I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Desperate Hours.  One of the defining indicators of a great script is that, afterwards, you feel like you’ve already seen the movie.  The writing is so powerful, so descriptive, that all the images are already in your head.  The mobsters coming out of the train with their tommy guns.  The Lone Stranger whistling as he walks through town.  That final image when the Stranger and the girl finally meet…and what happens next.  I can’t get that moment out of my head.  SO GREAT!  Anyway, all this got me thinking how rarely I give a script a genius rating. So I thought I’d write an article on what, in my eyes, makes a script “genius.”  A mastery of the craft is a necessity, of course.  But what about the details?  What should one be focused on to construct one of these bad boys?  That question has me jazzed, so I’ve put together a genius script “short list.”  You do the things I’ve listed below and you will maximize your chances of reaching genius status!

CHARACTERS
It all starts with your characters.  Duh, right?  How many times have you heard that before?  Well Desperate Hours shows us WHY character is so important. Not only must your characters be compelling enough for us to root for the good guys and be intrigued by the bad guys, they must also exhibit a history, something that indicates the character has lived an entire life before they ever made it into this story.  Oh, and to make matters worse, that history must be integrated seamlessly.  This is where the pros separate themselves from the amateurs.  They can convey a ton of history in a character without bringing the story to a dead stop.  The only way amateurs know how to do backstory is via flashbacks. These pace-killers almost always destroy your story on the spot.  You’d much rather convey backstory in the present, keeping the story moving in the process.  That’s hard.  So how do you do it?

Well, there are a few ways, but one of the most popular is through the relationships in your story.  Create a past between two characters and you’ve instantly created a backstory!  Look at how easy that was!  This is an area where Desperate Hours really excels.  Every relationship has a backstory.  Frank and Sue were once in love, but he left for the war and she went and married George instead.  George has always known that his wife still holds a flame for Frank, which creates a backstory between he and Frank as well.  This history plays into every conversation that occurs between these three, which laces the dialogue with subtext and conflict.  And those are the things that make scenes compelling, interesting, and intense.  Because there are so many characters in Desperate Hours with juicy meaty backstories, almost all of the scenes are like this, laced with history and tension and conflict.

Backstory is not the only thing you have to worry about with character, though.  You’ve probably heard from agents and producers and other screenwriters that your characters must exhibit three dimensions.  Except nobody really talks about what that means.  Well, we just dealt with one dimension – an overarching backstory.  Dimension 2 is an unresolved issue from the past (the most specific/important piece of your character’s backstory).  And dimension 3 is a fatal flaw.  If we take Frank from Desperate Hours, his unresolved issue from the past is not being able to save his family.  He tried.  He couldn’t do it.  And he’s always felt guilty and conflicted because of it.  Therefore he must save this girl in order to resolve his past.  Dimension 3, his fatal flaw, is his stubbornness.  Frank refuses to back down, no matter how ridiculous the odds are, no matter how much logic tells him otherwise.  He will do it his way til the very end.  There are other dimensions you can add to a character, but these three are ultra-important and give your character the most bang for your buck.

STRUCTURE
Besides structure providing a foundation for your story, which is its primary purpose, I’ve found that a great structure also creates three distinct and unique acts.  All three acts work together, of course, but each also works on its own, almost as its own individual movie.  The advantage of doing this is that the story constantly changes and evolves, keeping things fresh.  Bad scripts usually rehash the same act or sequence over and over again, creating a dull predictable script in the process.  In Desperate Hours, the first act is about a man reconnecting with the town he left behind after losing his family. It’s not that exciting, but the characters are so well set-up, that we’re willing to follow them to see where the story goes.  The second act, then, becomes about the mystery, a completely different storyline from the first act.  Who is this woman?  Who shot her?  Why was she shot?  Is she going to live?  We want to know.  The third act is, of course, the mobster invasion.  It’s a natural extension of what’s happened so far, and yet it’s completely different from everything we’ve seen so far.  This is not the only way to write a script, of course, but it’s something Desperate Hours did so well, I couldn’t help but think the approach should be used more often.  Anything that evolves your story, as opposed to stagnates it, is good for your screenplay!

INSPIRING CHOICES
This is an oft-forgotten X-Factor in a script.  You can have solid characters.  You can have a great mystery.  But if you don’t make consistent inspiring original choices that the reader isn’t expecting, it doesn’t matter.  It’s times like this when I realize how difficult screenwriting is.  Nailing the characters is fucking HARD.  98% of screenplays don’t do it.  But let’s say you’re one of the fortunate 2% and get past that hurdle.  You then have to nail the structure, with the story evolving through each subsequent act, staying fresh and fast-moving, never hitting any lulls.  That’s not easy to do either!  But let’s say you somehow get past THOSE TWO hurdles, you now have to make sure that each and every choice you make feels fresh.  With every choice in history already being done before, this part of screenwriting requires a particular kind of patience, a ton of trial and error and a willingness to admit when a choice isn’t working so you can go back to the drawing board and come up with something better.  Stuff like the Model-T Ford showing up in the river in Desperate Hours.  Great choice.  The surprise (spoiler) that the female witness was nothing but a prostitute.  Great choice.  Having the single mobster stroll into town before the attack.  Great choice.  Remember, even if you have all the screenwriting book stuff in place, it still comes down to your imagination, your creativity, and your fortitude.  How long are you willing to toil through choices until you come up with the perfect one, for every single choice in your screenplay!

BUILD
Great scripts build.  Too many writers don’t know how to do this, and as a result, their scripts stagnate in the second act.  Things continue to push forward, but the push happens on a horizontal plane instead of a vertical one.  To build your story, you must think vertically.  Think of your second act as a game of Jenga.  You must keep adding pieces to the top until everything dangles on a precarious foundation.  If even one piece is misplaced, the entire thing comes crashing down.  Try to do this with every aspect of your second act.  In Desperate Hours, instead of keeping the conflict local b/t Tom and George and Sue and Frank, Mariani uses his second act to bring the rest of the town in.  So now we’ve gone from the fates of four, to the fate of everybody.  This is called “upping the stakes,” and it has the added benefit of building the story, making everything bigger and badder.  If things aren’t getting bigger and badder, with more on the line, more people involved, more elements affected, then you’re not building.  So many scripts die because the writers don’t properly build their story.  Genius scripts masterfully build their story from the beginning of the second act all the way to the climax.

CHARACTER-RELATED SUBPLOTS MUST BE INTERESTING
Here’s the thing – plot is important.  You need things happening in your story to keep the audience’s interest.  For example, when Frank and Tom go up into the mountains and find the dead Federal agents, that’s a plot point that’s needed to keep the story interesting/moving.  However, you can’t just depend on plot.  If the only thing keeping your story interesting is plot points, the audience will start to detach themselves.  Why?  Because audiences need a connection with people to stay interested in a story over an extended period of time.  In other words, they need to feel connected with your characters.  And this is done through character-related subplots. You’ll often bounce back and forth between plot point and character subplot.  If these subplots aren’t just as compelling/intriguing/fascinating as your main plot, you’ll lose the reader.  To achieve a great character subplot, the main relationship in each subplot must have its own hot-button issue between the characters that must be resolved.  In Desperate Hours, we have Frank and Sue.  Their issue is that they still love each other, but can’t be together (as well as a secondary issue of “Why did he leave her?”).  We’re drawn to this subplot because we want to see how that’s going to be resolved.  Then you have Frank and George.  Their issue is Frank’s building anger towards George due to him abusing Sue.  Again, there’s so much tension between the two due to this, that we absolutely have to see how the relationship will resolve itself.  So to summarize, create a dominant issue between two characters and explore these conflict-filled relationship subplots in the downtime between plot points.

I’ll be honest with you.  A lot of what I’ve listed above is kind of advanced screenwriting shit.  It isn’t easy to pull off.  I mean, I’m assuming you’ve already mastered the basic stuff, like knowing where to break your acts, how to arc your characters, which backstory should be included and which shouldn’t, that sort of thing.  But if you’re wondering about the kind of stuff a genius script contains, this is it!  Complex three-dimensional characters, an ever-changing story, a sense of building, inspiring choices, strong subplots.  So get back to your scripts, folks.  I don’t review nearly enough genius scripts on this site.  I need more.  And I know at least one of you is going to write one. :)

Genre: Period
Premise: A small town crippled by WWI and the Spanish flu finds itself facing major moral questions and a brutal invading force when a young girl shows up on a rancher’s doorstep covered in blood.
About: I don’t know much about this project or this writer.  If it’s the same Mariani listed on IMDB, he’s  a guy who’s making a bunch of shorts in whatever capacity he can, grip, sound, director.  Would be pretty amazing if he just came out of nowhere. (edit) More information coming in.  This is set up at Johnny Depp’s production company.  Hmm, that could be bad.  Since Depp has a million projects, this could be stuck in purgatory until whenever he gets around to it. :(
Writer: E. Nicholas Mariani
Details: 120 pages (Sept 13, 2011 draft)

As you may know, genius scripts don’t come around very often on Scriptshadow.  In fact, there’s an ongoing joke that I’ve never even given a genius rating.  Not true.  I gave the original Source Code draft that made the Black List a genius rating.

But it’s been so long that, I admit, I was wondering if I’d ever rate a script “genius” again.  In fact, I was thinking of replacing the rating when the new site is launched.

But then days like this come along and…well, they give me hope not just about the industry, but about art in general.  They let me know that there are writers out there who pour every ounce of heart and soul into their work and who have been at this long enough that that heart and soul amount to something.  That’s the thing – a lot of us have heart and soul.  A lot of us channel that into our work.  We just haven’t learned the craft well enough to channel it in the right way.  That takes time.  It takes dedication.  I don’t know Mariani’s story.  But I’m guessing he’s been at this for awhile.  You don’t write a script like Desperate Hours by accident.

So what makes a script genius?  That’s tough to say.  I think a mastery of the craft is one.  There are no technical mistakes in the work.  An understanding of how to explore characters, which Mariani is fan-fucking-tastic at.  Inspired choices (as opposed to boring and obvious ones – which is what I usually see).  And then that x-factor, that way you connect with the reader on an emotional level.  That last part is the tough one, because what inspires me emotionally may not inspire you emotionally.

The year is 1918.  Don’t know much about 1918?  Let me give you some background.  The Spanish Flu had just gone about killing 50 million people worldwide, over half a million in America alone.  And if that wasn’t bad enough, World War 1 had obliterated nearly every able-bodied man in America. America’d been stomped on, ground up, and spit out by God, and was just starting the healing process. It was fucking bad.

Enter Frank Sullivan, a man who’s felt the worst of it.  Frank lost his wife and his two children to the flu, and hasn’t gone back into the world since.  He lives out on his ranch, miles away from town, and if he has his way, he’ll die without ever coming in contact with another human being again.

But, you see, the world is changing.  Hope is slowly creeping back into people’s daily lives, and Sullivan’s best friend, Tom, who’s both the sheriff and the mayor (hey, you gotta improvise when 1 out of every 4 people around you drops dead) convinces him to come join the town for a little celebration that night.

It’s there where we meet Doctor Sue Fowler (a title she’s received, like many others in town, via extenuating circumstances), a woman who Sullivan has all sorts of history with.  The two were going to get married until Sullivan ran off to join Theodore Roosevelt’s famed “Rough Riders,” and fight for his country instead.  Sue was then forced to marry her second choice, a drunken abusive man named George, who she’s been stuck with ever since.

The two are absolutely still in love, but there’s nothing they can do about it, so all they can do is stare forelornly into one another’s eyes and wish things would’ve ended up differently.

However, their time together is about to get a lot more intimate, as that night, when Sullivan gets home, he finds that a woman who’s been shot to pieces has stumbled into and passed out in his house.  Sullivan races back to town, gets Sue, and the two do everything in their power to save the girl, a task that will be limited due to her near-death status and turn-of-the-century medicine.  However, the woman *is* holding on, just barely, and that means there’s hope of finding out what she’s doing here.

The next day, Sullivan and Tom follow the woman’s trail back to the hills, and find a brand new model-T Ford crashed into the river with two dead Federal agents inside.  When news hits town that a huge mobster trial is going on in Kansas City, everyone slowly puts the pieces together.  The woman is the star witness, and the mob is willing to do anything to put her out of commission.

And this is where things get interesting.  You see, it doesn’t take long for the mob to figure out the woman is still alive.  And that means they’ll be sending more people down to take care of her.  But what does the town do about this?  This isn’t their problem.  They don’t know this woman.  They just got done losing half their population to war and disease.  Things are finally starting to look up again.  Why get involved in more death, in more danger, when they don’t have to?  Let the mob have this girl and everyone can be on their merry way.

Except that’s not what Sullivan believes in.  You don’t abandon someone in need.  You don’t sacrifice someone who can’t fight for themselves.  Frank is one of the few people left on this planet who stands for something.  He believes in sticking your neck out and having your neighbor’s back.  Hell, he was part of the Rough Riders, the toughest crew in America.  Not to mention his own personal reason.  Frank watched helplessly as his family died one after another, unable to do anything.  He couldn’t save them.  But he can save this girl.

And this leads to one of the best third acts I’ve ever read or seen in my life.  Please for the love of everything, make this movie, because this third act is going to go down in fucking cinema lore.  When the mob strolls into that town, and Sullivan prepares for a showdown of him vs. them, I don’t remember ever being as electrified as I was in that moment.  I was just fucking CHARGED.  I’m not going to spoil everything that happens but I’ll just leave it at this: FUCKING AWESOME.

I suppose I should go into what works here, but I can never really do that with a script I fall in love with.  Basically, the script uses its first act to establish and make you fall in love with its characters, its second act to build the mystery of who the girl is, and it’s third act for the big showdown.  So yeah, in that sense, it’s perfectly freaking structured.

I suppose one can make the argument that the first act is slow, but I don’t know, I fell in love with the characters so much that I didn’t care that the story wasn’t emerging at warp speed.  I loved how Mariani established the setting.  That was so key – letting us know where America was at the moment, with everyone having lost someone, and then how that directly affected our main character.  Who doesn’t sympathize with someone who’s experienced such a terrible loss?  I was onboard with Sullivan from the moment I met him.

Then, when the mysterious girl shows up, it just gets better and better.  We have a mystery driving the story now – and an intriguing one.  Where did she come from?  Why was she shot at?  When we pull that car out of the river, I got goosebumps.  “Whoa,” I thought, “This is getting really good.”

And while this was happening, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of research and detail that went into everything.  There’s this throwaway moment early in the script, in town, where a group of old Civil War veterans marches down main street singing a solemn tune about their own war experience, and I just thought, “Who the hell thinks of that??”  That only comes from a writer who has just so immersed himself in that world, who knows 1918 so well, he might as well have grown up there.  Which is SO RARE in scripts I read, that a writer knows that much about what he’s writing about, which is one of the many reasons why Desperate Hours is so great.

Anyway, the script reaches the midpoint with this amazing dual thrust going on.  On the one hand you have the slow and steady buildup of the approaching mob.  It’s clear the town is in WAY over their heads with these guys, who are gradually cutting off all communication so the town can’t call for help.  And then you just have this amazing fucking character work, with each and every character having a backstory and a flaw they have to resolve before the end of the script.

Seeing Sullivan’s issues with George (Sue’s husband) play out — I can’t remember a more compelling character conflict.  I mean it’s just so layered and freaking INTENSE!  But it’s not just him.  It’s Tom, it’s the guy who brought the flu back to town, its the cowards versus the brave.  And that’s another thing!  Like we were talking about a few weeks ago – this script has a clear theme: FEAR.  The levels of it.  How we all back down.  How we’re all afraid.  But how there’s a time when you have to say enough is enough.  And how that moment is different for everyone.

AHHH!  This script is just so fucking good!

But when it really all comes together is the scene where THE STRANGER finally appears from a lone train, whistling through the town at night, a man who, we know, has come looking for this girl, and how he strolls into the bar, the most arrogant fearless mf’er in the world, and how he meets up with the only person on the planet who isn’t afraid of him.  This is one of the BEST SCENES I’VE EVER FREAKING READ!  When Sullivan tells The Stranger to “hold on” so he can go pummel the shit out of George, before coming back and telling The Stranger to “continue,” I was just…I was speechless.  And when the stranger walks back to the train, whistling the whole time, then finally STOPS, intitiating “the signal,” and we get one of the coolest fucking images we will ever see in movie history…I kind of thought I’d stumbled my way into script heaven.

I realize that at this point I’m a bumbling moron and not very helpful but this is what a great script does to me.  And by great, I mean REALLY GREAT.  As in going straight to the top of my Top 25 – and I mean WITHOUT QUESTION.  NUMBER 1!

This script….wow.  I mean…wow.  I don’t have words.  Whoever has this, please make it now.  You’re sitting on a dozen Oscars.

What I learned 1: SETTING in period pieces.  Establish it!  This script doesn’t work unless we get the opening title cards explaining that the flu and WW1 have obliterated America.  The town’s reluctance to engage the mob is a direct result of that, so without that knowledge, the script would’ve lost a ton.  Too many writers write period pieces without establishing what was happening at the time, and we need that context if we’re to understand and enjoy the story.

What I learned 2: Loss creates sympathy.  A main character losing someone makes us root for them.  Sullivan has lost THREE PEOPLE he loved more than anything.  So we care IMMENSELY for him right away.

What I learned 3: LIVE IN YOUR SCENES.  You can’t get the most out of your scenes unless you place yourself in them, unless you look into your characters eyes, notice the detail in the surrounding elements, breathe the air, listen to the sounds.  Immerse yourself in your scenes to find those little nooks and crannies that amateur writers ignore.  Detail is EVERYTHING.  It’s what makes your scene and story specific, unique.  There’s a great scene in Desperate Hours where Sullivan comes into town for the party riding his horse.  Times have changed though.  Everyone else has moved onto cars.  And Sullivan looks like an ancient has-been for tying his animal up next to these shiny metal technological beasts.  However, when a storm comes through later in the night, it’s Sullivan who looks like the smart one.  The cars are spinning their wheels, twisting around in the mud, whereas he casually hops up on his horse and gallops away.  I just don’t think you imagine a scene like that, with those cars digging their own graves, unless you place yourself down there in the mud, see the texture, taste it, realize that a 1918 Model T Ford probably isn’t going to be able to maneuver through mud that easily.

What I learned 4: ALWAYS KEEP YOUR MAIN SOURCE OF CONFLICT NEARBY – When Sullivan and Sue are nursing the girl back to health, Mariani doesn’t leave them alone there for long.  He gets George (Sue’s husband) over to the house and puts him there with them, causing all sorts of weird energy and tension.  Way more interesteing than giving Sue and Sullivan and unimpeded path back to a relationship.

(Posted by Sveta)

Carson is one magical creature but he can’t do it all himself. So…we’re hiring interns!

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Genre: Animation/Film Noir
Premise: In a futuristic world co-habitated by aliens and humans, the last human private eye is hired to investigate the fidelity of a well-known pop star.
About: Ray Gunn is an old project that writer-director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) wrote.  He’s gone on record as saying he’d like to revive the project, and might even do so after his next film, the earthquake pic, 1906.  Co-writer Matthew Robbins has had a long and interesting career, writing Spielberg’s first movie, The Sugarland Express, then later writing such films as Dragonslayer, Mimic, and Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark.  He’s currently working on the Guillermo Del Toro big screen adaptation of Pinocchio.
Writers: Brad Bird and Matthew Robbins (story by Brad Bird)
Details: 112 pages – June 28, 1996 draft

For those of you who’ve been told that you’re bad spellers or bad grammarists or bad at, you know, writing the right “their,” there is hope!  In 1996, Superstar director Brad Bird apparently didn’t know the difference between “it’s” and “its.”  For those of you wondering (and there should be a lot of you wondering – since I see this mistake ALL the time), “it’s” means “it is.”  If you’re writing “it’s” and it doesn’t mean “it is,” then you’re using it wrong.

And speaking of “it’s,” it’s a bad idea to write an animation spec!  Why?  Because animation specs never get purchased!  Those wily egotistical studios like to develop their animation ideas in-house.  Bastards!  However, if you’re really really into animation and want to write animation films someday, then writing a sample animation spec may be a good idea.  Just know that you probably ain’t going to sell it!

Okay, now that I’ve depressed you to pieces, let’s pick up those pieces and see if we can’t re-discover an amazing forgotten screenplay.

Raymund Gunn is a private eye in a future world where the private eye business has gone blind.  Or in other words, people don’t hire dicks anymore.  It’s much easier to get a spybot to do the job for you.  They’re cheaper and way better at the job.  So I guess you could say Ray is the last of a dying breed.

One day, the eccentric and very rich Arnold Dom pops into Ray’s office and offers him a much needed job.  He believes his wife, the ubiquitous pop star, Venus Envy, is cheating on him with another man.  So Ray goes off to do what he does best, and finds that Arnold is right.  Venus is intimately involved with a dude.  But not just any dude – an alien.

However, when Ray hands the photo proof over, he notices something odd.  Venus – or the woman he thought was Venus – is missing a tattoo on her hand.  Ray’s been had.  This is Venus’ body double in the salacious pics, not Venus.  And Arnold chose Ray (instead of a spybot) specifically because he knew he’d miss that detail.  Now, armed with this “proof,” he can clean up in the divorce settlement.

Feeling used, Ray stumbles around town all depressed-like, eventually running into Venus, who likes to sneak around town in disguise and sing her own songs under her alter-ego, Red.  The two start to fall for each other, but when Venus’ body double is murdered, Venus becomes the main suspect, and Ray will have to prove she’s innocent or lose the woman he’s fallen for forever.

Let’s start with the obvious.  Bird and co-writer Robbins have written an animation film about people cheating on each other and having sex with one another.  A PG-13 animation film is box office suicide.  So I’m confused as to why these two ever thought this was a viable project.

But even without that, there’s something very cliche and predictable about this story.  I suppose you have to play by the genre’s conventions to a certain extent but that doesn’t mean you should make every obvious choice in the book.  Private Eye.  Hired to prove a woman is cheating.  Ends up falling for the woman.  It all just felt so…familiar.  Even the whole alien-futuristic setting felt “been there-done that.”

If I’m being completely honest though, I’m not the best judge of film noir material.  I’ve said this before, but I need to feel emotionally connected to the characters to care about them and their story.  Film Noir seems to be more about the world to me – about the “cool” factor.  About the dirt and the grime and the double-crossing and the dialogue.  To me, all that stuff is icing on the cake, not the cake itself.  I’d rather explore a person’s flaws, their relationships, the overcoming of their past.  This just doesn’t seem to be the genre to explore that, so I’m typically bored.

And to heap even more honesty onto this review, these scripts are REALLY HARD to read.  You’re digging through miles and miles of world-building (describing your big unique sci-fi world) just to find the occasional dramatic moment, or read the rare entertaining scene.  Tack onto that an overly-complicated quadruple-crossing plot, and it becomes more like work to read Ray Gunn than fun.   Once that happens, it’s check-out time.

So the lack of an original story, the lack of excitement over this genre, and the messiness of this narrative just didn’t endear me to it.  Will be interesting to hear what you guys think though, especially you film noir fans!

What I learned: A screenplay should never feel like work to the reader.  The second it feels like work, you’ve failed.

Recently I’ve been talking a lot to John Jarrell, a screenwriter who’s been working in this business for over 20 years, and learning quite a bit from him. When he mentioned he was putting together a class, I told him that I had to promote it on the site, especially since I’ve been getting so many e-mails recently asking where the best screenwriting classes are.  I think you’ll be able to tell right away how awesome John is and how much damn knowledge he’s accumulated over his career.  But probably the best thing about John is what an awesome guy he is.  He’s just a great champion of screenwriters everywhere and really wants to help.  Enjoy the discussion and if you like John, sign up for his class here in Los Angeles!

SS: So tell us a little about yourself. Who are you?? What’s your screenwriting backstory?

JJ: Basically, I was a young guy who took on $50,000 worth of student loans to go to NYU Film and chase a dream of making movies one day. I literally drove out to L.A. in late 1990 with nothing but $200 dollars and my trusty ’66 VW Bug to my name. The old “confidence of ignorance” approach. (Not recommended, by the way.)

Five months later, with my Hollywood hopes and dreams being pulped into cream corn, I hit a clutch do-or-die shot and sold my first script. I was over the moon. Next thing I knew, I had real cash in my pocket and was flying home on a private G-3.

It had happened so fast, it all seemed to be too good to be true. Of course it actually was too good to be true. Which I learned pretty quickly.

My script didn’t get made and within a year I was broke and unemployed again. What followed was five unrelenting years of struggle simply trying to survive and put food in my mouth. (also not recommended)

But I did survive, and in ’97, based on a fresh spec, I got a break. I was signed by this small new agency called “Endeavor”. Things kinda took off after that.

Since then I’ve written films and tv pilots for many of the major studios and have worked with some of the best producers and directors in Hollywood. These include — Jeffrey Katzenberg, Neil Moritz, Joel Silver, Terence Chang & John Woo, Mike Medavoy, Richard Donner, Luc Besson, James Foley, Carl Beverly and Warren Littlefield.

Among other projects, I wrote “Hard-Boiled II” and a remake of Peckinpah’s “The Killer Elite” for John Woo, was one of the many, many writers on “Live Free, Die Hard” at Fox, and scripted the animated family film “Outlaws” for Dreamworks. I’ve also sold four tv pilots and just finished my first book — the real life memoir of a legendary Chinatown gangster from the ’70’s and ’80’s.