portfolio
Genre: Dark Comedy / Satire
Setting: Contemporary American high school and local community
Awards: 2026 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards Silver in Comedy; Grand Prize Winner, 30th Annual Fade In Awards Comedy Competition; 2026 Final Draft Big Break Competition Quarterfinalist; 2026 Portland Comedy Film Festival Dark Comedy Finalist; 2026 Georgia Comedy Film Festival Official Selection; 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 from the girl he fears will stop loving him and from the father and fundraising machine that now depend on him to keep dying.
94 pages
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
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; 2026 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder; 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 accidentally trapped in a glass-walled university admissions room during a record-breaking heatwave, their polished résumés collapse into a survival crisis that reveals the meritocracy may value obedience more than merit.
104 pages
Genre: Dark Crime Comedy / Period Thriller
Setting: The Bronx, New York, 1932
Awards: 2026 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder
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 Irish drifter, only to descend into murderous panic when every poison, accident, and grotesque scheme they try only seems to make him harder to kill.
91 pages
Story by John Salcido
Genre: Elevated Body Horror / Psychological Thriller
Setting: Northern New Mexico, 1988-1995
Awards: 2026 Quarterfinalist ISA's Emerging Screenwriters Horror Screenplay Competition, 2026 Honorable Mention, Screamfest 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), Misery (captivity, coercion, and escalating psychological torture).
Logline: When a desperate New Mexico farmer discovers his younger daughter’s blood-red tears produce a euphoric wine, he turns the barren family vineyard into an extraction farm, forcing her and the sister he trained to guard her to unite against him when a ruthless Sommelier arrives to seize the harvest.
91 pages
Genre: High-Concept Tech Thriller
Setting: Contemporary Los Angeles
Awards: 2026 Semifinalist Fade In Awards Thriller Competition, 2026 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 Los Angeles’s facial-recognition grid, forcing them to turn their blinding technology against him before he weaponizes the city itself.
119pages
Genre: Grounded Disaster Drama
Setting: Texas Panhandle, present day
Awards: 2026 Final Draft Big Break Competition Quarterfinalist; 2026 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder
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
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), taking the inspiring-teacher trope and turning it inside out.
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
Genre: Sports Comedy / Mockumentary Satire
Setting: Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and the competitive eating circuit
Awards: Semifinalist, 30th Annual Fade In Awards Comedy Competition; 2026 Scriptation Semifinalist; 2026 Portland Comedy Film Festival Finalist; 2026 Georgia Comedy Film Festival Official Selection; Official Selection 2026 Austin Spotlight Film Festival.
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: Armed with a titanium spork, a couch-dwelling eating prodigy rockets from his garage to competitive-eating superstardom, but when fame costs him the film-student girlfriend who believed in him first, he must choose between becoming a legend and building a life that actually satisfies him.
117 pages
Genre: Sci-Fi / Dystopian Thriller
Setting: A synthetic utopia inside a sealed Biome and the brutal physical 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 (synthetic reality and awakening), Black Mirror (technology as comfort and moral control), 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 in fighting the system she once served, only to discover that the people they hope to free would rather survive inside a beautiful lie.
117 pages
Genre: Drama / Indie
Setting: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Awards: 2026 Austin Film Festival Semifinalist; 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 whose hallucinations transform his encampment into a Shakespearean kingdom learns his camp will soon be cleared, he rallies his unhoused neighbors into a theatre company staging King Lear, hoping a legal loophole can save their community before the bulldozers arrive.
102 pages
Genre: Period Queer Punk Drama / Coming-of-Age
Setting: Olympia, Washington, 1991
Awards: 2026 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder; 2026 Slamdance Quarterfinalist
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, at the dawn of the riot grrrl movement, a freshman reports being sexually assaulted by the local punk scene’s favorite male singer, driving a furious queer punk to turn 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
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 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.
Companion Piece The High Priest. Also works fine as a standalone.
107 pages
Genre: Limited Series / One-Hour Historical Drama / Psychological Biography
Setting: Harvard, Millbrook, California, Algeria, prison, and the cyberculture afterlife of Timothy Leary.
Awards: 2026 Outstanding Screenplays TV Pilot Grand Prize Winner; 2026 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder; 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),
Better Call Saul for wit, reinvention, and
accumulating moral compromises; Masters of Sex (research colliding with cultural upheaval), The Assassination of Gianni Versace (self-mythology, image, and collapse)
Pilot Logline: After his wife's suicide, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary becomes convinced psychedelics can free humanity from suffering, but as his experiments turn into a personal crusade, he puts his career at risk while growing increasingly blind to the grief consuming his own children.
Series Logline: After a grieving Harvard psychologist discovers psychedelics and believes he has found a chemical key to human suffering, Timothy Leary begins a lifelong crusade for liberation, reinventing himself again and again as the cost to his family, credibility, freedom, and sense of self mounts.
Companion Piece The Molecule. Also works fine as a standalone.
Episode 1: The Scientist (55 pages)
Episode 2: The Prophet (54 pages)
Episode 3: The Celebrity (47 pages)
Episode 4: The Exile (56 pages)
Episode 5: The Rat (52 pages)
Episode 6: The Futurist (57 pages)
Story by Ryan Clarke and John Salcido
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
Awards: 2026 ISA's Table Read My Screenplay Hollywood Semifinalist.
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.
86 pages
Genre: Road Trip / Dark Comedy / Drama
Setting: Texas to California, 1978
Awards: 2026 Final Draft Big Break Competition Quarterfinalist; Semifinalist, ISA Emerging Screenwriters Competition; Official Selection 2026 Austin Spotlight Film Festival.
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.
94 pages
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 invents AI glasses that score every good and bad deed, he games the system to destroy his charismatic rival, only to discover that morality is far more valuable as a subscription service than as justice.
106 pages
Genre: Period Indie Drama / Romantic Road Drama
Setting: American Southwest to Pacific Northwest, 1977
Awards: 2026 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder
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
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 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder; 2026 Toronto LGBTQ Film Festival Selection; 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 secret broadcasts become a lifeline for lonely strangers, and force them to decide whether the intimacy they create on air can survive becoming real between them.
99 pages
Story by Ryan Clarke and John Salcido
Genre: Sci-Fi / Psychological Thriller / Dark Comedy
Setting: A farmhouse
Awards: 2026 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards Finalist; 2026 Final Draft Big Break Competition Quarterfinalist; 2026 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder.
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: Raised after the apocalypse by a smothering sentient smart home, a lonely survivor falls for the first woman he’s met since childhood, only to discover she’s the Network’s biological proxy and he’s been cast as breeding stock in its cheerfully deranged remake of Genesis.
90 pages
Genre: Sci-Fi Satire / Absurdist Comedy
Setting: A silent, color-coded future governed by regulated gestures and corporate order
Awards: 2026 Austin Film Festival Second Rounder; 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.
93 pages
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 risk analyst 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
FORMAT:: Feature
SETTING: Britain and the merchant shipping world, from the 1920s through the 1970s. A 1975 London pub frames a journey through working-class Liverpool, wartime voyages, foreign ports, and the edges of Beatlemania.
GENRE:: Biographical Dramedy / Dark Comedy
TARGET AUDIENCE: Adults drawn to character-driven period films that balance sharp humor with emotional depth; Beatles and music-history enthusiasts; and audiences who connect with complicated families, estranged parents, and imperfect second chances.
COMPS: Big Fish (a father’s extraordinary stories and the painful truths behind them), Stan & Ollie (British humor, a performer’s pride, and tenderness beneath the act), and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (acerbic wit, literary ambition, and the struggle to turn a flawed life into something worth reading).
LOGLINE: Desperate to justify a lifetime of absence, John Lennon’s charming but unreliable father tries to sell a memoir he hopes will also reach his estranged son, but must confront the failures he has spent a lifetime turning into stories.
120 pages