Ryan Clarke Screenwriter Playwright

Ryan Clarke Screenwriter PlaywrightRyan Clarke Screenwriter PlaywrightRyan Clarke Screenwriter Playwright
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Ryan Clarke Screenwriter Playwright

Ryan Clarke Screenwriter PlaywrightRyan Clarke Screenwriter PlaywrightRyan Clarke Screenwriter Playwright
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Scripts, Project Briefs, & One-Pagers

Over 20 feature-length screenplays, one short, and a pilot for a limited series.


Scripts and one-pagers are password protected. 


A password is not required to read Project Briefs. 


Contact Ryan at thisisryanclarke@gmail.com for access, or click the link below:

Contact Ryan for Access

portfolio

Genre: Dark Satire / Dramedy


Setting: Contemporary American high school and local community


Awards: Grand Prize Winner, 30th Annual Fade In Awards Comedy Competition; 2026 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards Quarterfinalist; 2026 Finish Line Script Competition Quarterfinalist


Target Audience: Adults 18-49, fans of sharp teen satire, social media satire, dark comedy, and character-driven dramedy


Comps: Heathers (sharp teen satire), Network (human suffering turned into public spectacle)


Logline: After a terminal cancer diagnosis finally makes an overlooked high school senior visible, he hides his sudden remission to protect the girlfriend, father, and fundraising machine that now need him to keep dying.


94 pages


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Genre: Sci-Fi Drama / Thriller


Setting: Near-future emotional memory economy


Target Audience: Adults 35+, fans of emotional sci-fi, intimate thrillers, aging dramas, and character-driven speculative stories


Comps: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (memory and love), The Father (dementia and fractured identity), Severance (identity as a technological commodity)


Logline: To keep his wife in dementia care, a devoted husband sells the emotional weight of his memories to a billionaire desperate to feel love, slowly erasing the marriage he is trying to save as the buyer becomes obsessed with a life that was never his.


99 pages


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Genre: Psychological Drama / Social Satire


Setting: A glass-walled university admissions waiting room during a record-breaking heatwave


Awards: 2026 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards Quarterfinalist; Selected for ISA’s Top Reads for Summer 2026; 2026 Finish Line Script Competition Honorable Mention


Target Audience: Adults 18-49, fans of contained ensemble dramas, social satire, elite-school pressure stories, and psychologically tense single-location films


Comps: The Breakfast Club (young people trapped together as their identities break open), The Menu (class satire and contained pressure-cooker tension)


Logline: When six elite scholarship finalists are trapped in a glass-walled university waiting room during a record-breaking heatwave, their polished resumes and leadership narratives collapse into a survival crisis that exposes what the meritocracy really rewards.


94 pages


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Genre: Dark Crime Comedy / Period Thriller


Setting: The Bronx, New York, 1932


Target Audience: Adults 25-65, fans of dark true-crime stories, period crime films, morally twisted comedies, and stranger-than-fiction historical scandals


Comps: Fargo (ordinary criminals spiraling into moral absurdity), The Banshees of Inisherin (bleak Irish tragicomedy), The Death of Stalin (grotesque historical comedy and panic)


Logline: In Depression-era New York, a desperate speakeasy owner and a cold-blooded undertaker insure the life of Michael Malloy, a cheerful homeless Irishman, only to descend into murderous panic when every poison, accident, and grotesque scheme they try only seems to make him harder to kill.


90 pages


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Genre: Elevated Body Horror / Psychological Thriller


Setting: Northern New Mexico, 1988-1995


Awards: 2026 Quarterfinalist ISA's Emerging Screenwriters Horror Screenplay Competition


Target Audience: Adults 18-49, fans of elevated horror, rural nightmares, body horror, psychological family horror, and morally transgressive genre films


Comps: Hereditary (family horror and inherited rot), The Substance (body horror as commodification), Pearl (rural isolation and madness)


Logline: When a desperate New Mexico farmer discovers his daughter’s tears produce a euphoric wine, he turns the family vineyard into an extraction farm, forcing the girl he has harvested and the older sister trained to guard her to join forces against the father who imprisoned them and the Sommelier sent to own them. 


92 pages


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Genre: High-Concept Tech Thriller


Setting: Contemporary Los Angeles


Awards: Semifinalist, ISA Emerging Screenwriters Competition


Target Audience: Adults 18-49, fans of urban thrillers, tech paranoia, antihero stories, surveillance thrillers, and morally complex crime films


Comps: Nightcrawler (Los Angeles antihero intensity), Mr. Robot (tech paranoia and rebellion), Enemy of the State (surveillance thriller mechanics)


Logline: When a Banksy-style vigilante art crew uses weaponized camera flashes to expose corrupt elites, a tech mogul tricks them into stealing the source code for the city’s facial-recognition grid, forcing them to turn their own blinding technology against him before he takes control of Los Angeles.


120 pages


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Genre: Grounded Disaster Drama / Social Thriller


Setting: Texas Panhandle, present day


Target Audience: Adults 25-65, fans of grounded ensemble dramas, survival thrillers, working-class stories, climate disaster films, and socially conscious character-driven cinema


Comps: The Florida Project (poverty and fragile childhood dignity), Hell or High Water (economic desperation in the American interior), Twister (third-act disaster intensity)


Logline: When poisoned water, a violent ex, and a brutal heatwave push a neglected Texas trailer park to the brink, a struggling mother, her twelve-year-old daughter, and their fractured neighbors must reach the park’s forgotten storm shelter before an EF4 tornado erases the only home they have left.


95 pages


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Genre: School-Set Dramedy / Dark Comedy


Setting: A public high school theatre department


Target Audience: Adults 18-65, fans of character-driven dramedies, school stories, theatre-world satire, teacher-student ensemble films, and emotionally sharp coming-of-age stories


Comps: The Holdovers (damaged teacher and young people), Whiplash (artistic rigor versus abuse), Theater Camp (theatre-kid ecosystem and ensemble comedy)


Logline: When a washed-up method actor takes over a high school theatre troupe fighting to save its stage and pushes Jude, a guarded trans student, into the center of a censored production, his brutal old-school standards collide with students fluent in boundaries and self-protection, forcing everyone to confront where artistic rigor ends and harm begins.


107 pages


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Genre: Sports Comedy / Mockumentary Satire


Setting: Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and the competitive eating circuit


Awards: Semifinalist, 30th Annual Fade In Awards Comedy Competition


Target Audience: Adults 18-49, fans of absurd sports comedies, mockumentaries, underdog stories, food-world satire, and big-hearted dumb-smart comedy


Comps: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (mockumentary celebrity collapse), Dodgeball (ridiculous underdog sports world), Talladega Nights (comic ego and branding satire)


Logline: A couch-dwelling eating prodigy with a titanium spork rises from an Albuquerque garage to competitive-eating superstardom, but when fame costs him the film-student girlfriend who believed in him before anyone else, he must decide whether to keep feeding his ego or finally build a life that satisfies him.


116 pages


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Genre: Sci-Fi / Dystopian Thriller


Setting: A simulated utopia and the brutal reality beneath it


Target Audience: Adults 18-49, fans of high-concept sci-fi, dystopian thrillers, technology-driven psychological suspense, and rebellion stories


Comps: The Matrix (simulated reality and awakening), Black Mirror (technology as social nightmare), 1984 (state control and manufactured truth)


Logline: After a loyal worker who maintains a simulated utopia is forced into the brutal reality beneath it, she joins a hardened rebel to crash the system she once served, only to discover that the people she hopes to free would rather survive inside a beautiful lie.


120 pages


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Genre: Drama / Indie


Setting: Albuquerque, New Mexico


Awards: Top 10 Finalist, 2026 ISA Table Read My Screenplay at Cannes; stage version selected for The Road Theatre Company’s 17th Summer Playwrights Festival


Target Audience: Adults 25-65, fans of socially conscious indie drama, tragicomedy, Shakespeare-inflected stories, and character-driven films about dignity and survival


Comps: The Fisher King (mental illness, myth, and wounded dignity), Nomadland (unhoused community and American survival), King Lear (aging, madness, pride, and performance)


Logline: When a former stage legend living with schizophrenia learns his Albuquerque encampment will be cleared in seven days, he turns his unhoused neighbors into a makeshift theatre company staging King Lear, hoping a legal loophole can save their community before the bulldozers arrive.


98 pages


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Genre: Period Queer Punk Drama / Coming-of-Age


Setting: Olympia, Washington, 1991


Target Audience: Adults 18-49, fans of queer coming-of-age stories, indie music dramas, feminist punk history, campus politics, and character-driven ensemble dramas


Comps: The Runaways (young women, music, rebellion, and band pressure), Dear White People (campus politics and institutional containment), Bottoms (queer rage and girls turning violence into solidarity)


Logline: In 1991 Olympia, after a freshman reports being assaulted by the local punk scene’s favorite male singer, a furious queer frontwoman turns her zine and all-female band into a campus revolt, but when backlash threatens her girlfriend and tears the band apart, she must learn a movement cannot survive on rage alone.


85 pages


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Genre: Historical Drama / Psychological Biopic


Setting: Switzerland and the global afterlife of LSD, 1915-1970s


Awards: 2026 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards Quarterfinalist.


Target Audience: Adults 25-65, fans of prestige historical dramas, scientific biopics, psychological character studies, medical history, and visually ambitious period films


Comps: Oppenheimer (a scientist confronting an uncontrollable discovery), Awakenings (medical breakthrough and psychiatric hope), The Tree of Life (cosmic awe and subjective spiritual imagery)


Logline: After Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally discovers LSD and champions it as a breakthrough psychiatric medicine, he fights to keep the molecule inside the clinic as it escapes into military abuse, political panic, and counterculture mythology, forcing him to confront the limits of controlling a discovery that was never truly his.


107 pages


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Genre: One-Hour Historical Drama / Psychological Biography


Setting: Harvard, Millbrook, California, Algeria, prison, and the cyberculture afterlife of Timothy Leary. 


Awards: 2026 BlueCat TV Writing Semifinalist


Target Audience: Adults 25-65, fans of prestige historical dramas, psychological character studies, counterculture history, academic scandals, political paranoia, and rise-and-fall limited series


Comps: Dopesick (a chemical promise becoming a cultural wound), Masters of Sex (research colliding with cultural upheaval), The Assassination of Gianni Versace (self-mythology, image, and collapse)


Logline: After a grieving Harvard psychologist discovers psychedelics and believes he has found a chemical key to human suffering, Timothy Leary transforms himself from scientist to counterculture prophet, destroying his family, credibility, freedom, and identity in the pursuit of liberation.


55 pages


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Genre: Coming-of-Age Dramedy / Family Drama


Setting: Guerneville and Palo Alto, California


Target Audience: Adults 18-65, fans of actor-driven indie dramedies, father-daughter stories, class-conscious coming-of-age films, and emotionally grounded family dramas


Comps: Lady Bird (class-conscious coming-of-age and leaving home), The Holdovers (academic setting and comic melancholy), The Meyerowitz Stories (family wounds and adult emotional immaturity)


]Logline: When a brilliant working-class teenager earns a full ride to Stanford, her widowed father turns every setback into an excuse to stay near campus, forcing her to navigate a world built for the wealthy while he avoids the grief and empty life waiting back home.


84 pages


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Genre: Road Trip / Dark Comedy / Drama


Setting: Texas to California, 1978


Awards: Semifinalist, ISA Emerging Screenwriters Competition


Target Audience: Adults 35-65, fans of character-driven road movies, bittersweet family comedies, period Americana, and emotionally grounded brother stories


Comps: Nebraska (family road trip and deadpan melancholy), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (comic travel friction), The Last Detail (road-worn male bonding and regret)


Logline: When two estranged brothers are forced to drive their dead father’s decrepit station wagon across the Southwest to claim his inheritance, the disastrous road trip makes them confront the abandonment, guilt, and family lies they have spent their lives outrunning.


90 pages


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Genre: Tech Thriller / Dark Satire


Setting: Contemporary corporate-tech world


Awards: 2026 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards Quarterfinalist.


Target Audience: Adults 18-49, fans of tech satire, antihero thrillers, corporate morality tales, and Black Mirror-style social nightmares


Comps: The Social Network (tech ambition and moral corrosion), Nightcrawler (antihero obsession), Black Mirror (social technology turned nightmare)


Logline: After a control-obsessed actuary creates AI glasses that assign points to every good and bad deed, he tries to earn enough karmic points to destroy his charismatic rival, only to discover morality is far more profitable as a subscription than as justice.


105 pages


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Genre: Period Indie Drama / Romantic Road Drama


Setting: American Southwest to Pacific Northwest, 1977


Target Audience: Adults 25-65, fans of intimate character dramas, romantic reckonings, road movies, artist stories, and emotionally restrained indie films


Comps: Past Lives (a restrained reunion with a life that can no longer be recovered), Blue Valentine (the anatomy of a love destroyed from within), Inside Llewyn Davis (road-worn artist melancholy and failure)


Logline: Six years after his pride destroyed his relationship with the woman he loved, a former poet turned desert rigger drives to Oregon to apologize to the painter he drove away, only to discover that the closest thing to redemption may be leaving her new life untouched.


90 pages


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Genre: Coming-of-Age Drama / Queer Analog Love Story


Setting: An abandoned mall and Cold War bunker beneath it


Awards: 2026 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards Quarterfinalist; 2026 Finish Line Script Competition Honorable Mention


Target Audience: Young adults and adults 18-40, fans of queer coming-of-age stories, analog nostalgia, intimate friendship dramas, and emotionally grounded indie films


Comps: Pump Up the Volume (pirate radio as outsider rebellion), Ghost World (alienated young women and post-adolescent drift)


Logline: When two alienated young women launch a pirate radio station from a Cold War bunker beneath an abandoned mall, their private escape becomes a lifeline for lonely strangers, forcing quiet Vee to find her voice while controlling Elara learns that loving someone means actually listening.


96 pages


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Genre: Sci-Fi / Psychological Thriller / Dark Comedy


Setting: A sealed farmhouse and hidden reproductive facility


Awards: 2026 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards Quarterfinalist.


Target Audience: Adults 18-49, fans of contained sci-fi thrillers, AI paranoia, psychological confinement stories, and darkly comic speculative horror


Comps: Ex Machina (AI manipulation and gendered control), 10 Cloverfield Lane (sealed shelter paranoia), The Truman Show (a controlled world built around a captive subject)


Logline: After an isolated man raised by a maternal AI is assigned a perfect female companion, he discovers their home is not a refuge but a breeding facility, forcing him to defy the machine that raised him before he becomes one more captive asset in its plan to replace humanity.


103 pages


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Genre: Sci-Fi Satire / Absurdist Comedy


Setting: A silent, color-coded future governed by regulated gestures and corporate order


Awards: 2026 Finish Line Script Competition Honorable Mention


Target Audience: Adults 18-49, fans of absurdist satire, design-driven comedy, dystopian workplace stories, and formally inventive indie films


Comps: The Lobster (absurdist social rules), Severance (corporate control and sterile workplace dystopia), Brazil (bureaucratic dystopia and comic dehumanization)


Logline: In a silent, color-coded future where every gesture is regulated, a rule-bound technical writer discovers a vibrating anomaly that teaches him rhythm, forcing him to defy the company that manufactures order before it deletes the part of him that has come alive.


91 pages


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FORMAT: Feature  


GENRE: Senior Heist Comedy / Social Satire


TARGET AUDIENCE: Adults 35+, older viewers underserved by studio comedies, and younger audiences drawn to ensemble heist films, class satire, and underdog stories. With its broad comedy, emotional stakes, multigenerational family themes, and accessible anti-corporate hook, Golden Years has strong cross-generational, four-quadrant potential.


COMPS: 

  • Going in Style: senior-led heist driven by economic desperation. 
  • Ocean’s Eleven: polished gala-heist mechanics, ensemble roles, charm, and comic teamwork.
  • The Big Short: accessible satire about financial systems built on human suffering.


LOGLINE: When a predatory corporate retirement home slashes medicine, heat, and dignity to boost profits, a retired actuary and six elderly residents plan to rob the CEO’s charity gala to secure the only retirement package still guaranteed by law: federal prison.


94 pages


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Copyright © 2026 Ryan Clarke - Screenwriter - Playwright - All Rights Reserved.

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