Karmic Buyback: A Pilot Program, a screenplay, is the story of Oliver Harker, a water resources engineer in his early thirties, adrift in a world of lost social connections. Aside from this work, which he describes as "just a lot of redundant paperwork," his only connection to the outside world is his exuberant younger brother Van. With no father to speak of, and harboring long term resentment against his mother who ran away to Africa the day after Van's high school graduation, Oliver's defining tragic moment came three years earlier. It was then he discovered Eva, the woman he planned to marry, cheating with an old flame. Isolating himself from his few remaining friends, Oliver has become a short-tempered, unbearable grump. Meanwhile Eva, unbeknownst to Oliver, has recently died. She wakes to find herself in a strange, antiseptic afterlife where she is given the opportunity to repair some of the bad karma she accumulated in her short life, specifically in regard to Oliver. As Van begins to help him reestablish social ties, an accident which lands Oliver in the hospital finally draws their mother back across the Atlantic. Oliver must decide between Eva, in her foolish attempts to win him back as a result of the ultimately misguided Karmic Buyback Pilot Program, and the real people who love him.

A father addicted to gambling returns home after 13 years and has to pick up the shattered pieces of his failed relationships.

This report documents the creative process that resulted in the feature screenplay "Magic Mountain," including the first inspiration for a dramatic thriller, initial attempts to devise character and plot, writing and rewriting script pages, and then the radical change of genre and artistic intention toward surrealist comedy, culminating with the final sequence of rewriting during the thesis semester. / text

"Bleeding Hearts: How Revising a Mediocre Screenplay Helped Me Find My Voice" examines the development of Joseph Pudas’ feature screenplay Bleeding Hearts. It tracks the course of how Bleeding Hearts was written and provides a candid look at the creative process, specifically how the writing and rewriting of this particular screenplay helped Pudas discover truths about his sensibilities and limitations. In his two years at the University of Texas, Pudas took the opportunity to experiment with different genres and tones in order to pinpoint his strengths and weaknesses as a screenwriter. Bleeding Hearts was initially intended as a straightforward romantic comedy set in the political sphere, but early on Pudas encountered difficulties with tone and genre (romantic comedy vs. cynical political satire) that would continue to persist throughout the bloated first draft. With the assistance of his peers and thesis committee, Pudas reworked the concept and wrote a more streamlined, romantic draft closer in line to what he originally envisioned the project to be. / text

The following work is a feature length screenplay about Anna Morris, an 18-year-old girl who finds herself faced with a moral dilemma when her estranged father, Robert, contacts her on her 18th birthday. When she learns about Robert’s past involvement in an online child pornography ring Anna must decide if she can forgive him, or -- more importantly -- if he is worthy of forgiveness. However, as the story unfolds we find that it is not just Anna who needs to forgive. This story approaches issues of repentance, growth, and the journey into adulthood as Anna takes on each new challenge.

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“From Slasher to Slaptsick: How Rewriting The Queen Bee Took Me from Horror to Teen Comedy” examines the process of switching preferred film genres through rewriting an existing script on assignment. / text

This document recounts the development of my feature length horror screenplay “Woodwork,” from the conception of the idea through the completion of three separate drafts. It attempts to inform the reader of the choices made that led to the subsequent changes in each draft, as well as examining elements of the story (or backstory) that remain absent in the final draft. It also describes the evolution of myself as a writer over the nearly two-year period between first picking up this idea and finalizing a third draft for presentation to graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting. / text

This report details the writing and revision process that went into my thesis feature screenplay, The Death of Us, a romantic comedy about a young man who fakes his mother’s death to try to keep his girlfriend from dumping him. I trace my steps from the idea’s conception to the completion of my thesis draft of the screenplay, using the outlines and beat-sheets I created at various stages along the way as examples. I explain the circumstances and inspirations behind The Death of Us, and finally, I attempt to reconcile the giant gap between my original intentions for this script and the final product. / text

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