December 2018

I was excited to see that Charley Parkhurst, the heroine of my script The Bushwhacker, finally got a proper New York Times obituary.

Here’s an excerpt:

Charley Parkhurst was a legendary driver of six-horse stagecoaches during California’s Gold Rush — the “best whip in California,” by one account.

The job was treacherous and not for the faint of heart — pulling cargos of gold over tight mountain passes and open desert, at constant peril from rattlesnakes and desperadoes — but Parkhurst had the makeup for it: “short and stocky,” a whiskey drinker, cigar smoker and tobacco chewer who wore a black eyepatch after being kicked in the left eye by a horse.

And there was one other attribute, this one carefully hidden from the outside world. When Parkhurst died in 1879 at age 67, near Watsonville, Calif., of cancer of the tongue, a doctor discovered that the famous stagecoach driver was biologically a woman. Charley, it turned out, had been short for Charlotte.

I’m spending the last few weeks of the year updating my neglected website and blog.

I’ve added a bunch of new articles and interviews.

I’ve also added a list of what I think are the best screenwriting contests, labs, and fellowships.

One of the best things to happen to me since my last update was the week I spent at the Black List Feature Lab in LA.

Here’s a blog I wrote about it, and here’s an except:

Screenwriters don’t often get pampered. They don’t often get spoiled. They usually don’t even get valued.

But during one week in October, 2016, seven of us were pampered, spoiled rotten, and valued.

Home base was a West Hollywood Airbnb straight out of Architectural Digest. There were mirrors on things I didn’t know you could put mirrors on. There was a dedicated appliance just for making margaritas.