2008 Virginia Screenwriting Competition Winners

• Allan Moye

  The Lizard Lady

  Maddie’s life is dull, her husband is always away and she’s growing old too fast in a small town. Everything changes when her new next door neighbor moves in, an ex-professional wrestler with a lust for life and a secret that attracts an array of trouble.

• CB Wilson

  Juniper Bass

  A small town sherriff struggles to adjust to quirky townsfolk, nosy neighbors and a pushy girlfriend, all while solving a murder.

• Virginia Proutt

  Chubby

  A lonesome, fatherless boy, who lives with his mother and overbearing grandmother, pines for a normal life. A saucy tomboy moves into his neighborhood and befriends the boy. Life gets complicated when the boy’s mute uncle visits and his grandmother becomes ill for which the boy feels responsible. The young friends barely keep out of trouble while they plan a neighborhood circus to raise money for the sick grandmother.

Finalists

• Drew Babb

  The First Family Of Virginia

  Twenty-five years after the American Revolution, a scandal rocked Virginia’s wealthiest and most powerful family, the Randolphs. At the scandal’s epicenter was Nancy Randolph, accused of infanticide, incest and implicated in another death as well. Her defense attorneys constituted a prototype of the legal “dream team” — John Marshall and Patrick Henry. Depending on your point of view, Nancy Randolph was either a murderous vampire or one of the strongest women who ever lived. This is the story of that trial.

• Patrick Beltran & Lu Ugaz

  A Modest Proposal

  A klutzy children’s author who wants to propose to his sophisticated girlfriend hires a marketing consultant to help him craft a plan and ends up falling in love with her.

• Alan T. Williamson

  Because You’re Mine

  Traina is a hard news network anchorwoman, and Lyle is a reporter for a sleazy tabloid paper. After Traina dumps Lyle for refusing to grow up, she makes plans to marry Herman Stillman, the most serious man in network TV. Lyle is desparate and will do anything to make Traina fall in love with him again…even voodoo.

• Ramona Taylor

  Respite

  On the road for a quiet week together, a bitter married couple rescue a stranger from the scene of an auto accident. After offering him medical care, shelter and sympathy, the couple realize that there is more to this man. He is either a killer, hired by one to murder the other, or someone more dangerous.

• Andrew Carnwath & Robert Kelshian

  Bloodscout

  Virgil Flicken is haunted by the memories of what happened to him on Old Rag Mountain as a child, but when his teenaged son goes on a scout trip to the same mountain, Virgil must overcome his own fear, self doubt and a lot of zombies to save his kid.

• Virginia Shepherd

  Buried Treasure

  A group of elderly Americans decide that they do not want to spend their final days wasting away in a nursing home. Instead, they have orchestrated a Mediterranean cruise to the Black Sea — with the express purpose of jumping overboard.

• Matthew Warner

  Eyes Everywhere

  Charlie Fields suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and believes his wife is conspiring with a bioterrorist. He thinks the villan, Mr. Duke, heads a secret organization bent on controlling the world and that Duke is conducting experiments on his children. As Charlie battles delusions of mind-reading lasers and invisible spy cameras, he fights to separate fantasy from reality to determine if his children are truly in danger. His conclusions lead him down a harrowing path of kidnapping and murder in which the world is not what it seems to be.

• Vincent Sweeney

  The Trailer Park

  After Sara’s grandfather dies she loses her only connection to the outside world. She soon meets a local man named J.T. and finds a love in him that few ever do. Together they plan to build a new life and start a family of their own, far away from the secluded trailer park they live in. The only thing in their way is J.T.’s dangerous obsession with his bizarre neighbors, his fear of the unknown, and the money he and Sara need to buy a used amusement park ride.

• Thomas Randolph

  Resistance

  A man’s country is invaded by another country with political and social philosophies that the man identifies with. Never the less, he joins his country’s militia to fight off the invaders. As the war goes on, what once began with a token resistance to the invading forces becomes an active defiance of an unwelcome occupation.

• George Wills

  A Midsummer’s Daydream

  Four shipwrecked Elizabethian actors turn a royal wedding upside down in the “new world”.

• Scott Norris

  Expiration Date

  When an expiration date appears on the neck of a depressed family man and dairy manager, he figures it’s a bad joke. But as his life falls apart he’s forced to reconsider. Can he change his fate before he expires?

• Annie Elizabeth Ryan

  Scurvy Dogs

  A dressmaker turns pirate to avoid slave catchers in 18th century Louisiana.