Screen
(Screenplays in progress)
Jeremy Paul, screenwriter and playwright, welcomes enquiries about any of the following screenplays.
Any day in summer you can sit out at Mick’s seafood café on the water’s edge looking over Swanage Bay. You see people of all ages, shapes and sizes, grasping at life, come rain or shine. This is the genesis of:
Sink or Swim
(A Romantic Comedy)
The short ferry ride across Poole Harbour, Dorset, brings a vintage Bentley, a family Vauxhall, a battered Fiat and a Suzuki motorbike for a summer weekend of festivity and fireworks in the seaside town of Swanage. A fifth story arrives via Corfe Castle by open-top bus.
Leonard, once a humble merchant seaman, now the proud owner of the Bentley, has come, minus a leg, to look up his great lost love Bunty - did life treat her well?
Carl (the Vauxhall driver) brings his new love Janice, with Ricky and Jodi (15), their kids by their previous partners, strangers to each other. What are the odds on them bonding?
Then there are Gary and Daya (the Suzuki couple). He is a window cleaner and a keen diver. She is a well educated Indonesian beauty. They are at the start of a hot affair.
Conta and Mary (on the open top bus) are Edinburgh ladies on a break from their boring husbands. Mary’s hat flies off in the direction of Corfe Castle which leads to an unsettling encounter with the randy local artist Pedro.
Holly (in the Fiat) dumped by her Italian husband, becomes a cook at the Language School. Her son Aldo (8), on the loose, winds up at the visiting circus with the old clown Fellini and his Italian wife Bauchi, former ‘Queen of the Trapeze’.
This screenplay is currently being written.
The Flipside of Dominick Hide
(A Romantic Comedy)
From the award-winning BBC TV play written by Jeremy Paul and Alan Gibson, which starred Peter Firth, Caroline Langrishe, Pippa Guard and Patrick Magee, and in turn inspired an opera from Sir Michael Tippett, and is currently in development with Pandemonium Films, L.A for an American take on the story.
Little Charley Ross
(A Drama)
Set in Philadelphia in 1874 and based on a true story of the first recorded kidnapping of a child for ransom in US history.
My wife picked up a book by Norman Zierold for 20p in a church fete (the way the best films are found!) and I was instantly hooked and used it as a basis for my screenplay. Norman and I became friends by letter and he gave me encouragement on early drafts before he went into a spiritual retreat in Nebraska and we lost touch. This ironically echoes the story of Little Charley himself. Norman, where are you? I hope you are alive and well.
This project will never leave me. It is as vivid now as it was on that hot July day in Philadelphia in 1874 when a small boy playing outside his well-to-do home was taken off in a tinker’s cart into the vast uncharted wastes of America.
The true events of his father’s desperate search involving crass police bungling and high politics self-interest throw up as many twists and turns as any thriller could hope to offer.
When Christian Ross (the father) enters an asylum on a tip-off his son has been found he hears all the inmates cry out - "I am Charley Ross, I am Charley Ross". All the lost souls claiming identity.
Writing this, it felt like America’s search for its own lost innocence, and it may well appeal to the world of Eastwood, Redford and John Sayles, or from a European eye, Wim Wenders, Mike Apted and Alan Parker.
This screenplay is ready for production.
Frederick
(A Comedy set in present day L.A)
Frederick lodges in the garage of successful opthalmologist Stanley and his lovely wife Jane. Friends tell them Frederick is a sponger ripping them off but Stanley and Jane beg to differ, and what does their 11 year old son Barnaby think?
Who is the real provider?
This comedy springs from my visits to America. As a European I enjoyed films like Milos Forman’s ‘Taking Off’ starring Buck Henry (whose writing also got to me - ‘The Graduate’, ‘To Die For’), Schlesinger’s ‘Midnight Cowboy’, Parker’s ‘Mississippi Burning’ and Mendes ‘American Beauty’ among others. Robert Altman, Billy Wilder and Woody Allen inspired me. Here, then is a US romantic comedy with a European twist.
French Cricket
(A Thriller)
Andrew, Jane and Heather are called from the tranquility of an English village cricket match to go to France and identify the body of their close friend, Creff believed killed in a car crash. Arriving in Provence, they confront the formidable Inspector Lemaire and find themselves enmeshed in a web of mystery and intrigue which puts a severe test on relationships and leads to a chilling climax.
Written by Jeremy Paul and Carey Harrison in the tradition of the French classic film noir (Claude Chabrol) the screenplay is awaiting production.
The Day The Music Stopped
(A Thriller)
Harry, a successful composer of film music, lost touch with his oldest friend Duncan when he dropped out of sight three years ago. Out of the blue Harry gets a call to Corsica and finds Duncan in a dingy back street room, but he’s off the booze and drugs and has a new family, a beautiful young local girl and a baby. Once a successful writer of TV crime fiction, Duncan is now writing lyrics for love songs and strumming on an old upright piano. He needs Harry to find him a tune. That evening in the local bar there’s a joyous renewal of friendship. Harry agrees to be godfather to the little boy.
But the very next day they make a shocking discovery. The girl and the baby are gone from the room leaving no trace.
Duncan starts on a desperate search, but Harry has a date in New York where his beautiful young wife is singing in a Lloyd Webber gala. "Go, Go!" says Duncan…but that tune, it’s in Harry’s head now, half heard in all kinds of places, even at 3am in an empty hotel bar where he stumbles on Lloyd Webber also looking for a tune…
Harry has to get back to Corsica but now Duncan’s missing in a place where crime mingles with family honour, passions run high, and dark and terrifying forces close in on Harry. How much do you risk for your best friend, his woman and child? When the chips are down do you act on the moment, or stop to remember your loved ones and save your own skin?
And, could it be Duncan, all along, who’s been calling the tune?
First draft completed, February 2008.
Other Influences and Inspirations
Francis Truffault, Jean Renoir, Carol Reed, Alexander Mackendrick, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Nicholas Roeg, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Eric Rohmer, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Alexander Payne and the Coen Brothers.