Daniel Pyne's Blog, page 3
October 20, 2013
Booklist review of Twentynine Palms
Issue: June 1, 2010
Twentynine Palms.
Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof
Pyne, Daniel (Author) Jul 2010. 240 p. Counterpoint, paperback, $14.95. (9781582435732).
Marginal Hollywood actor Jack Baylor ends an affair with the wife of his best friend, Tory, and knowing Tory’s anger-management issues, he retreats to the California desert town of Twentynine Palms to let the metaphorical dust settle. There he promptly begins an affair with Mona, a young mother of two. But Tory arrives in the town bent...
The Street (1988)
John Mankiewicz and I created this 40 episode series for late night television. We shot on Betacam, using existing light, with a small crew, in Newark, New Jersey — finishing a show in a single night, four episodes every five days. The concept was to do a fictional documentary about beat cops, as if we were riding around with them on their shifts, and occasionally peering in on their private lives; every scene was shot in one unbroken take, sometimes later edited for time. It was so successfu...
October 17, 2013
September 11, 2013
A Hole In The Ground Owned By A Liar
SYNOPSIS
When Lee, ahigh school shop teacher in Evergreen, Colorado, buys a gold mine off the internet, he’s not looking for gold, but for an adventure to quell his oncoming midlife crisis. With the frequently unwanted help of locals and his volatile ex-con brother, he attempts to work the mine until he runs into a couple of Pakistani-by-the-way-of-Jackson-Hole prospectors willing to kill for its contents.
A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liaris part mystery and part gold-infused tall tale with...
Twentynine Palms
SYNOPSIS
Cracking in the desert heat, the sleepy town of Twentynine Palms sits outside the bright blankness that is the sprawl of Los Angeles. For someone on the run like Jack Baylor, who needs a quick exit out of L.A. after a steamy affair with his best friend’s wife, Twentynine Palms is the perfect refuge. But then Jack gets implicated in a murder and his best friend, Tory, is following his trail, out for revenge. With the unexpected help of a 14-year-old girl, Jack desperately works to evad...
July 27, 2013
The Hard Way
Screenplay by Daniel Pyne
This was the rewrite that put me on the map as a writer of feature films. I was working at Universal Studios, as a television writer-producer and creator, where I met William Sackheim, who helped me produce my first series, “Hard Copy,” for CBS. Bill was a friend, and my mentor, and had brought this project to Universal with him from Warners, in turnaround. The original writer, the wickedly talented Lem Dobbs, had run out of gas trying to get the script into a form th...
