Category: Scenes

Several scenes from one of my favourite screenplays. I’m sure I never quite got it right – and there’s a bit of a preamble tacked onto the front. By all means skip it and go to the scenes!

Live Twice Extract

This is the opening scene of a screenplay Chris Hubbell and I wrote some years ago. It’s based on the life of Bill Miner, allegedly the first outlaw to coin the order ‘Hands Up!’ But he was much more than a bank- and train robber – much more than even the excellent Richard Farnsworth movie The Grey Fox recounts. Hunted relentlessly by the man who eventually captured him many years later, Bill decamped to London (England) where he became a High Society fixture and a successful gambler. Later he travelled to South Africa and planned to rob the gold trains which carried billions (in today’s currency) of dollars worth of gold from the Witwatersrand mines to Johannesberg. A relatively sane man, he saw that he stood no chance against the machine-gun armed guards. He returned to the USA where he resumed his train- and bank-robbing career at an age when most men are long retired. Inevitably he was captured and lived the rest of his life under remarkably comfortable prison conditions and sharing almost daily reminiscences with the veteran lawman who had hunted him all his outlaw life. Our movie ends before his capture, with his last train robbery – the locomotive’s boiler exploded by Bill’s infamous .500 Elephant Gun, a gift from Lord Smallwood whose daughter Bill was about to marry before he had so hastily to flee England. Much of the South African material is based on my book 

Chris and I have always been fascinated by London’s Soho, particularly in its pre-chic days when it starred clubs of every type from low down strip to high class cocktails, dinner and dance; when our pal the homicidal Greek barber shared his building with ‘French models’ and a soon to be famous graphic designer. It was exciting, a bit out on the edge and a universe away from today’s Soho of slick advertising execs and  monstrously expensive restaurants.

We set Flash Chord in this world which we knew so well – just as we also knew and had been involved in the music business, the fringes of show business and a couple of other more-or-less dodgy doings.

Flash Chord extract

Here’s the opening scene of a screenplay based on the life of Jim Bowie and featuring both the making of the legendary knife and the events leading up to The Alamo. I’ve learned so much more about Bowie since I wrote this, not least through living in New Orleans. One of these days I ought to drastically rewrite it. The legend justifies it.

Knife opening/title scene