Romance
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
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
Geraniums Are Red
Genre(s): Romance
Logline:
Geraniums Are Red seeks to reveal how a seemingly normal woman can be so attracted to the dark side.
Synopsis:
Anna Kerbey is a bored and restless small-town wife and schoolteacher. She doesn’t know quite what’s missing in her life until she meets Jean-Guy, a poetry-loving bank robber who writes to her from prison. Initially she goes to see him out of curiosity and compassion. But when she meets a charismatic hustler, she succumbs to the awakening of her deepest emotions and falls in love.
When Jean-Guy is released, he sweeps Anna off on a life of adventure which quickly turns into a world of petty crime, broken promises and violence, a world she knew nothing of and now sees only too well.
Author Info:
CAROLYN MAMCHUR is a professor at Simon Fraser University and the award-winning author of several psychology texts and children’s books. She has written seven feature film scripts including Arousal (based on a Barbara Gowdy story) for Back Alley Films; and a half-hour drama for CBC.
CAROLYN MAMCHUR, Writer
(604) 736-4060 Fax
Agent: Shain Jaffe
Great North Artists Management
(416) 925-2051
Or contact Praxis
Lady S
Genre(s): Dark Comedy, Drama, Romance
Logline:
To maintain her freedom and improve her lot in life, a seductive, impoverished widow plays both ends against the middle with her grown daughter, her family, and various men, but is undone by an ungovernable passion for an unsuitable lover.
Synopsis:
Jane Austen's first novel – dark, funny, sexy, with a heroine quite unlike the well-behaved virgins of her later works – is the basis for this screenplay.
In terms of content and tone, Lady S suggests a late-night tryst between Dangerous Liaisons and Sense and Sensibility. The book, like the lady, is controversial. Some Austenites tend to suppress this early work, finding it too disturbing for the gentle-Jane canon. At first glance, this story does seem far removed from the girlish goings-on of later Austen; but in fact Lady S introduces a vigorous female spirit whose wit and strength of will are very much in keeping with the bright, assertive, deliciously outspoken heroines of Emma or Pride and Prejudice.
Lady S spans one year in the life of a notoriously alluring female libertine, a woman who, according to one rival, “has to have all the men”. At thirty-six, lovely, wicked Lady Susan is considered decades too old for the multiple amours she’s conducting; but such perceptions do not deter her. Recently widowed, encumbered with an awkward teenage daughter, large debts, and a bad reputation, she knows the marriage market may now be her only salvation. Yet, passionately drawn to a wholly unsuitable man – penniless, seductive, married Manwaring – and repelled by the prospect of renewed marital imprisonment with some wealthy 'protector', she risks all to live and love on her own terms. Her attempt to follow her heart, to survive husbandless on charm and wit alone, is doomed; but even when her greatest feat overtakes her and she is forced to wed a rich, brainless fop, her dignity never falters. Ironically, her daughter, despite dreaminess and (in her mother’s view) a dangerous lack of self-control, ends up gaining the love match Lady Susan is denied.
Lady S offers many pleasures: a tale of erotic intrigue in which mother and daughter vie for love, sex, and money; a comedy of manners wherein social and sexual hypocrisy are exuberantly laid bare; a compelling narrative whose satire is rooted in Freud’s timeless question 'what do women really want?'. Above all, in the person of Lady Susan – complex, seductive, indomitable – the screenplay brings to light an original and fascinating character.
Author Info:
MICHELE ADAMS has an M.A. in English literature, and a special interest in the 18th century. She has published fiction and reviews, recently completed a novel, worked for CBC Radio as a writer/broadcaster – and continues to freelance as writer/editor in a variety of forms. Her second screenplay, Fat Girl, set in 1963 Winnipeg, tells the tragi-comic story of a love triangle involving a fourteen-year-old boy, a beautiful nun, and the quirky “Fat Girl” of the title.
MICHELE ADAMS, Writer
1149 Lily Street
Vancouver, BC V5L 4H5
(604) 253-5828
madams@idmail.com
Agent: Dacia Moss
Lucas Talent
(604) 685-0345
Sweet Nothings
Genre: Comedy / Romance
Logline: Sweet Nothings is a fast-paced, character-driven comedy about the modern search for romance.
Synopsis: Taylor, Thompson and Crater are all single men approaching "The Big Three-O"; they're long-time friends despite differing views on life, love and commitment. When gal-pal Carrie Hunter tells them that a legendary friend of hers – "The Perfect Woman" – will be at The Live Volcano on Friday night, each guy secretly plans to venture alone into that mysterious night-time world to find her. They will risk everything – even their lives – to meet the woman of their dreams.
Author Info: JOHN LAWSON, JAI DIXIT and SHELDON INKOL are graduates of the York University film program. They have completed seven screenplays together, in addition to solo projects.
Lawson is an accomplished assistant director, as well as the co-writer of both No Exit and Jungle Boy. Dixit's short film The Unbelievable Story of Ellison Spinrad, Aria Von Sniper and the Puzzle of Easy Enlightenment has been screened extensively across Canada. And Inkol is the co-writer of two features, Specimen and Carver's Gate (aka Dream Breaker), the latter of which he also directed.
SHELDON INKOL, JAI DIXIT & JOHN LAWSON, Writers
Sheldon Inkol
147 Borden Street
Toronto, ON M5S 2N2
(416) 323-3537
(416) 652-0390
(416) 323-9148 Fax
sheldoninkol@netscape.net or greedy@interlog.com
Agent: Linda Saint
The Saint Agency
60 Pleasant Boulevard, Suite 801
Toronto, Ontario M4T 1K1
416-944-8200
416-944-3700 Fax
linda@thesaintagency.com
Or contact Praxis