Screenwriter / writer-director · Atlanta

ChristopherShank.

Different stories.
Same handwriting.

I write about people trying to fix what can’t be fixed.

Selected work.

A starting point across features and shorts.

Full slate
01 / FEATURE

NOBODY LEAVES

Still carrying guilt over ignoring his suicidal brother’s final calls, a young man hits and abandons another desperate stranger on a rain-soaked road; ten months later, her ghost begins calling, forcing him to choose between the life he rebuilt and the truth buried in the woods.

A contained, performance-led ghost story where haunting is a demand that someone finally stay. The footprint is manageable; the moral pressure is not.

07 / FEATURE

THE RESERVIST

A punk Army Reservist ordered to deploy to Iraq seeks guidance from his active-duty younger brother; when the brother is killed in action, he prepares to disappear under a fake identity but must decide whether refusing the war means abandoning everyone who still loves him.

An Iraq War movie beginning with a punk kid who believed the Guard was a loophole. It lives in the ugly space between recruiting-poster duty and romanticized desertion.

11 / FEATURE

HERE FOR THIS

A broke Atlanta couple take over a murdered Black hardware owner’s storefront to launch a vintage shop, then uncover a gentrification scheme linking their benefactor to the killing — and turn their business into a public trap before the town erases them too.

The dream storefront is also the crime scene. An Atlanta social thriller where building the business, exposing the scheme and becoming its next target are the same action.

08 / FEATURE

FUCK YOU, GLEN POWELL

When Glen Powell comes to his Missouri hometown to shoot a movie and starts dating the woman he has loved since high school, a stalled factory worker and failed screenwriter launches one last pathetic campaign to win her — only to discover the movie he needs to rewrite is his own life.

09 / FEATURE

KING OF THE DEAD

A lonely repairman discovers a door where the dead can be reclaimed at the cost of twenty-five living years per hour; after bringing four family members back, he spends a lifetime trying to defeat the one loss the bargain cannot undo.

The rule fits in one sentence and generates a lifetime of consequences. Every trip through the door succeeds, turning wish fulfillment into the engine of the tragedy.

03 / FEATURE

STANDBY

When her husband’s estranged father dies, a Korean-American psychologist tries to keep her depression-prone spouse connected to life as funeral debt, a faith-based inheritance ultimatum, and their elderly dog’s medical crisis turn one loss into a test of how much grief a marriage can carry.

The depressed husband is not the center of gravity. The wife everyone assumes can keep him alive is. It is a marriage drama about the cost of making one person the perimeter around another.

Across genres

The voice
stays the same.

Horror when the truth is not enough. Comedy when it is too much. Drama when it lands where it lands.

Somebody carrying a problem that won’t be solved — and going at it anyway. Badly. Stubbornly. Right at the point where the story they’ve been telling about their life stops holding weight.

Blunt, observant, and darkly funny. Sensitive without sentimentality.

About

On the desk.

Finished scripts tell you what I make. This is what is currently taking up room in my head.

See everything in development →
  1. 01

    ATHEISTMAS

    A Christmas Carol for someone who does not believe in ghosts.

    OUTLINE / ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT
  2. 02

    AGAIN

    A filmmaker turns a temporary financing delay into a 36-hour criminal spiral trying to save a movie that wasn’t actually dying.

    FEATURE OUTLINE + CHARACTER WORK COMPLETE
  3. 03

    LOSING MY EDGE

    Before LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy spent years convinced everyone else had already beaten him to his life.

    RESEARCH / ACCESS / DEVELOPMENT
  4. 04

    BIG MOVIE PREMISE LAB

    Can a movie still sell itself in one sentence?

    10 SURVIVING ORIGINAL EVENT-MOVIE CANDIDATES
  5. 05

    MOM v. WALMART

    A national legal story reconstructed from the family life the headline could not contain.

    BOOK / RESEARCH / REPORTING / STRUCTURE

THE REVAMP

I put scripts into development all the time. This time I put myself there.

Open project

Selected Journal

Essays and notes.

Read the Journal →

11 selected
placements.

Festival, competition, and fellowship recognition across the slate.

Night road seen through a car windshield

In development / short film

Keep Driving

A depressed Atlanta rideshare driver accepts a lucrative late-night fare into rural Georgia. When the signal dies and he realizes his passenger intends to die at the destination, keeping the stranger alive means admitting that he needs help too.

  • PRODUCTION DEVELOPMENT
  • 17–20 MINUTES
  • GEORGIA / CONTAINED NIGHT SHOOT
The film

Script requests. Assignments. Development. Directing. Press.

Contact.