until he meets the daughter of one of the disappeared keepers, the lovely lass Siobhan (The 7 Adventures of Sinbad's Kelly O'Leary) that CF becomes convinced the disappearance wasn't a rational thing at all. Seems Siobhan's old man had reservations about taking the job in the first place because of rumors of a ghostly serpent taller than the isles who appears during great storms and tries to smash the island to bits with the fury of waves. This ghost-serpent is supposedly the reason the lighthouse was erected here centuries ago, at the utmost northwest corner of Scotland: to guard the UK against spectral invasion from the wild, unknown, ephemeral Arctic regions. When her dad turned up missing, Siobhan knew the serpent was somehow responsible. Armed with this new knowledge and teammate, CF and crew investigate the creature and - without giving away too many act two and three twists - discover the only way it can be vanquished is to confront it and capture it in a stone reputed to be it's eye hardened to gem once plucked from its head by the lance of a long-ago lighthouse keeper. So Fort must find this stone, then this serpent, then capture it face to face if he is to save the island from its supernatural threat.

The nice thing, I think, about this pitch is the franchise it opens. Charles Fort, as the link above attests, was a real dude, the so-called "inventor of the supernatural," and, cinematically speaking, a kind of Indiana Jones of the paranormal, a Sherlock Holmes of the otherworld. Fort's books provide dozens above dozens of launching-pads for the sort of steampunk paranormal amalgam we saw in Rachel Lee Goldenberg's Sherlock Holmes. In fact, she'd be a great choice to direct this flagship film. She could even co-write with me, if she wanted; I'm amiably collaborative like that.

I'm just sayin'.

977's Unsolicited Yet Copyrighted Pitch #5: THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT


So when last we saw C. Thomas Howell, he had valiantly sacrificed his own escape for the sake of others', and remained on the mysterious island out-of-time populated with prehistoric terrors and most inhospitable natives. He had his wife with him, and she was pregnant. You just knew there was a sequel in this, and sure enough, there is. And it's already plotted!

Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote the original novel "The Land That Time Forgot," also conceived a sequel, "The People That Time Forgot" (should be "who," I think) that has actually been filmed once before, as a sequel to the Doug McClure-starrer filmed in the 70's by American International Pictures. The story of the sequel concerns a rescue mission staged years later by friends of he who was left behind. That's the story I'd steal for The Asylum's sequel.


In my envisioning, twenty years have passed since C. Thomas and his budding family were left on the island. Back in the real world, Timothy Bottoms' character has dedicated his life to trying to get back, but when our film starts, he's dead, recently, and his son has taken up the mantle, desperate to make his father's life not have been in vain. On his team he has his girlfriend - a ethnologist/anthropologist/photographer - as well as a mercenary unit of three lead by a former Special Forces operative (if I have my druthers, the incomparable Geoff Meed). Together they're working the last clues Bottoms left before dying, and sure enough, it finds/triggers the wormhole and through time they go, only to come to offshore of the same said mysterious island.

Their initial assessment of the island is pretty much the same as everybody else's - holy shit, those are dinosaurs! After a couple close scrapes with the thunder lizards, the team begins making its way into the interior, searching for clues of CTH & Family's existence. On this hunt they stumble upon a lurid scene: a scantily-clad native girl about to be summarily executed for some unknown crime by a few men of her tribe. The mercenaries easily dispose of this crew, and the grateful native girl agrees to help them find their friend, as she knows of him.

Seems after everyone else left, C. Tom figured the only way to survive was to make peace with the natives. In exchange for teaching them agricultural, recreational and political skills, they let he and his wife live, let their baby - a daughter - come into this strange world. All was well for a period. Then the island brought others, another, more hostile tribal force, who discovered the power of the island to move people through time, and the peace was shattered, conflict broke out, and in the end it was this newer tribe who won, killing all the native men and taking all the women and children as brides and slaves. As for C. Tom, rumor has it that he escaped, disappeared into the jungle, and has not been seen since. What of his wife? She was killed refusing to be taken from him, murdered before his helpless eyes. The child? The native girl looks away uncomfortably, says that child is dead too. Why did the tribesmen want to kill her (the native girl)? Because she cannot have children, and is therefore worthless to them, just another mouth to feed.

She leads them deeper into the interior where they face more tribulations in the form of dinosaurs on land, sea and air, and increasing contact with the hostile natives who are desperate to locate and usurp the island's power for their own. As they get closer to an answer, stranger things begin to happen, people begin to appear and disappear, Nazis, Huns, WWI soldiers, Crusaders - distressed, aggressive, out-of-time passengers plucked here one second then whisked away the next. One of their own steps through a hidden wormhole and is never seen again. 

At a climactic point our team finds themselves in a certain-death situation, which is when an aged and haggard but alive C. Tom reveals himself and saves the day then leads them to his secret, the island's secret, the source of it's power (I realize I'm borrowing from LOST here, if anyone was actually wondering.).


I've decided to go full-spoiler here, because, you know, nobody's actually reading these things, right?

The gist of it is this: this lair of CTH's, it's all light and portals to different places, different times. It's the island that controls time, or rather, this island is the nexus of all times, under its own control, and CTH has taken on the role of guardian, seeking to keep this place from falling into the wrong hands, like the hostiles', who he loathes beyond description for killing his wife. It's true that he could have left the island, this time, whenever he wanted, ridden the time-waves through the centuries, going whenever he wanted, but his daughter was here (she's now revealed to be the native girl; he tried to rescue her but it was impossible), and besides, without his wife, the love of his life, where (when) was he going to go? Nothing in the world was going to make him happy again, so he opted to stick around, hermit it up here, watching all time at once but never interfering, never trying to go back to before they were here, because time, once altered, ripples, and who knows what would have happened? Chaos effect, butterflies and tsunamis, all that. He can, however, send our team home with everything they need: Bottoms' boy with his promise to dad fulfilled, the anthro-gf with incredible evidence, the mercenary captain with a new lady-love - the native girl/CTH's daughter. She wants to go back to the world with them, and CTH wants her to go. But he will stay behind, as, like he said, there's nothing out there in the world for him anymore. Couple of sappy goodbyes and presto, the team is back in the future, their present, and that's that.

Could be, though, at some distant point in the future, like say when medical advances make it so that the native girl and the mercenary can conceive, and give birth to a child, that they publicly christen, it could be that in the back of the church an old man in the shadows smiles in a familiar fashion before blinking out of sight in a wink of light. 

You always leave room for another sequel...


I'm just sayin'.

977's Unsolicited Yet Copyrighted Pitch #4: CASUAL ENCOUNTERS

In the tradition of Sex Pot, The 18 Year Old Virgin and, most recently, MILF, I humbly present this raucous sex comedy that I'm calling Casual Encounters. Like many other Asylum comedies, it centers around two friends, young men in their mid-20's, tentatively named Walt and Roddy (the latter name alone should provide three to five minutes of jokes, easy). Walt is our lead, a clean-cut nice-guy who's too nice for his own good. Roddy is his best friend, the more crass, vivacious and stoned of the two (Seth Cassel could be good here.).

Our film opens on graduation night, Walt and Roddy both having graduated that day, Walt from a journalism Master's program and Roddy from his 7-year Art History program (insert "it's where the chicks are" jokes here). Roddy has convinced a reluctant Walt to come with him to the big party that night, a thing Walt never does, being the quiet, bookish, stay-at-home, mild-mannered sort he is. But, since his girlfriend Jessica, another graduate, is busy with her girlfriends that night, and on account of the cajoling he's getting from Roddy in reference to his impending desertion of Roddy and this town for Jessica and the big city, Walt concedes. 

The party is an affair of debauchery, a mixture of college kids, grad students and the like, all enjoying a well-deserved break. While Roddy is revealed to be a natural reveler, Walt is the obvious awkward wallflower, standing alone, avoiding conversation, all-around not enjoying himself. But out of the corner of his eye he sees a girl running playfully upstairs, Jessica, he thinks. He makes his way across the party and goes upstairs, finds himself in an empty hallway with several doors, all of them open but one at the end. He goes to it, hears a minor skirmish and a squeal from inside. Thinking Jessica in trouble, he opens the door. In the room he finds Jessica, topless, her breasts covered in chocolate syrup, and two eager young men, naked, ready to clean her. All are a bit shocked. What follows is a difficult, awkward, and chocolate-breasted break-up (that the naked dudes observe) in which Jessica says they've been together too long, since high school, and she'd been feeling cooped up for a while now, like she was letting her sexiest days pass her by. Until recently he was the only man she'd ever been with (was?!?), and she just can't continue to waste all this (chocolate breasts) on one guy. Walt counters that they're supposed to move to the city (any city) the next day. Yeah...she's not coming. Maybe later they can get together, settle into that grown-up life Walt seems so eager for, but for now, she's young, she's hot, her moral compass for the moment is out of whack and she wants to flaunt it. Walt, spineless, concedes and even leaves the room, closing the door behind him so Jessica and her new friends can get back to business.

Roddy spots Walt, dejected, leaving the party and follows him out, gets the story. Walt is freaking out, he's got a deposit on an apartment in the city, needs to start looking for jobs, but going alone freaks him out even more; he's ruined, his life is over. Roddy steps in and says he'll move with Walt, he's spontaneous and unattached like that. So it's settled.

We pick up with the two friends in the city where in the process of moving in Roddy meets a comely neighbor and disappears to sex her up, leaving Walt alone to move in by himself. When Roddy returns Walt confronts him about this, how it will be, Roddy with the ladies and Walt all alone, and Roddy assuages him by saying all they have to do is get Walt back in the game himself and it will all balance out; he's a free man for the first time as an adult, the first time ever, he should get out there and hump anything that will let him. To prove his point, Roddy takes Walt to a nearby bar that night, tries to help him meet women, but Walt is hopelessly awkward, doesn't know how to talk to women, certainly doesn't know how to pick them up. It's a disaster, in short, and Walt leaves embarrassed, ashamed and alone, while Roddy scores again. When Roddy returns later that night, he and Walt have a talk about the problem, how Walt can't communicate with women in the moment like that, his brain seizes up and he can't think of anything to say. If only there was a way to pick up women without having to look at them. 

There is, Roddy declares, and grabs a laptop, directs Walt to a community message board that comes with a Casual Encounters section. Roddy explains the CE principle to Walt and why he thinks it's ideal: he's not looking for anything other than sex, he doesn't want to play games, and he doesn't want to talk face to face. He can communicate honestly and directly through writing, his strong suit. Walt doesn't know, he isn't sure, it sounds kind of, well, desperate and sketchy. It is sketchy and desperate, but so it the best sex, which Walt wouldn't know, having been with only one woman his whole life; he has to trust Roddy.

So trust he does, and allows Roddy to post an ad for him detailing what he wants in a sexual escapade. Walt has to get drunk as he does this, so nervous and timid he is, so it gets progressively lewder and thus funnier as he goes. Walt passes out before the ad is posted. Roddy finishes it for him by snapping a picture of Walt's package to post with the ad. As it turns out, Walt happens to be well-endowed, causing Roddy to curse all the time he spent writing when they could've just posted the pic.

When Walt wakes up in the morning, his inbox is flooded with willing women wanting to get down. Funny sequence going through the women, the pictures, the shapes, the sizes, the ages, the kinks, the personalities, all this, until he finds one that suits his purposes, someone, like him, that seems normal and even demure, bespectacled, quiet, just a mousy thing looking for a good time.

Now, from here we get into - pardon the pun - the meat of our movie, the encounters and how they effect him, so I don't want to give away much more than generalizations. What I can say is that the demure chick turns out to be the opposite, kinda dominatrix-y, the signs were all there in conversation but Walt didn't get it, and this rough but hilarious encounter freaks him out. Roddy convinces him to try again, promising this time to help him decipher the lingo via  "micro-blu," an inner ear blu tooth device (a dash of Cyrano de Bergerac never hurt a comedy). This is where the vagaries in description begin.

Walt goes on another encounter, Roddy talks him through to the good stuff. Things get a little freaky, and when it's over Walt forgets he still has the blu tooth in, allowing Roddy to have heard everything, which disturbs him and disturbs Roddy as well for how much it turned him on, so both agree this plan was a one-time thing.

As Walt continues to navigate the strange world of no-strings sex he meets an array of characters: cougars, BBWs, curious lesbians, goth girls, good, old-fashioned trashy sluts, other kinksters, and among these one girl, different from him, fiercely independent, edgy, but cautious, who answers his ad a few times, but takes it slow, talking only the first encounter, standing close without touching the second, progressing like that, because her kink is the build-up. Walt is falling for her in a weird way, but she'll have nothing of it, because once they consummate, the build-up is over. 

So as these aspects of our story wind around each other - the casual encounters eventually giving him the experience and confidence he needs to feel independent as a man and his burgeoning real affection for a girl he met that way - the monkeywrench of Jessica re-enters the picture. She's back, says she's been around and all she's found is that she had the best right where she was. She wants Walt back, wants to pick up where they left off, leaving Walt to make a difficult decision between his old, safe, static life and love or his new, exciting, dangerous and thrilling life, with it's possible new love (is there anything beyond the build-up? can it ever be more exciting?).

This one has it all: jokes, boobs, comic sex and a nice array of women characters sure to appeal to a broad range of men. Plus, I can't think of another sex-personals comedy off the top of my head, so it could be virgin territory, but without a single virgin. Would also work as a horror movie with minimal tweaks.

I'm just sayin'.

977's Unsolicited Yet Copyrighted Pitch #3: THE RUN


In the spirit of the new direction 6 Guns pointed The Asylum, I humbly present this killer-gang thriller that's part western, part 70's-era slasher flick, and part revenge story. I call it, simply, The Run.

Based on the same historical anecdote that inspired both Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow and Cornell Wilde's The Naked Prey - the run of Lewis & Clark trailblazer John Colter from Blackfeet Indians - The Run begins at the outskirts of the Eastern Oregon desert, late summer 1978. Our protagonist, Franklin Delano Lund, 35, is relocating his wife, two sons and ailing father-in-law from Maryland to Oregon in search of work. He is a boatbuilder, trading Baltimore for Portland. When we meet him it is dawn of their tenth day on the road, and FDL is waking in his hammock to the rays of the new sun. If all goes well, by the time the sun sets again, they should be in Portland. If all goes well.

All Not Going Well #1: Soon after FDL and the fam hit the road that morning, the radiator in their old pickup truck cracks, stranding them along an isolated stretch of highway.

All Not Going Well #2: It takes well into that night before another vehicle is seen to approach them.

All Not Going Well #3: The vehicle in question is a pickup truck carrying seven men - rogues, scoundrels, sweaty psychos - who after feigning assistance, attack and abduct FDL and his family, dragging them off screaming into the empty night.

They are taken to a barn even further into the isolated desert where for the next few days they are humiliated and abused for the inebriated and heartless amusement of their captors, mostly FDL, that we see, but by the time these few days are over, FDL is the only member of his family left alive, and the fun has ended for his captors; now it's time to dispose of the last remaining witness (I'm leaving out a lot of details about their time in the barn, the little events that build to this Act One climax, because they're too sweet to give away here. one would hypothetically have to read the script.). But Roscoe, the leader of the gang, sees promise in FDL, he sees fire, so he doesn't want to just kill him, he wants to play with him for one last contest: the run of the arrow.

The run of the arrow works as follows: FDL is made to strip naked. Then, the gang's best archer (yes, they have a best archer) fires an arrow as far as he can into the desert. Upon this arrow landing, FDL is instructed to walk to it, and when he reaches it, he's told he should start to run. Why? FDL wants to know. Because, Roscoe informs him slyly, That's when the men start giving chase. That's when the game becomes kill or be killed. 

(FDL's naked, tired, dehydrated, hungry, battered and unarmed, of course, while his captors are whiskey-fueled, vicious, well-armed and used to hunting human prey. so...his odds aren't great [which makes him that much more empathetic and badass])

The next two acts of the film are this chase, FDL running through the desert, trying to gain any advantage he can, as one-by-one the men pursue him, forcing violent conflicts only one can walk away from. And when it isn't the men he's battling, it's the environment, the heat, the sand, his own thirst and hunger; every instant becomes survival. This chase is also a flight from character, as FDL struggles to save what is still good within himself from the rising murderous rage he feels over the deaths of his family, the cruel fate that brought him here, and the men who would play with his life like he was a bug. Ultimately, however, he realizes the only way he is going to survive is to have his revenge, to become like the men he despises - a ruthless, wanton killer. 

I won't give away any more - every detail is a spoiler in this one - but to say that in addition to his pursuers and the environment, FDL must also contend with mountain lions, deranged mountain folk, a coyote and heartbreak after heartbreak courtesy of thwarted salvation. And the ending, specifically the final scene, is, in my humble, responsible opinion, awesome

An engaging action-thriller and an intense character study, The Run is equal parts brutal and fragile, as are the psyches of most men pushed beyond their limits. It's about more than physical survival, more than cold vengeance, it's about what, if anything, can survive - emotionally, mentally, morally - when everything is ripped away from you and destroyed needlessly before your eyes. 

Think Cormac McCarthy meets Wes Craven, if I may be so pretentious, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Oregon minus the chainsaw. I'm seeing Jeff Denton as FDL, Sarah Lieving as his wife, and perhaps Paul Logan - if we can dirty him up, think Killers-era PL - as vicious alpha male Roscoe. And this pitch comes with a finished script.

I'm just sayin'.

977's Unsolicited Yet Copyrighted Pitch #2: THE FORGOTTEN CITY

So sometime in 2012 - hopefully before the world ends - Brad Pitt has a film coming out with director James Gray (The Yards, We Own The Night) based on the book "The Lost City of Z," which in turn is based on the real-life story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared into the uncharted jungles of Brazil in 1925 with a team that included his own son, all in pursuit of a renowned lost city of lore, a quest that had already killed 100 men before Fawcett ever set foot in the Amazon basin. Brad Pitt plays Fawcett, and such is the reason, it is suspected, for that crazy ass goatee he was sporting for a while.

With that as the basic premise - an explorer goes on a dangerous, obsessive quest for a mythical city hidden somewhere in an unmapped jungle - I humbly present a tie-in, The Forgotten City, a blend of this story, Saul Bellow's novel "Henderson the Rain King." and a dash of King Solomon's Mines.

Richard Dancy is a cartographer - map-maker to the layman - in 1920's Britain, a man in his mid-30's, single and coldly academic. This is the result of his harsh upbringing by a famous explorer and therefore an often absent father, the revered Reginald Dancy, with whom Richard has a strained relationship at best. One day a triumvirate of members from the Royal Academy of Exploration comes with some rather foreboding news for Richard: his father has disappeared during his latest expedition, it has been six months since he was last heard from. Richard knows his father is had mounted his third expedition for the Forgotten City of Kuikugu (kwee-coo-joo), a mythical civilization hidden somewhere in the deepest reaches of the Amazon basin in western Brazil, a place no other civilization exists even today, one of the last entirely unknown regions of the planet. The triumvirate implores Dancy the Younger to lead a rescue mission - since he knows both the maps and the region, having been on the second expedition with his father, a source of their falling out - of himself, two soldiers in the British army, a local guide and an associate cartographer assigned by the academy who just happens to be a woman. Hesitantly, and perhaps at the behest of his estranged-by-association mother, Richard agrees and the film shifts to the jungles of Brazil.


I don't want to give too many twists or turns away, but needless to say the journey through the jungle - using copies of older Dancy's maps, extrapolated from by the son based on what he knows of his father's cartography mindset, the father having taught the son - is arduous at best, beset with danger floral, faunal, native and from within. But I will tell you this: they do find the city, and they do find a culture still living there, ruled by a god in flesh, as far as the natives are concerned. And this god? None other than Reginald Dancy. (this is where the "Henderson" comes in)


The rest amounts to this: the father has discovered the most significant archaeological and sociological discovery of the century, perhaps ever, and in the process he has been mistaken for a god by the primitive inhabitants here, a role he was only eager to play. He's gone mad with power, and instead of sharing this discovery with the world, he wants to horde over it, command it where it is, create a world, a society, a civilization, all of his own. Son wants to bring him back. He won't go. Son wants to go back, then, let people know Reginald is alive, let them know what he's discovered. Reginald won't be having any of that, either, because if the world knows, the world will come, and his idyllic kingdom will be destroyed. So he can't let his son leave. But his son won't stay. So...turmoil! 


The third act I'll keep to myself but to say it's awesome. As for casting, I'm seeing Brian Krause (2012 Supernova) as Dancy younger, maybe Jonny Lee Miller, if they can get him, but definitely John Rhys-Davies as Darcy the elder. The woman I think would be best suited for Natalie Stone (30,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls), and as far as the soldiers go, I'm happy so long as one of them is Geoff Meed (6 Guns, Airline Disaster).


Here's your tag line: "A lost civilization...that will do anything to remain that way."

And if this idea doesn't float your boat, but the idea of tying-in to Lost City... does, you could always just do a supernatural-action adaptation of the story of Hiram Bingham III, the American explorer who rediscovered Machu Picchu in 1911. Brian Krause would definitely be suited for that role.


I'm just sayin'.

977's Unsolicited Yet Copyrighted Pitch #1: MAN-O-WAR

Suppose the recent oil spill in the Gulf wasn't a disastrous accident, but rather a cover up? A cover-up for what? you may be asking, What would be worth covering that they'd put our environment at such risk? Why good old fashioned nuclear power, of course, or something like it, some controversial fuel source hidden in a reservoir beneath the seabed that when ruptured spills forth a small quantity of the super juice, the existence of which can't be known by the general public (or competitive nations), so in order to conceal it, a few hundred million gallons of oil are spilled to cover it up. But not before the super juice can infect a swarm of Portuguese Man-O-War, fusing them into a single, mighty, mega(if you will)-man-o-war that then drifts into the gulf stream toward the Atlantic seaboard.

Thus begins Man-O-War.

Our real story begins on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina's Outer Banks, a quaint island town south of the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras. Mac Finn, a strapping young bearded lad in his mid-30's, is returning home after a 15 year absence. He's been living out west, Oregon, a failed writer, a failed husband, now a boatbuilder, returned home in the wake of his estranged father's death to settle the old man's estate and restart his life where he thought he'd left forever. Ocracoke is a small, tight-knit community, everybody remembers everybody, and Mac is met with mixed reactions; those who are happy to see him back in the fold, and those who still view him as an uppity creative type who thought himself better than them and so deserted the island and his father, a widower.

Mac is at the heart of the horrors to come. Over the next few days bodies will start to appear, burned and lacerated, from the ocean. I think I've set it up well enough that you can figure what's killing these folks. From there, without revealing too many gory details or my twist ending (just to say there are only so many ways to kill a man-o-war, I had to get inventive), the man-o-war fucks some shit up, and it's up to Mac and a cast of locals - not scientists, not soldiers, just average people, fishermen and waitresses and drunks - to vanquish the marine monster before it destroys their idyllic community.

Think Jaws meets Eight-Legged Freaks meets Hard Rain.

As for the locals: Ellie Caffrey, waitress at the Red Drum, a small bar on the Ocracoke pier, an ocean-side found-artist, not a native but treated like one, and Mac's potential love interest; Kurt Lund, the curator of a local tourist-trap aquarium, early 40's, more of a carnival barker than a scientist; Red Oldham, brash owner of the Red Drum; Henry Olive, another non-native, a wide-eyed young journalism intern for the weekly local rag covering the deaths; Abram Tompkins, the aging sheriff who for thirty years has had the island under his stern thumb and who just happens to have been Mac's father's life-long best friend, thus making him also Mac's harshest detractor; plus others like a mayor, a deputy, a stoner line cook, a fish mime (a mime that, well, mimes fish), a couple of amiable alcoholics, a bait boy and the requisite chum-in-waiting tourists.

I'm seeing David Charvet as Mac, Lindsey McKeon as Ellie and Seth Cassell as the stoner line cook. I'm willing to give him a shot at redeeming himself.

I'm just sayin'.