A man living alone in the country, Phillip, is disturbed from his listless, sad existence by the bite of an exotic looking beetle in his living room. The offense fires up his dormant angel. He plugs up the hole the beetle scrambled into,  then goes down to the highway tavern

Phil is a quasi-underworld businessman of 35. When his mistress dies under shady circumstances and his wife consequently threatens to divorce him, Phil is overwhelmed with regrets and doubts. He flees everything to visit Charlie, a gentle philosopher/crackpot he roomed with in college but has not communicated with

A middle-aged man clings to a narrow ridge of stone as lightning whipcracks in the dark air around him. “I’m fucked!” he laughs. The storm past, he totters along the ridge to finish his mission: rescuing an injured young man stranded atop the mountain peak.  “I can’t

We follow a young writer who is learning craft and wisdom of good fiction writing. All week he agonizes over his manuscript in order to make the final Friday afternoon pickup at  the mailbox near his apartment. Every Monday morning he receives the manuscript back in the mail, marked up

The house is a jumble. Dirty plates and food packaging everywhere. Little heaps of floor sweepings  along the perimeters. The window sills are old battlefields of insect carcasses and sagging spider webs. But a Barney Kessel record is playing. There’s a glass of red wine. The smoke of a

Beaver’s whole family watched as the long boy ?? eased up to the embankment, ramming it, tearing up a fat slab of sod.  “Al right, Floyd!” Beaver’s voice was louder than the truck engine. Even the echo could be heard. It was a moist Saturday morning. The mother and

Beaver always said the reason the dam washed out was Jack Schmidt. Jack was the man he hired to build the pipeworks that ran through the dam for draining excess water. They consulted a couple of engineers, found them too elaborate, and got busy doing it their own way. Beaver

Transplants The “Aliens and Bruce Willis” concept, which turned into my Being There screenplay. Original idea Thursday morning about July 31, 1998. Stranded space aliens have been laboring secretly for 130 years to perfect the process of transplanting themselves into human bodies. They are now ready to put the plan

Two brothers decide to move an old stone and log church to their farm and make it a summer home they’ll return to in the decades of their adulthood and separation. It is the last job they’ll do together on the farm before striking off in separate directions,