2005 Virginia Screenwriting Competition Winners

• Bruce Sanborn

  Touch

  A painfully shy gardener becomes involved with a seemingly young woman who claims to be over 200 years old.  At first incredulous, evidence mounts that she may be telling the truth.  Weary of watching those she loves die of old age, the woman heads down a self-destructive path.  Will love redeem her?

• Alan T. Williamson

  Nunley

  Nunley is a lawyer who only takes cases that he can settle with a plea bargain, just so he’ll have more free time to pursue his real interest in life…Chasing Women.  Unlike most lawyers, Nunley isn’t concerned with winning every case.  In fact, he couldn’t care less about winning.  Nunley is only concerned with getting his clients to “plead out” so he won’t have to build a case and actually go to trial.  But Nunley’s life is suddenly turned upside down when he takes on a murder case and ends up being framed by the FBI.  Nunley then finds himself running from the law with his client, an aging, burnt out, leftover hippie in tow.  Nunley’s forced to clear his own name, which means that for the first time in his career and his life–Nunley takes on a case that he intends to win – his own!  Nunley is not a courtroom drama.  In fact, there isn’t a single scene inside a courtroom.  Nunley is a comedic redemption story about one man’s struggle to develop a conscience.

• CB Wilson

  Another Man’s Freedom

  In the stifling Virginia summer of 1963, a black man and a white woman struggle to find a place for themselves in society’s suddenly-changing landscape.  The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in the nation’s capital and a murder in their own small intensify the search for resolution and honor in their lives.

Finalists

• Brian C. Baker

  Sovereign Ground

  A disgraced politician exiled to the Ambassador’s post of backwater nation is assured political redemption if he keeps the fires of outsourced industry well-stoked. When the head of a rebel group claims sanctuary within the embassy walls, government forces surround the embassy. The Ambassador finds himself under siege, and the outcome hinges on whether he chooses to salvage his political future, or honor the values that began his political career.

• Victoria Ellis Nye

  Force Majeure

  Two days before Christmas.  Stuck in an airport. A raging snow storm outside.  The holidays are never good to Nate Orlando.  But, somehow, this one just might turn out differently.

• Laura E. Grabowski

  8 Days Till Dawn

  Ben Harris, a busy advertising executive, cares about one person and one person only: himself. However, when he learns that his mother was in an automobile and is in a coma, he begins to question his priorities.  He spends all his free time in the hospital, telling his mother stories about the life he wished he had, a life where he is married to an ex-girlfriend his mother adored and has a child with her.  After six years, his mother wakes up and she remembers everything he said.  Now been must find a way to create the life he told her about- or risk sending her back into a coma.

• Telomeres

  Kathryn Kuhlen

  Growing old’s a bitch, and philandering journalist Derek Flanagan discovers just how far some women will go to turn back the clock.  Suspicious of the supposed death of his other-in-law at a Virginia assisted living facility, he stumbles onto the story of the century: the facility is really a front for the anti-aging research work of the brilliant maverick woman physician in charge.  She’s harvesting growth hormone from the pituitaries of kidnapped men to fuel a chemical fountain of youth – and prematurely aging her victims in the process.  Having restored several women to youth already, including Derek’s mother in law, she now seeks to persuade Derek’s long suffering wife to take advantage of her services.  Will she add Derek to the grisly assembly line?

• John D. Leslie & Mike Gandolfi

  Out Of His League

  John Turner, an eleven year old basketball fanatic and mediocre little leaguer is the son of a single middle-class mom.  When an opportunity arises for John’s overworked, business tycoon father to enlist John’s favorite major League player, Boomer Kennedy, a self absorbed prima Donna in the twilight of his hugely successful baseball career, the elder Kennedy seizes it.  In the course of this comedic adventure, we see John learn that things are not always as they may seem, while Boomer learns lessons in humility and compassion.  In the end, we all discover that in life it isn’t always whether you win or lose, but more in how you play the game.

• M. Charles McBee

  C-ville

  A single mom working for Albemarle County, must solve a boundary dispute among three hostile, quirky parties. The unclear lines criss-cross a lake, under which is a potential fortune in natural gas. She must also deal with her grief-stricken father, a former UVA basketball coach who is the target of a lust-filled neighbor, and her ex husband, an ex-con with a suspenseful connection to the boundary dispute.

• B. David Peck

  Nobody Or A Nation

  When a world renown black financier learns of a Presidential appointment, he anticipates a thorough background check. he decides to make his first visit to the hated African birthplace form which he was sent as an infant. He discovers that his parents founded this vital, utopian country before they were killed, and he must decide whether to accept the rare opportunity in America or to help his actual homeland survive a threat to its existence. Note: This entire story can be filmed in Virginia. The first scenes are in Northern Virginia and Richmond. Of greater significance to the author, the same actors will portray various characters. The intention is to exploit the strange sensation of seeing the same people in different positions. A more important reason for the dual roles is to suggest that people of color are a Nation.

• Joel Ratner

  Special Ed

  It takes the special ed kids to teach Ed (their bus driver) how special he is, when their impromptu field trip becomes an FBI manhunt for the PTA’s “most wanted”

• Robert Remy

  1851

  A young slave couple struggles to have a normal love relationship despite myriad physical, social, and economic roadblocks that make it seem all but impossible.

• D. Kirk Richardson

  The Deuce

  In 1904, in the vibrant African-American community of Jackson Ward, a newspaper writer and a troubled press, a theater manager trying to expand, and a silent-movie hero looking for a miracle come together at just the right juncture to create a film that’s not just pictures, but a story.  In The Deuce, inventions the culmination of inspiration, perspiration, and desperation.

• Edwin Simmons

  Spirits Of The Southern Moon

  A man named Henry tells of when renegade Klansmen took over his country, burning churches and murdering innocents.  Outnumbered, he seeks to enlist three comrades from his old outfit, Company K, 13th Virginia Calvary.  Two will join him, but his old commander, Captain Jeter, once a kindly man who intended before the Civil War to become a doctor and free his salves, has now become an embittered racist and refuses to join in Henry’s “little war.”  Jeter, though, is a haunted man and the spirits troubling him drive him to action.  They also restore his peace of mind and his “fondness for the Colored: which had been wrecked by the horrors of the Civil War.