Projects
These are samples of my screenplays, film/TV treatments, own fictional stories and other projects since being selected as one of the first 'most promising' new British screenwriters for the UK film industry's inaugural Screenwriters Studio.
GETTING REAL - British
Documentary from Free Cinema to Free Market
: major doc project charting the history and themes of British documentary, from the B & W analogue 1950’s to the colour-saturated digital era of 2000, recognised around the world as a jewel in Britain’s cultural crown yet unsung in its own land. Its practitioners and their work bear witness to the rise and fall of the post-War Dream and the dawn of a new era with digitech and the internet (see here).
OUT OF THE DARK -
Hitchcockian detective story/horror movie set in the UK and Africa. Based on the 2003 bestselling book Out of The Dark, a true ‘buried memory’ story about suicidal mother Linda Caine, a Baptist, and her journey back to sanity with the help of Jungian psychotherapist Robin Royston, who risks his career to save her life. A unique exploration of faith and psychology (see Outline/Storyline and Screenplay Samples).
TIME DOES NOT HEAL
- a true story about Chilean exile and psychotherapist Luis Munoz's return to his homeland in 2002 to testify against his former Pinochet torturers, which involves him having to face his now adult daughter whom he was prepared to sacrifice for his for comrades and his cause. A psychodrama based on Munoz’s autobiographical book ‘Being Luis’ (2005) and his experiences of the long-term costs of political commitment and torture.
IN THE WINGS
- offbeat coming-of-age true story of Valerie Rossmore's adoption from age 7 to 18 by the founders of Dublin's legendary Gate Theatre the mesmeric Irish gay actor/writer/designer Micheál MacLiammóir, who was in love with her father, and Micheal's lifetime partner director Hilton Edwards. A magical, emotional, erotically charged scenario of 1960’s early gay parenting.
CONVERSATIONS WITH AN
EXECUTIONER
- true story of a Polish World War Two Resistance hero’s incarceration by the Stalinist regime in a cell with the Nazi General responsible for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. Based on the 1977 book ‘Conversations With An Executioner’ by Kazimierz Moczarski, an extraordinary insight into the mind and making of a Nazi.
CITIZEN KEYNES
- TV drama documentary on John Maynard Keynes set in the critical 1929-1936 period when Keynes, closely involved with the Bloomsbury Group, was crystallising his radical new economic theories following the 1929 Crash, now being resurrected to save the world's economic system.MATUSHKA
– a fictional teenage love story about a well-born young girl’s descent into the world of a gang of wild, destitute orphans of the Russian Civil War and Revolution and her affair with the gang’s peasant boy leader. Love, sex, drugs and politics set amid the epic events of the time.STEP BY STEP
- a romantic comedy about two young phobics.
CRAZY LILA
- A tender love and betrayal thriller about an unconventional Resistance agent's work on an escape 'line' in Occupied France helping Allied servicemen evade capture by the Germans and return to Britain, using her small son as cover. When her 'line' recruiter becomes both her lover and her boy's longed-for stepfather the story takes a dramatic twist. A fictional Hitchcockian movie inspired by the true experiences of my mother Elizabeth Furse and my half-brother Anthony Haden-Guest.
THE CRUNCH
- a major fictional thriller set in the near future, based on own original story/treatment. In a debt-ridden UK Britons from all walks of life battle with the forces of the financial markets, part of an international struggle to free the world from the yoke of debt. As civil resistance amasses, the threat of a UK default looms. If the UK defaults the world goes bust. Three ordinary British families from across the social divides are caught up in these epochal events (see here).
THE ROARING BOY
- Patrick Maguire's true story as the youngest child of the Maguire Family, wrongly convicted as IRA bombers in 1976. A poignant, tragi-comic journey from Patrick's devastated boyhood to its adult nadir and redemption at the time of the 'war on terror' 30 years later, when Muslim rather than Irish people are in the line of the State's fire. Based on Maguire's autobiography My Father's Watch (2008), written with Carlo Gébler.
BLIND FLIGHT
- based on the No 1 Bestsellers An Evil Cradling (1992) by Brian Keenan and Some Other Rainbow (1993) by John McCarthy and Jill Morrell, whose combined sales topped 1.5 million, about the two mens’ extraordinary relationship during their 4 ½ years together as hostages of Islamicist militias in Lebanon in the 1980’s (see Production Highlights).
STORMY WEATHER
- a colourful, touching, tragi-comic satire on Britain since the 1940's centred on the true story of a misfit father and son relationship between the gay, iconoclastic artist/film maker Derek Jarman and his World War Two RAF hero father, a New Zealander who longed for English respectability. Based on Jarman’s life, books and work (see Film Treatments).