Screenwriting Commons^™

Pathos, Fall 2021, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Bret Steggell

Discovering Caroline, Jon Meyers

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

DISCOVERING CAROLINE is the script for an ensemble, a feature-length supernatural drama, set in 1899. Caroline, presumed dead at birth, returns forty years later to the scene of that tragedy, a university nursing school training hospital, where her birth mother still works as a lunch lady. Surrounded by a dozen other characters (thirteen if you count the pig), played against a backdrop of a handful of supernatural events, this script explores familiar love, romantic love, inappropriate love, truth, deceit, death, and the consequences on others when these life events intertwine throughout seventy-seven scenes. Included here is an introduction as well …

"The Caucasian Persuasion Here In The 'Dale": Othering, White Normality, And Post-Racialism In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Isaiah Lee

University Honors Theses

This thesis engages the construction of race within the television landscape of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to investigate how well-meaning, progressive media either reinvents or repudiates racial stereotype. This paper also examines the figure of the Other, as it is evoked in horror, and utilizes Hazel Carby's conception of the fantasized black subject to analyze the setting and characters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with an eye towards the inherent assumptions the show makes about race. Ultimately, I argue that Buffy's representation of race assumes a white normality, flattening its non-white characters under the guise of inherent difference, even …

Starless Nights, Deepak Rauniyar

Theses and Dissertations

A film about the filmmaking process and the life of a filmmaker. But it's also a story about immigration, home, and negotiation. We constantly negotiate in our lives to maintain our relationships, opportunities, and dreams.

Home, Kandace James

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

My feature-length screenplay follows an anxious girl who, after her mother kicks her out of the house, is forced to live in her car. She’s in love with the dog walker but she’s the one who got her kicked out in the first place. Possessing the voices of queer, Black women, I display one possible outlook on the queer experience. “Home” broadens the narrative of young Black girls lived realities in America. “Home” depicts the realities of what it means to be young, Black, queer women in a world marked with religiosity, abuse, and grief, while in the process of …

Encore: A Story Of Identity, Austin Copps

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

Encore, a feature length screenplay, tells a story of a young man and his search for identity.

This Must Be The Place: A Short Film, Reagan Shull

Honors Projects

This Must Be The Place is a short film categorized as a Coming of Age Mystery with strong narrative ties to Magical Realism set in the heart of small town America. The key thematic ideas are identity, female relationships, isolation, friendship, and loss. This story emphasizes each person’s struggle for identity, and the isolation that can be brought upon themselves when they do not know who they are. Further, the difficulties regarding the search for one’s dreams without a strong sense of identity are also discussed in this narrative. Ultimately, this story is about dealing with isolation as we grow …

Bigfoot Nation, Maximilian Kubisiak

LMU Theses and Dissertations

An outcast Bigfoot and amateur “expert” in the study of humans, a Ted Kaczynski conspiracy theorist, and a bored Gen Z-er are all unwittingly drawn into a ring of political, corporate, and international conspiracies in a small Rocky Mountain town. The trio bumbles through the absurdities of a classic western conspiracy.

Whittier, Mario E. Johnson

LMU Theses and Dissertations

A Navy sailor enlists at a mysterious Naval Reserves base to be closer to his dying mother and discovers he’s transporting aliens and an unknown medicine that could potentially save his Mom’s life.

Barren, Hannah Herman

LMU Theses and Dissertations

In the aftermath of their baby’s stillbirth, eccentric couple Marlow and Dev clash with overbearing loved ones, outspoken neighbor kids, and each other while trying to reconcile unmet expectations and their newfound reality. Bottling up her emotions, Marlow begins to see inanimate objects speak, spewing out the feelings she hopes to keep suppressed.

Pathos, Spring 2021, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Bret Steggell

The Táin, Luke Hart-Moynihan

LMU Theses and Dissertations

The Táin (Myth / Epic Fantasy, Feature) - In mythic iron-age Ireland, an exiled king allies with a proud queen to steal a magic bull and retake his former kingdom, but his semi-divine foster-son stands in their way. Based on the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cúailnge.

Tom, Dick, And Harry, Andy Hammersmith

LMU Theses and Dissertations

Presumed dead, a cantankerous retired assassin hides out in a senior living home. When the CIA tracks him down, he enlists his fellow residents to trade in their walkers for weapons to protect the facility from a death squad.

Sid And Bugaboo, Delaynna Corley

LMU Theses and Dissertations

It is an animated series for kids. It centers on Sid, an adventurous eleven-year-old girl, who gets into trouble one too many times, and a Bogeyman, is sent to scare her straight. But this monster, named Bugaboo, turns out not to be the scary creature that she thought he would be, creating an unlikely friendship between the two.

The Last Greatest, Ethan Raduns-Silverstein

LMU Theses and Dissertations

Fighting bankruptcy, the owner of the last traveling circus train in America must improve the act and generate ticket sales or it's curtains for him and his eclectic cast and crew.

Clean Sweep, Isabelle Davis

LMU Theses and Dissertations

Best friends, Harry and Dave, both come to face their own versions of mid-life crises. Harry is a former hockey player stuck in his glory days, and Dave is a recently divorced, try-hard dad without any glory days. Harry realizes he’s not in the “prime” he thinks he is but still wants another shot at the Olympics, so he decides to trade hockey in for the most exciting and physical sport in the world – Curling. He drags along Dave to form a team of misfits, including the local shuffleboard champ and hairdresser, Ramona, and a high-school janitor, Gail. Under …

No Man's Land, Preston Ray

LMU Theses and Dissertations

NO MAN’S LAND (One-Hour, Horror) – In a dying Dust Bowl town suffering from the outbreak of a strange disease, a headstrong epidemiologist finds herself facing off against an ancient, supernatural entity.

Black Men Don't Cheat, Edwin Lorenzo Martin

LMU Theses and Dissertations

Sick of doing what's expected him, Marcus leaves his job as a doctor to pursue acting as he and his roommates figure out life in a fast changing South Central LA.

Fallmore, Emanuella Bettarello De Oliveira

LMU Theses and Dissertations

After a nightmare where her best friend is killed by a terrifying creature, a teenager girl, wakes up to find that not only is he missing in real life, but no one in the perfect town of Fallmore seems to remember he ever existed...

Hindsight, Haley Elizabeth Moore

LSU Master's Theses

“Time travel is theoretically impossible, but I wouldn't want to give it up as a plot gimmick.”—Isaac Asimov

“Of all the concepts in Speculative Fiction, Time Travel is probably the one that, over time, has provided us with the most possibilities for storytelling, and therefore the one that has been (clocked as having been) exploited the most.”—TVtropes.org

Hindsight is a one-hour long show with an eight-episode arc per season. It is a story of authenticity and gimmicks, privilege and disadvantage, mediocrity and exceptionalism. These are all pretty big concepts, and yeah, we look at them on a macrocosmic scale, but …