Screenwriter / writer-director · Atlanta
Not shock you. Shock is cheap, and most of it is forgotten by the parking lot.
I write movies about people who have lived inside an explanation long enough that it starts to rot around them: the marriage is fine, the grief is handled, the thing they did was understandable, tomorrow will be different.
Sometimes the cleanest way into that is two people in a room. Sometimes I need a ghost, a war, a pit bull, an AI wife, a black hole, or Glen Powell being perfectly pleasant in Missouri while somebody else loses his mind.
I write across genres because genre is a tool. If the movie is still riding home with you, it did its job.
Featured screenplay · Current priority
After his mother's death, a Philadelphia musician returns to the Missouri town he escaped, where his estranged father, old friends and soldier brother's absence force him to confront how little he knows about the people he left behind.
It started as my MFA thesis, which means I have had enough years to be embarrassed by old versions of it.
Since then it has been through festivals, outside readers, notes I agreed with, notes I ignored, notes I fought, and notes that turned out to be right. The script kept surviving because every serious pass found another thing I had made too easy.
I know this town. I know these people. I know how funny a family can be while everyone in the room is avoiding the same sentence.
If you want one script to figure out what I do, start here.
Birdtown is the cleanest place to start. It is not the only place I go.
There are soldiers, ghosts, bad marriages, dead friends, a pit bull who refuses the job people bred him for, technology that gives a grieving man exactly what he asked for, and a filmmaker who commits felonies because admitting the movie is dead would require admitting something worse.
Pick the problem that interests you.
See all the work
A punk Army Reservist facing deployment to Iraq turns to his active-duty younger brother, but after his brother is killed in action he considers vanishing rather than reporting—and must decide whom his refusal would leave behind.
Feature · Military family drama / war-era character drama
A lonely repairman discovers a door that returns the dead at the cost of twenty-five years of his life per hour, then devotes decades to undoing the one loss no bargain can repair.
Feature · Southern gothic fantasy / family drama
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A grieving husband reconstructs his dead wife with an AI service, but when the replica reveals a marriage he never knew, he must choose between preserving a version that agrees with him and accepting the real woman he lost.
Feature · Near-future science-fiction / psychological relationship drama
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An Atlanta couple turn a murdered shopkeeper's hardware storefront into a vintage business, then discover that the deal tying their future to the neighborhood also connects their benefactor to the man's death.
Feature · Social thriller / Atlanta urban drama
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A psychologist struggles to keep her grieving husband and their marriage afloat after a death in his family, financial obligations, a faith-based inheritance ultimatum and an elderly dog's emergency compound into a crisis neither spouse can absorb alone.
Feature · Intimate marriage / family grief drama
Discarded for refusing violence, a gentle pit bull forms a bond with a withdrawn man; when the dogfighting network comes to reclaim the animal, their fragile refuge becomes something they must defend.
Feature · Animal-rescue drama / survival thriller
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After a former infantryman dies by suicide, the men who served with him gather to sort his belongings and discover that their celebrated brotherhood may be failing a friend who is still alive.
Feature · Veterans ensemble / grief drama / dark comedy
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During a pandemic-era sweep of Los Angeles's Skid Row, a disgraced doctor stages a reckoning for the brother who betrayed him, but his daughter's bond with an EMT and the encampment community force him to choose between control and letting others live.
Feature · Shakespeare adaptation / politically charged urban drama
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When a financing review freezes his first film on the eve of production, an ambitious director begins forging, stealing and betraying the people who trust him to save the movie—only to discover the money arrived on schedule.
Feature · Dark comedy / filmmaking thriller
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Gravely ill at Christmas, an atheist who spends his life selling the possessions of the dead experiences fever visions that force him to face the family he abandoned—and the urgency of a life with no second chance.
Feature · Christmas family dramedy / existential fantasy
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With their marriage close to collapse, a husband runs the Honolulu Marathon with the wife who may be leaving him, hoping that finishing together will prove their life can still be repaired.
Feature · Marriage drama / sports-road story
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A depressed rideshare driver realizes that his late-night fare intends to die at the destination, and finds that helping the stranger means finally admitting his own need for help.
Short · Suspenseful two-hander / human drama
A grieving man planning to die is unexpectedly left with a tiny dog whose relentless demands keep ruining his final schedule.
Short · Black comedy / grief drama
Making now
I spent enough years waiting for somebody else to decide whether I was allowed to make a movie.
This one is small enough that I can stop pretending permission is the problem.
One car. One night. Two people who need the other person to stay alive for reasons neither one wants to admit.
I intend to make it.
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This is where I try not to.
Movies. Family. Death. Religion. Work. Failure. Taste. Ambition. Getting older. Trying to become somebody I can stand.
Every once in a while I get several hundred words in and discover the asshole I was arguing with was me.
My dad had a pillow. It’s mine now.
Growing up, I thought acceptance was one of the highest things you could earn.
The first movie that made me want to make movies was not the kind of movie filmmakers usually cite when they are trying to sound impressive.
I can tell you I believe in the work. That is not evidence.
These are the placements, selections and recognitions from people who had no obligation to agree with me.
Every result stays at the level the awarding organization published. A quarterfinalist is a quarterfinalist. A finalist is a finalist. Nobody gets promoted because the better word looks nicer in a bio.
Represent it. Finance it. Develop it. Produce it. Publish it. Hire me to write something else.
Or tell me I got something wrong and bring the receipts.
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