PROJECTS

May, 2017


What I'm currently working on:



JUNIOR AMERICANS, the next "THE SANDLOT" for a new generation.  Based on a true story about the first, last and only time a National American Little League team was coached by kids the same age as the players - 14 year-olds.  Set against the background of American Little League baseball, it’s a story about the power of friendship and the stresses, worries, difficulties and hard decisions that taking your first steps into the grown-up world put on that friendship.

Oh, and it's funny as hell too.



THE ODYSSEY OF EDWARD MORRELL , based on a true story and told as a first-person reminiscence by an aging Edward Morrell, the first and last man in the United States ever sentenced to life in solitary confinement, with no chance to be let out of his cell - recounts his astonishing odyssey to a skeptical newspaperman in 1946.



HEMINGWAY'S HERO, an original screenplay that me and my writing partner Paul Jaconi-Biery wrote as a vehicle for my friend Peter Fonda to star in.  It is completed and we have a foreign sales company on board.


THE HAOLE SUBSTITUTE, a screenplay based on the book by Walt Novak, which I co-wrote with Michael Schiffer.  I have a huge announcement about this project coming next week.  Here's a link to the book on Amazon:

The Haole Substitute by Walt Novak


PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY (PCH), created by David Mickey Evans and Howard Burkons.








A Time…

Their dream was freedom.  And for the post WWII generation, freedom was found along the most famous road on earth – Pacific Coast Highway.  

For the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation, after Holden Caulfield gave them permission to seek their own freedom on their own terms, that journey was taken along PCH.  In the ten years from 1958 to 1969 a group of friends, five men and two women, tested the limits of freedom along PCH’s most iconic stretches.  From Hollister Ranch to the Mexican border and beyond, they left no wave un-surfed, as they lived, loved, fought, and sometimes betrayed each other, and learned that whatever your idea of freedom is, it isn’t free.  Some learned the lesson, some paid with their lives. 

These are the living, breathing human beings – barely out of their teens – who took the counter-culture out of the pages of Salinger and Kerouac and lived it.  They brought the anti-establishment into the real world.  These are the characters that flipped a gigantic middle finger to the status quo...

... these are The Nomads.

A Place…

Borrowing from the real world of California power-broker families (the Hearsts, the Dohenys) and the real world of the pioneer surf culture (Butch Van Artsdalen, Candy Calhoun, John Severson, Bunker Spreckels), PCH explores, like never before, the clash of these two worlds at a unique time in history.  The Donnellys are the establishment, and Jack, and The Nomads, the counter-culture.  PCH, while being about wealth and power, loyalty and treachery, and love and hate within these two “families,” is primarily a story about the battle between them that begins in 1959 with the emergence of the greatest youth movement in history, and will, by 1969, forever redefine the American Dream.

PCH, like its title suggests, traverses the incongruent worlds of the rich and poor, the uptight and the uninhibited, dramatizing the conflicting passions and mores of our young characters and their intimate, compelling stories.  Highly visual and in constant motion, PCH is erotic, intense, crass, arrogant, funny, dramatic and always unsettling; a bold adult look into a new generation at war with itself and its ancestors, the impact of which literally shaped today’s youth.

A Revolution…

PCH is not a nostalgic look at the past; it is the past as present tense – immediate and very real.  It is a brutally honest look at ten years (1959–1969) that changed adolescent culture first in America and, eventually, worldwide.  It depicts a time of innocence lost, of radical, social upheaval, in a world where the drama is real, the passions high, and the physical jeopardy raw and cinematic.

PCH flies by with the reckless speed of outlaw street drag racing, and moves with the balletic grace of the most powerful forces on the planet; always excitingly unpredictable. 

Our main characters, collectively known as The Nomads, the children of The Greatest Generation, are not a cozy band of misunderstood misfits.  They’re frontiersmen and women; sexy and sexed-up “kids” who love like crazy, fight like hell, are willing to take on anything the world has to offer, rebel for rebellion’s sake, push envelopes of their own making, create Art and propagate a Lifestyle that will define a generation, spawn a sub-culture that will go on to become the dominant youth movement of the next 50 years, and of course, surf the most life-threatening waves on Earth.

They are us, unleashed, living life to the fullest and way out of bounds – in a blue-sky world with breathtaking sunrises and sunsets framing the days of their priceless youth.  

And we can’t take our eyes off of them.


INTENSIVE CARE, a Samuel Goldwyn-Award winning drama, written by Lawrence Hughes Stern.