Drama
Abby's Place
Genre(s): Drama
Logline:Rodney fixes up a lake cabin in northern Alberta as a healing place for his wife, Abby, who prepares a path for him to discover after she is gone.
Synopsis:
Abby is dying. Rodney, her husband, knowing she is preoccupied with water, buys a cabin on a lake in northern Alberta, hoping it will be a healing place. Rodney's eager hands fix up the cabin and gradually Abby gets better. She and Rodney find a new understanding in their love for each other and kindle an unlikely romance between Rodney's assistant, Maxi, and Clyde, the operator of the town dump. Clyde opens his heart to Maxi, a self-styled crone who presents her quilts as poetic, magical markers for the journeys in life of those she loves. After the inevitable happens, and time begins to fall out of Abby's hands, Rodney discovers the gift that has been laid for him at
Abby's Place.
Bio:
KATHERINE KOLLER's plays for CBC Radio include
Cowboy Boots and a
Corsage, Magpie, and
Going to the Dump. Her stage plays have been produced at the Edmonton Fringe Festival and Jagged Edge Lunchbox Theatre. Katherine has won several awards for her radio, stage and screenplays, including two Praxis fellowships and two Alberta Screenwriting competitions. She has also attended the NSI Writer's Workshop, the Banff Writing for Series Television course and the NSI Writers' Roundtable.
KATHERINE KOLLER, Writer
Tel: (780) 436-7272
Fax; (780) 436-7272
kkoller@donovans.ca
Bleed
Genre(s): Drama
Logline:
An edgy contemporary drama about three women, their relationship, their sex lives, and a stalker who threatens them all.
Synopsis:
Bleed is a contemporary dramatic thriller about three women facing their demons with men. Recently single, Alexis is a cold, attractive VJ who is unwittingly being stalked by Jason, an obsessed fan. In an attempt to get to her, Jason sleeps with her room-mate Jeanette, discovering that she has a penchant for video taping intimate liaisons. Ines leaves her boyfriend when he says no to keeping their baby. She moves in with Alexis and Jeanette and together they battle with their stuff around men, their friendship and lives threatened by the machinations of the obsessed and disturbed Jason.
Bio:
A graduate of the film program at Simon Fraser University, PENELOPE BUITENHUIS has worked as a director/filmmaker in Canada and Europe for the last 16 years. Her feature film credits as director include Boulevard with Rae Dawn Chong, Lance Henriksen and Lou Diamond Philips; the thriller Dangerous Attraction; and Trouble, written and directed in Berlin, which received Best Film honours at numerous festivals.
In television, Buitenhuis directed the Gemini-nominated CBC MOW Giant Mine, as well as several television series episodes including Hope Island, Madison, Wind at my Back, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Lonesome Dove and the pilot for Cold Squad. She has also written and directed three documentaries and fifteen short films. She is in development with a new feature script, Punk Not Dead.
PENELOPE BUITENHUIS, Writer
2098 E. 19th Ave.
Vancouver, BC V5N 2J3
Agent: Carl Liberman
The Characters
Tel: (416) 964-8522
Bottom's Dream
Genre(s): Comedy, Romance, Drama, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller
Logline:
William Shakespeare solves a murder that his best friend, Hamlet Sadler, had been accused of, and in the process uncovers a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth the First.
Synopsis:
A young (22) William Shakespeare, married to Anne Hathaway (28), is a father to three small children and unsuited to follow in his father's trade as a glover. Stuck in the backwater town of Stratford-upon-Avon, he is at loose ends. Thus...
Shakespeare is caught poaching the rabbits of Sir John Lucy and is viciously flogged for his efforts. He swears, despite the penalty of death, to poach Lucy's prize stag.
A riot at the annual Stratford Fair, caused in part by Shakespeare's friends led by Hamlet Sadler, has town elders on edge and worried about seditious behavior in these troubling times. Before the young men can be apprehended, a merchant is murdered and Sadler is accused.
To complicate matters, Queen Elizabeth is visiting Stratford, ostensibly to raise troops to fight the Spanish Armada, but in reality to secretly gain intelligence about an assassination plot against her life.
Bio:
JIM HAMM is a Vancouver-based writer, producer and director of documentary films. This script is based on his own short docudrama, Smile and Dial. The Boiler Room reached the finals in BC Film's New Views competition.
JIM HAMM, Writer
3993 Perry Street
Vancouver, BC V5N 3X2
Te: (604) 874-1110
Charlie's War
Genre(s): Drama • Mystery/Suspense/Thriller
Logline:19 year-old Charlie Boyle falls under the spell of a charismatic white supremacist and tracks down an anti-racist vigilante who is trying to kill him.
Synopsis:
Charlie Boyle is a high school dropout with attitude to burn. Playing guitar with his new band is the only thing that truly turns his crank. When the band finds itself without a place to practice, Karl Hoffert lets them use an old cabin on his property. Hoffert has a secret agenda -- he is a white supremacist. Two members of Charlie's band belong to his National Front and he figures the music will attract kids to the movement. But he's going to have to bide his time; Charlie has made it clear he 's not interested in playing in the 'house band'.
When Charlie's father finds out what he's up to, he orders Charlie to stay away from Hoffert. But Charlie has never listened to his father and he's not about to start now, not when the band has landed its first gig and he 's fallen in love with Hoffert's 17 year-old daughter, Julia. Charlie storms out of the house and into Hoffert's welcoming arms.
Julia knows Charlie is making a mistake in trusting her father; she begs him to get out before it's too late. But when an anti-racist vigilante blows up the band's cabin, nearly killing a little girl, the die is cast. Charlie joins forces with Hoffert in a hunt for their enemy. The hunt sets off a deadly chain of events that forces Charlie to confront his dark side before it destroys both himself and the love he has found with Julia.
Author Info:
MICHAEL BETCHERMAN is a Toronto-based screenwriter. His first feature film script, Still Waters, won the Gold Award for Best Thriller at the Houston Film Festival (WorldFest Houston). His television credits include Street Legal, Side Effects and Exhibit A. He is currently writing and producing Justice Denied, a 90 minute pilot for TNT about the wrongfully convicted.
MICHAEL BETCHERMAN, Writer
142 Robert Street
Toronto, ON
M5S 2K3
(416) 924-2143
(416) 924-1617 Fax
bumper@interlog.com
Cowboy Boots and a Corsage
Genre(s): Drama
Logline:Roxanne, seventeen and full of spark, can hardly wait to get out of small town southern Alberta, but it means leaving her newly-widowed mother, Jeannie, who is unemployed and screaming at cows.
Synopsis:
Ever since her dad dropped dead at Harry's Bar, all Roxanne wants is to get out of small town southern Alberta, but she's going nowhere fast. Her mom, Jeannie, has lost hold of Roxanne and clings to her half-section of prairie grass. When Roxanne considers dropping out of school, Jeannie takes the only job she'll ever get -- at Harry's Bar. While Roxanne dumps her steady boyfriend and experiments with guys passing through town, Jeannie finds unexpected satisfaction and even romance at the bar -- until the night she nearly gets her daughter killed. The whole town and the prairie that surrounds it share in this struggle of a girl trying to graduate and a woman trying to start over. In the end, it's rebuilding their family that matters most, and Roxanne finds out from Jeannie where they first began in a private mother-daughter celebration.
Author Info:
KATHERINE KOLLER's plays for CBC Radio include Cowboy Boots and a Corsage, Magpie, and Going to the Dump. Her stage plays have been produced at the Edmonton Fringe Festival and Jagged Edge Lunchbox Theatre. Katherine has won several awards for her radio, stage and screenplays, including two Praxis fellowships and two Alberta Screenwriting competitions. She has also attended the NSI Writer's Workshop, the Banff Writing for Series Television course and the NSI Writers' Roundtable.
KATHERINE KOLLER, Writer
(780) 436-7272
(780) 436-7272 Fax
kkoller@donovans.ca
Cryin' Time
Genre(s): Comedy, Drama
Logline:Cryin' Time is a boisterous hard-driving romantic comedy set in rural Nova Scotia. Dreams are what movies are made of, and the theme of this feature film/M.O.W. is taking chances, making choices and risking it all for a dream.
Synopsis:Country music is the musical mythic archetype that surround sounds the action and underscores the changing world of the characters in a place that has turned in on itself, as past, present and future are tossed against each other in the tilt-a-whirl pursuit of love, lust, and ultimately, the control of personal destinies; whether the battleground is a sexy lingerie mafia with Mary Kay fantasies, a circus ride repair sculpture, or a white trash trailer filled with cardboard cut-outs of the gods and goddesses of country music.
To quote a recent Telefilm reader's report, "What we have here is a strong central character, an interesting metaphor and a rich collection of incidents. It's a story of personal discovery with a delightful edge of black comedy; a hard drinking, sexually charged world peopled by engaging and often funny characters; this could make a winning movie."
Author Info:
T.H. HATTE is a nationally produced playwright, screenwriter, and director. Mr. Hatte's screenplay Finn's Rock is currently in development with Salter Street Films. The documentary he directed, Alana, was broadcast on Vision Television in January.
A writer of over a dozen half-hour dramas on film and video, including A Fist A Nail and Two Windows, which was produced when Mr. Hatte was a writer resident at the Canadian Film Centre, and winner of the Silver Bar Award, at the Austrian Film Festival.
Most recently, Moose Meat, a half-hour drama written and directed by Mr. Hatte, was broadcast on CBC's Sunday Arts and Entertainment program, and his stage play, The Last Words Of Duct Schultz toured theatres across Canada.
Mr. Hatte's teen feature film script, Anchor Zone (produced by Red Ochre Productions of Newfoundland) was released theatrically in Canada through Norstar Entertainment, and distributed around the world through Alliance Releasing.
T.H. Hatte lives in Halifax.
T.H. HATTE, Writer
PO Box 31110
Halifax, NS B3K 5T9
(902) 453-0347
thatte@ns.sympatico.ca
The Cure For Death
Genre(s): Action/Adventure, Drama, Romance
Logline:
The lives of a young African American, a white Klansman, and a young boy are all linked by their common father, Darby Turner.
Synopsis:
Willis Turner wakes up one rainy night to hear someone stealing his only asset, his motorcycle, from the carport downstairs. A couple of weeks later, the police retrieve the bike in Delaney, Texas, 300 miles southeast. When Willis tells his mother Leona he's taking the bus to Delaney, she warns him to stay home and forget the bike. Delaney has changed. An African American is the sheriff, an African American woman the deputy. But racism hasn't gone away, it has merely gone underground.
Willis’s half-brother A.J. Turner is a hate-fueled cross-burner for the local KKK. Fresh out of prison for burning a black church, A.J. dreams of his role as head of the local Klan, believing he can bring on the Armageddon prophesied in the Bible. Willis’s father, Daryl Turner, a business leader in the small community, is a weak man torn between the knowledge that people are all the same under the skin, and conflicted by his need to conduct business in a community that refuses to let go of its hate.
Willis retrieves his stolen motorcycle, but the bike was damaged and needs repairs. Working on it in A.J.’s outboard repair shop, he learns of a Klan cross-burning planned for a farmer's field. Willis sneaks into the ceremony and risks his life to thwart the Klansmen’s plan to burn down a mixed-race church with everyone in it. He narrowly escapes the hooded Klansmen and their dogs pursuing him through the woods.
In town, Sheriff Jack Raine and deputy Dee Bogue, tipped off to the plot, evacuate the church and defuse the explosives. A.J. escapes, but is caught the next day in the backroads of Louisiana. Dee finds love in the arms of A.J.'s girlfriend. Willis rides off on his repaired motorcycle. And the world returns to equilibrium.
Author Info:
JOHN SHINNICK was born in East Texas, educated briefly by Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. He built schools as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Gabon, operated rural development programs in Senegal, and emigrated to Canada in 1970. He studied creative writing with W.O. Mitchell at the Banff School of Fine Arts in the late Seventies, won fiction competitions in the Okanagan, and served as an editor with Pacific Yachting Magazine for 13 years. Today he operates an online used and rare-book business, freelances for various magazines and is writing his fourth spec screenplay between bouts of editing B.C. Shorelines Business Letter and Media-Wave.com, an online publication devoted to film and television.
JOHN SHINNICK, Writer
916 West Broadway, #580
Vancouver, BC V5Z 1K7
(604) 618-7086
(604) 618-9570 Fax
john@media-wave.com
The Dolly Rockers
Genre(s): Comedy, Drama
Logline:
The Dolly Rockers is a rock 'n roll road movie about an all-girl band chasing a dream down the Trans Canada in the winter of '74.
Synopsis:
Winter, 1974. The Dolly Rockers, an all girl rock band, are about to hit the Trans-Canada in a rusty Econoline to meet an oil rich Calgarian who has promised them a record deal.
For Frankie, the talented lead guitarist with the soul of Jeff Beck, the road trip means escape from her beautiful girlfriend. She is tortured by her homosexuality and heavily into denial. Instead she takes too many drugs, loses herself in her amazing blues-influenced guitar work, and insists the band get on the road. This means taking on Honey, an opinionated small town singer seemingly out of her depth in this heavy duty band.
For Liz, the aging drummer with bad wrists, the trip is an all or nothing bid to relive a moment of lost glory and bury the ghost of her