Armed and Dangerous
with a Handful of Screenplays
So I blasted into 2026 in a writing fury.
And now, 20 days into the New Year, I am armed and dangerous… with a handful of screenplays*
Before I get into that, though, I’d like to point you in the direction of my podcast appearance on Kent Hill’s Cinema Yugen.
Here’s the SPOTIFY LINK, but it’s available on all your other podcast platforms as well, I believe.
Kent and I have known one another for about a decade or more. We’ve never actually met, not in the real world, anyway, as he’s in Australia and I’m in the UK, but we’ve chatted online for years. Mainly because we’re both film nuts and both screenwriters. I’ve appeared on his podcast before, and we also collaborated on a screenplay in 2021.
During the recording of this recent podcast, Kent mentioned the aforementioned screenplay. It was from an idea I had, a gleefully schlocky genre mash-up which, in a nutshell, is GANGSTERS VS ALIENS. Yes, we’ve had Cowboys, so why not Gangsters!
We wrote the script five years ago, and then, I’ll be honest, I kinda forgot about it. At the time, we called it ‘One Last Heavy Whack’, which doesn’t really mean anything, so when we started talking about it again during the podcast, I suggested having a title that simply says what it is on the tin.
After we recorded the podcast, Kent messaged me to say he had the title, and boy, did he! He also sent me an AI picture with this new title. Now, I’m weary of using AI (not least because it is modelled on theft), but for mock-up posters, to get an idea across, I’ll admit, it is quite handy. (It’s a slippery slope, though, but that’s a whole other can of worms.)
Anyway, here’s what he sent me:
Slop, maybe, but gotta say, it made me laugh. Enough to get me moving on a rewrite. So, since recording the podcast, I have smashed out a page 1 redraft, honing the story and characters, and made it even more ridiculous and funny, hopefully. Plus, I think I’ve got it to a far more production-ready place. (So if there are any producers out there reading this…)
So now I’ve got Spacefellas (title still makes me laugh), the stag-do horror Last Night of Freedom, which I wrote with Dan Howarth, and a big-budget actioner called The Magnificent Mile, co-written with Matthew Waldram. Plus, I’m currently co-writing another schlocky horror with my good friend David Bryant. And there are other writing projects on the horizon.
All this stuff is going out into the world, so we’ll see what happens.
In other news, Adam Park told me there’s a distributor interested in The Wilding, so it looks like that is getting picked up (although I think they want to change the title, something else I discuss on Kent’s Podcast), and Improper Bastards has begun pre-production in earnest for a possible April/May shoot date. It would be nice to get that one in the can before my 51st birthday in June.
Just got The House on Lidderman Street to get sorted now. Watch this space…
Anyway, a Bumper (Sub)Stack this week, to see in 2026. Back on Thursday with a post entitled ‘My Life as a Failed Novelist’.
Onwards!
* I didn’t write them all in 20 days.