Steve's Written Works

[gsvec]

Re: Days Gone Bye

So far so good, Steve - I wanna see the rest!!

[Steve]

Ladies and gents,

At the behest of Jean, I give you a preview of one of the five screenplays I completed whilst on hiatus. Enjoy!

Steve

The Twilight Country

An Original Screenplay By

Stephen J. Davis




First Draft

1. FADE IN:
WIDE SHOT THE DEVIL'S BAYOU

Sunset bleeding red as Hell on the glassy sawgrass swamps of an Alabama bayou. The voice of an old man:

Voice (off)
If the Devil ever had hisself a backyard, then it was the bayou. If you ain't never been down there--well, hell I don't know how you can even imagine it.

The swamp hums with life, as the voiceover continues.

Voice (cont'd)
. . . They say they's hardly another place in God's world where it gets so dark in the daytime.

The dark swamp landscape is surveyed in a long slow pan.

Voice (cont'd)
Only the godawful desperate or the plain goddamned would ever try an' live out there. It's everthing in the swamps to cut you or sting you or sting you or burn you or poison you or swallow you whole. Gators, tigers, snakes of all kinds. Then you got ever kind of bug in Hell buzzing in your ears. . .

The pan has brought into frame a balding middle-aged man with a round, open face. He walks toward us with an axe slung over one shoulder. This is REUBEN CROSSWAITHE.

Voice (cont'd)
. . . and the swamps is the worst of it. Lord only knows what-all's been swallered up in that godforsaken muck that won't never again see the light of day. You got a million stories buried in the bayou ain't nobody heard but the Devil.

Crosswaithe stops and lowers the axe, looking down at something on the ground.

Voice (cont'd)
No one ever knew them swamps better than the bootleggers. And no bootleggers knew 'em better than the Ashleys.

We cut to the:


REVERSE

A wooden contraption with a fat barrel at the end of it. Something else that looks like a butter churn. It's a whiskey still.

Voice (cont'd)
Now the oldtimers, they'd tell you a hundred stories about the Ashleys and the crimes they did.

Crosswaithe kneels down beside the barrel and grunts as he prizes the top open with his fingers. He peeks in.

His face is reflected in the dark rippling liquid inside.

Crosswaithe purses his lips but remains unfazed.

Voice (cont'd)
Now we all of us heard the stories--about the bad blood between John Ashley and Billy Crosswaithe, and the war the Ashleys had with Yankee bootleggers who tried to cut in on their territory.

After a beat Crosswaithe gets to his feet. Then he raises the axe over his head.

Voice (cont'd)
Thing is, so many stories have been told that there's hardly no way of knowing the truth.

Crosswaithe swings the axe down and splits the barrel apart- moonshine gushes like blood.

He starts hacking at the rest of the still, chopping it into kindling.

Voice (cont'd)
. . . It probably don't really matter all that much anyhow. Lies make the legend.

Crosswaithe sets the axe down. He stares ruminatively down at the carnage he's wrought. Tight on his face.

For the first time the man speaks:

Crosswaithe
All right then.

BETWEEN HIS FEET

Streams of moonshine trickle between his boots into the swamp.

CUT TO BLACK



2. CUT TO:
RAIN

A loose shot looking over Reuben Crosswaithe's shoulder as he walks up to a house in the bayou.

He comes up on the porch and starts pounding on the door loudly until it swings open and RED ASHLEY, the hard-looking patriarch of the Ashley clan looks coldly out at Crosswaithe.

Crosswaithe
. . . I need to talk to you, Ashley.

Red
Do you now? Well come on in out of the rain and let's talk . . .

Crosswaithe
No. I want to talk to you out here.

Red stares at Crosswaithe. A beat.

Then Red takes his hat from a nail beside the door and steps into the yard and closes the door behind him. He follows him out.

Red
. . . All right, Reuben, what was it you wanted that had to be said in the rain?

Crosswaithe
I wanted to tell you somethin. I found your whiskey still on my land and this is what I come to say. Now, I don't care if you make whiskey till you're ass deep in it. . . but don't make it on my land. If the law found that still, they'd come down on me, not you.

Red gives an almost imperceptible shrug.

Red
That's about the way I figured it, too. Did you bust it up?

Crosswaithe
You damn right I did. Broke that whiskey too.

Red's voice is harder:

Red
Now, you ortn't done that.

Crosswaithe
Why, goddamn you. If the son of a bitch hadn't been so heavy I'd of dumped it in your front yard. I don't know who you are or where you come from. Nor what kind of operation you run here. But I'll tell you one thing: Don't mess with me. If piece one of that thing goes up on my ground again, me and you goin around and around.

He leans toward Red. The cords stand out on his neck.

Crosswaithe (cont'd)
. . . You hear?

Red
I never took a order in my life from a tenant-farmin redneck, and I ain't about to start now.

Crosswaithe seizes him by the front of the shirt and slaps him hard. He shoves Red back into the mud and draws a knife.

Red lands sitting and fumbles in his pocket.

He pulls out a nickel-plated derringer and fires.

A hole opens up in Reuben Crosswaithe's gut and he pitches to his knees.

Red
Why don't you say somethin now, bastard? Ain't you got some more say for me? Hunh?

Crosswaithe
Unghh. . . it fuckin' hurts. . . oh Jesus Christ. . .

Red
You better call on somebody closer'n that.

Behind him, a boy's voice CALLS OUT from the open door:

Boy (off)
Pa?

Red
(looking back)
. . . Shut the fucking door!

The door slams shut.

While Red's back is turned, Crosswaithe has grabbed his knife and lunges forward, slashes down Red Ashley's side.

Red
Goddamn you!

One hand pressed to his side, he fires down at Crosswaithe's head. It gouts blood.

He staggers back clutching his side. Blood streams through the hand pressed to the wound.

Red
. . . You son of a bitch. You raggedy-assed son of a bitch!

He sits down in the mud beside the dead man, hissing with pain.



3. CUT TO:
CLOSE SHOT RED ASHLEY

Dragging Crosswaithe's body to the edge of the swamp.

A belt bound around the rag pressed to his bloody side. As he stops he kneels down beside the body.

With one hand he paws through Crosswaithe's pockets. After a beat he pulls of a gold pocketwatch. He tucks it in his shirt.

Then he sits down and kicks the body into the bayou. It rolls in and slowly begins to sink.

Red watches.

Finally:

Red
Get your last look at this world. It shore looks dark in the next one.

The body slips into the darkness.



4. CUT TO:
THE HOUSE

Dark, lit only by candles. The door swings open and Red fills the room with raw and jagged life.

His son looks up at his entrance. He is dark-complected, with a gaunt intensity unexpected in a boy his age. This is JOHN ASHLEY.

John Ashley
Good God. What happened to you?

Red
Fell off the porch. Go get that whiskey out the cabinet.

There is a long, motionless beat. He starts to take the rag away from his side but the layer pressed against his skin sticks, its loose weave bound to his skin by clotted blood.

He pulls very gently and winces as blood starts to flow again.

He drops the rag to the floor.

Red
If this don't beat any damned thing I ever seen!

John Ashley hands him a bottle of whiskey. Red peels his shirt off and throws it to the floor, then opens the bottle and pours whiskey all over the gash in his side.

Red
God-almighty-damn!

John Ashley bends down and picks something off the floor. It's Crosswaithe's gold watch. He looks over at his father.

John Ashley
What's this?

Red
(still in pain)
It's a present fer you.

John Ashley
Where'd you get it?

Red
At the gettin place. Do you have to ask so many questions?

He limps through the door into the next room. As the door clicks shut we CUT TO BLACK, and from black we:



5. CUT TO:
THE WOODS INTERLUDE SEQUENCE

Although it is day, the tree cover gives an effect of almost cathedral-like darkness. The sun filters down through the leaves in gently shifting patterns.

We hear only the sound of the wind and the creaking and groaning of tree limbs in the breeze.

In this scene the angle is low--almost ground-level. The sun dapples the floor of the forest, which is carpeted with pine needles.

Suddenly in the foreground two BOOTED FEET walk, slow motion, into frame. Sunlight ripples over them, making them seem almost alive. With a whoosh of rustling leaves they stop in front of SOMEONE on their knees before them. There is an almost dreamy silence until . . . a GUNSHOT!

As we fade out, we hear a distant rumble of thunder.

Excerpt from The Twilight Country
Copyright © 2009 by Stephen J. Davis
All rights reserved

[Steve]

Re: Days Gone Bye

Anyone else?

[Jean]

Re: Days Gone Bye

with my connection, I can't watch at all: it gets stuck every five seconds

[Steve]

This is a short hardboiled noir story I wrote. It's basically James Ellroy + David Lynch. Please give me some feedback!

-- Stephen J. Davis

THE SAX MAN’S REBOP
A Short Story by Stephen J. Davis

I am a ghost. I haunt the sewers and the subways by day. By night I come up from my hell and I howl at the moon until the clouds finally scatter and I can see L.A. in all its pimply corruption and damp-palmed lust. I love it.

I’ve been a squatter here for a couple years now. I generally keep to the subways; they’re usually pretty warm even by California standards. Plus I can raid the vending machines if I come across any spare change. Which ain’t often. A couple of months back, the gods decided to cut me a break. One of the machines went haywire and started vomiting up candy bars all over the place. I must’ve grabbed over two dozen of them before the security guys showed up. I lived off that heavenly bounty for a couple of weeks; I still had most of the wrappers crumpled in my saxophone case.

I am a sax man, though I haven’t been playing long; eight, maybe nine months. I’m not that great at all, to be honest; usually it only nets me a couple of quarters when I start bebopping on the subway. I taught myself to play by ear – it’s mostly honks and flub notes, but once in a while I’ll get going on some simple tune like “In Dreams” or “Crying.” Actually, the only half-decent songs I can play are Roy Orbison’s. My biggest gig was when I played backup sax for a low-rent jazz quintet at the Hellhole, a cozy little club down Tijuana way. The bandleader got himself knifed by a couple of gringos in a back alley after the performance, so they never called us back to TJ for an encore.

So I started spreading my love of jazz on the subway, blasting out “Pretty Woman” or “Running Scared” for spare change. It gave my something to do, and something to call my own. I managed to scrape up enough to buy a new reed a few weeks ago. It was worth it – kinda. I still can’t play for shit.

It sometimes gets be in trouble, though. Like yesterday, for example.

I’d really been cooking that afternoon – blasting the chorus from “Only the Lonely” over and over – and I was just settling down with a pint of Johnnie Walker Red Label when he came up to me. I didn’t notice him at first, not until he had me shoved against the wall with a .38 socked against my throat. Just like that.

“Listen up, shitbird,” he said. His voice was broad Boston guttersnipe. He was tall and fat, with a huge flat head that grew straight out of his shirt collar and the palest blue eyes I’d ever seen. He wore a double-vented blue suit. He looked like a gone-to-seed refugee from the L.A. Rams middle line. He looked shrewd, he looked mean; I listened up. “Only reason you’re not dead is ‘cause you don’t know shit, capisce?”

I capisced, all right.

“Me n my employahs, we own this subway, okay? We say what goes on, and we say what gets played. You dig? So either you stop playing that thing” – he jerked a thumb at my sax case – “or we’ll stop you. We’ll shoot your ass dead, is what I mean to say.” He rattled me a couple of times for emphasis. “You got the picture?”

“In Technicolor,” I sputtered.

“Good,” the suit said. Then he made sure his point got across by roundhousing knuckle dusters into my midsection, left-right, one-two, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. I remember retching, I remember being shoved back against the stone wall of the tunnel.

Then I remember nothing.

* * *

I came to a couple of hours later in a sour puddle of Johnnie Red and my own sick. I squeezed my eyes shut and picked myself off the cold concrete. I looked around. My sax case lay a few yards away; the suit had given it one hell of a boot after I’d blacked out. Woozy and rubberlegged, I went over and picked it up. There was a size 12 dent in its side, but otherwise it looked okay.

I looked left and right for the brute in the blue suit, but he’d already taken a powder. Good, I thought, and gasped. My chest ached like my ribs had been cracked.

I flipped the latches on the case to make sure the contents were safe. But when I opened it, something caught my eye. A white rectangle tucked between the B and A keys of the sax; it looked like a business card. I pulled it free and took a look at it. It was blank except for two lines in very small type:

SIDNEY “BIG SID” KUPCINET
PUBLIC RELATIONS

I laughed at the thought of the gorilla who’d punched my lights out as being “public relations” for anyone; then I remembered what he’d said about my sax playing and I stopped. I balled up the business card and dropped it in the cocktail of Johnnie Red and vomit. I closed my sax case and moved on. And I haven’t played since.

* * *

A couple nights later I’m back on the prowl. It’s late, and I’m trying to get some shuteye. It’s one, maybe two in the morning, and I’m cooping next to the storage lockers, right underneath the security camera. It’s the only place you can sleep around here. If they see you this close to the lockers, they’ll get antsy and send a cop to chase you off. It’s happened to me a time or two. But as long as the camera can’t see you, you’re fine. So I prop my sax case against one of the lockers and tuck myself into the corner and try to doze off.

But I can’t sleep. Can’t tell you why, exactly. It’s not the lights; they’re on all hours and I’m used to it. But eventually I just give up and start staring up at the ceiling. There’s a beautiful mural spray-painted up there – truth be told, it’s the real reason I sleep around here. It’s of a woman, a statuesque redhead straight from a G.I. pin-up. She’s wearing a one-piece bather and she’s got a smile on her face that I can’t even begin to describe. It’s sort of sweet and tired at the same time, and it makes me think of Florida. That’s where I grew up, before I breezed out to L.A. They say it’s the same, all beach and sea, but it’s different. It’s cleaner out there, you know? More livable, you know? You know? You –

“You know she ain’t real, right?”

I’m up on my feet in the blink of an eye, sax case in hand, my heart jackhammering in my chest. There’s a guy standing to my left, leaning against the bank of lockers. He doesn’t look at me, only at the bathing beauty on the ceiling. He’s pale, like he was wearing white pancake makeup. He’s got a little hoop around his ear. He wears a satin smoking jacket, and one of his hands has an Ace bandage around it. He looks like he’s about to fall asleep, and yet he’s wide awake at the same time. Mellow.

“Christ, man, you scared me.” I’m clutching my chest, making sure my heart doesn’t burst out and escape.

“She’s not a real person,” this cat’s drawling, eyes almost closed, slightly swaying on his feet. “She’s an idea someone had a very long time ago. An angel of redemption who sees all and understands everything. In this day and age, that’s an impossibility. Or at least, it is in the world as it exists.”

I start to relax. A ghost like me sees a lot of reefer smokers and hopheads down in the subways and the gutters I inhabit. Shit, can’t say I’m any better. I used to do acid a long time ago, back when I could afford it.

Then the man looks down at me, and then his eyes open reaaaaaally wide. And all of a sudden, I can’t move. I’m paralyzed, with something screaming in my head like a banshee. Because this man’s got eyes like four hundred watt bulbs, the kind that look straight through you down into your soul, and doesn’t like what’s there. The kind of eyes God has on a bad day.

“But ideas have power, Andy,” the guy says, and I’m afraid to ask him how he knows my name, because I get the feeling this man’s like a cobra, about to kill me.

Then his eyes go back to slits, and he looks over my shoulder at something. I turn away reluctantly, afraid to take my eyes off of him. And I see him walking toward me, the goon in the blue suit, Big Sid Kupcinet is coming and hell is coming with him, in the form of four thugs that could be Big Sid’s brothers. All of them are wearing blue suits and every one of them has a gun.

“Run,” the man in the smoking jacket says to me.

I don’t need to be told twice. I jump past him and tear off like an antelope being chased by a pack of hyenas. I’m fast, sprinting full out, and I’ll run until I pass out. It takes me a while to realize why I feel that way: my sax case isn’t in my hand.

I skid to a stop, meaning to look back, but that’s when I hear the ka-raack! of a shot and the tiled wall of the subway splinters over my shoulder. I let out a scream and throw my hands over my head and beeline for the nearest cover, which turns out to be the ladies’ room. I don’t hesitate for a second; I’m diving through the door and huddling behind it, making myself small, wedging myself in behind the doorframe. And then I hear the screaming; it’s coming from just down the hall.

Sooner or later it stops, but I don’t take any chances. I wait a few more minutes until I’m sure the coast is clear, and then I poke my head out the door and look around.

The subway platform is a cordite-reeking slaughterhouse. Big Sid Kupcinet and his brethren lie dead on the floor, bullet holes oozing blood all over them. Brain spatters leaking yellow fluid cover one entire wall. My first coherent thought is that the goons had ended up shooting themselves up while shooting at me, but I tear my gaze away from the mangled corpses and something else catches my eye.

It’s the guy in the smoking jacket. He’s standing in the middle of the carnage, like a horse sleeping on its feet. He’s holding something in his hand, but it’s not a gun. It’s my sax case.

I grip the doorframe and pull myself up. I start feeling a hollowness as I walk toward the guy, fearing him more than I’d feared Big Sid. But the sight of my prized possession in this man’s hands puts the kibosh on that little dance of terror. I say, “Hey, man, that’s mine.”

I don’t think he hears me at first. He’s just standing there, waiting... and then whoosh! eyes open really wide. And I suddenly realize just how much blood is on the floor.

The guy looks at me, his cold eyes boring into me like poison darts, and I look away, committing the carnage around me to memory. The dead man nearest to me had no face left; blood and cartilage fragments covered what remained. I think that it might be Big Sid, but how can you tell? I know I will carry this sight with me to my grave.

Looking back up, I feel cold all over; my breath comes in spurts. I’m afraid of what the guy in the smoking jacket’s going to do to me, and I wonder if he’s going to bludgeon me to death with my own saxophone. I suddenly realize the man doesn’t even have a single scratch on him, and he’s got blood all over his hands.

Then the man throws out a smile that’s pure charm. “I like Roy Orbison, too,” he tells me. The words serenade over the scene, as though he hadn’t just butchered five men a few minutes earlier. “You don’t get any better than ‘Blue Bayou’, in my book.”

I try to smile back, parting my lips and grinning my teeth in what feels more like a rictus of pain that anything else. The man holds out my sax case. “I think you might want to get a new case, though. There’s a big dent in it.”

I take it numbly, feeling sticky warmth on the handle and I realize it’s blood. I nearly drop it in shock and the man starts to laugh. High feminine laughter that sounds hysterical in my own ears. Then, still laughing, he turns and walks away down the tunnel.

He stops once, only once, underneath the mural of the lovely beach beauty. Without looking back he says, “Don’t worry about the security camera. It can’t see you.” And then he tips his hand to the paint-and-pastel goddess above and walks on into the shadows, still laughing that mad laugh. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again, and I don’t want to.

All of a sudden, I realize where I am. I tear from the bloodbath and highball it down the tunnel, hoping I don’t run into any of the subway dicks that start asking questions about the blood on my hand. The only thought running through my mind is how Florida’s looking this time of year.

And I wonder how they like their Roy Orbison.

* * *

Two weeks later, the sax man was dead. Shot by a cop on the Sepulveda Platform, two blocks down from where he’d met the mystery man. The cop had needed some extra arrests for his record, so he’d tried to pick up the sax man for loitering. Naturally, things didn’t work out that way, so the cop dropped off the body with a friend of his at the coroner’s and hocked the man’s sax in at a local pawnshop. The cop figured he’d done worse things in his life, and besides, City Hall was putting a lot of heat on them these days to keep the subways clear, especially after the bloodbath a couple weeks ago. The election was coming up next month, after all.


© 2009 Stephen J. Davis

[Steve]

Re: Billy Said Keep Going

Wow. I am surprised that this still exists in some format.

I abandoned the story in 2008, and I gotta say, my flirtation with McCarthy-esque verbosity has gone the way of the dinosaur. I couldn't even imagine writing in this style today. It is nice to be able to look back and see where you've been, as well as shake your head in good ol' embarrassment and say, "Wow, was I really that bad?"

[Jean]

Re: Billy Said Keep Going

First: of course it exists. While bears are not extinct, they will preserve everything their friends have ever written or said.

Second: your separation from McCarthy is one of the best news I've heard in a long time.

Third: when will we see something new? Any style will do.

[Steve]

Re: Billy Said Keep Going

McCarthy is still a favorite, but his particular style isn't quite where I want mine to be. Still, it was helpful to write in that vein for a while, and I did pick up some good tricks from it.

Something new? Hmm... I've been writing steadily, with a couple of finished manuscripts in varying stages of revisions and several screenplays in the works. I may post some tidbits here and there.

[Jean]

Re: Billy Said Keep Going

Please do.