As my friends and family know, my dream career is to be a scriptwriter. I’ll divulge into the reasons why at a later date, but for now I want to take you on a trip down my memory lane by showing scripts I wrote between December 2003 and late 2008. I’ve been writing for much longer, but all scripts pre-2003 were lost in a reformatting accident. And as for post-2008, blame that on extreme writer’s block.
I have divided the scripts into five categories as follows:
TRUEBLOOD TV
This was written in 2003-4, long before the first name was taken by a town full of hicks and vampires. It’s a comedy about a man who believes he is in a television show, and causes havoc in the name of getting ratings. At this time, I was heavily inspired by Family Guy. I betrayed my concept within ten pages of Episode 1 and – more or less – just wrote episodes of Family Guy but with different names and such. Episode 1 is set at Christmas time. Episode 2 is about the benefits of robbery. And Episode 3 is called ‘The Trueblood-Cheerleader Fist Conference’, which just sounds like a porno. Yeah, this series as a whole was bizarre, but it’s one I’ve returned to (more on that at a later date too).
SHORT FILM SCRIPTS
After a script of mine – Colonel Batman, about a bigheaded, copyright infringing superhero – was filmed with friends, I became obsessed with the idea of doing short films. However, the only other script to receive this treatment was my A-Level coursework: Mes Heutoirs Enormes, possibly the only film in the world to parody the French New Wave era of cinema. I believe that’s Tim’s muddy shoe print on page 1. Anyway, two scripts that weren’t filmed were Twenty-Three, a semi-funny science fiction script; and Where’s Me Gold?, which I’m officially renaming ‘A Load of Old Bollocks’ because it is.
VIRTUAL SERIES
I can’t be arsed to go into detail what a virtual series is, so here’s a link to an explanation on MZP. My contributions to MZP have been meagre. There’s a pilot called Bill, about a demon living at university with two slackers, and an episode of Natasha Tyreen that won’t make any sense unless you read the preceding nine episodes. The Tyreen script was so appalling, the showrunner didn’t write any more episodes. That’s never a good sign.
THE IDIOT BOX
Another virtual series idea was called The Idiot Box, an aggressively titled show about four people actually in the world of television, channel hopping between a variety of shows. Apparently Stay Tuned, a 1992 John Ritter film, has the same concept but I’ve never seen it to find out. Episode 1 saw the characters in a Friends-style sitcom, and Episode 2 was in the style of M*A*S*H and other war shows. I aim to return to this concept in the future.
UNIVERSITY
Not a lot here. Limb By Limb was a script for my second year scriptwriting module that was too safe, and got a poor mark as a result. It didn’t stop me from entering it into the 2008 Kaos Films Short Script Competition, where I went through to the first round proper. This meant I was in the best 500 scripts out of 2000. The other 1500 must’ve been submitted on toilet paper or something. There’s also the script to Site 047. My friend Dave came up with the concept and a first draft. I self-contained the story and wrote two action scenes.
And that’s it. Riveting stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.
