is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Tuesday
Jun 26, 2007

Burley's Time to Die Pitch: 1.0 posted by Martin

I have some things to say about yours, but I’ll post mine first and then we can cross-post about stuff. What worked, what didn’t, how to refine.

Oh, and for me? Think of this as Silkwood meets Speed. Doesn’t that jangle the WTF bone?

Here we go:

Six Months. September Rose hasn’t seen her husband in six months. He’s on rotation as a guard on a the prison planet. But during guard rotation, the prisoners riot and seize control of the facility. September’s husband is murdered.

Now she has seven days to get his body back to Earth in time for revivification — he can live again! After that, he’s gone for good. Problem is, the prisoner’s rule the rock, and nobody — especially not a mourning wife stuck on Earth — can get inside the gravity of the maximum security lock-down. His body is prisoner.

But the security officers who have already given up, and the prison planet management who won’t return her calls, and least of all the prisoners — one of whom seems to actually sympathize with her — have seen a woman like September Rose before. And nobody will keep her from retrieving her husband’s body in time to bring him back to life. Not until every moment is used. Not until it’s Time to Die.

Comments (0) — Category: the screenplay

What is Spitball!?

Spitball! is two guys collaborating to write about writing and collaboration. We're writing partners who have worked together since 2000, and placed in the top 100 in the last Project Greenlight for our script YELLOW.

Currently, we are both working on multiple screenplay, short story, and novel ideas independently and together, and collaborate on this blog.

What Spitball! used to be

Spitball! started as an attempt to collaborate on a screenplay online in real time. From January 2006 to July 2007 we worked on an interactive process to decide the story we were going to make. A full postmortem is coming, but you can find the find all the posts by looking in the category Original Version.

During this period, we affected the personalities of two of the most famous spitball pitchers from the early 20th Century. Look at our brief bios for more info about this, and so as not to be confused as to who is talking when.

We rebooted the franchise in early 2009 in its current form.

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Kent M. Beeson

Urban Shockah pic

Kent M. Beeson (aka Urban Shockah) is a stay-at-home dad and stay-at-home writer, living in Seattle, WA with his wife, 2 year old daughter and an insane cat. In 2007, he was a contributor to the film blog ScreenGrab, where he presciently suggested Jackie Earle Haley to play Rorschach in the Watchmen movie, and in 2008, he wrote a film column for the comic-book site ComiXology called The Watchman. (He's a big fan of the book, if you couldn't tell.) In 2009, he gave up the thrill of freelance writing to focus on screenplays and novels, although he sometimes posts to his blog This Can't End Well, which a continuation of his first blog, he loved him some movies. He's a Pisces, and his favorite movie of all time is Jaws. Coincidence? I think not.

Martin McClellan

Burleigh Grimes pic

Martin (aka Burley Grymz) is a designer and writer. He occasionally blogs at his beloved Hellbox, and keeps a longer ostensibly more interesting bio over here at his eponymous website. You can also find him on Twitter.