» On 10/02/2019 04:00:00 PM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
Côte d'Azur to NBC NY Page. 

I was hired as a Page soon after returning from a year in southern France, selling t-shirts to the tourists with a Danish business partner. The venture wasn't successful at all, and we still laughingly refer to that period as "The Year Of Failing Miserably." But it was a lot of fun, and it convinced us that we could accomplish great things in life. Well, medium-great, anyway. I filled several notebooks with our daily adventures, and later threatened for decades to dramatize our year abroad. After a few of my other screenplays placed well in international competitions (quarters, semis and finals), I figured it was time to dig out the notebooks.

So I fictionalized our experiences, then converted the screenplay into an ebook. That proof-of-concept adaptation has appeared on Amazon's Performing Arts Best Sellers list since it was first published, in July 2019, with reviews averaging 5 out of 5 stars.

Title: Côte d'Azur

Logline: "There's nothing quite so romantic as spending one's youth in a foreign land."

Synopsis: Eric is a 20-something American guy who's plunging headlong into some humorously calamitous and often outrageous adventures, sexual and otherwise, while selling t-shirts on the French Riviera. Or maybe Eric is an older man who's looking back on his earlier years with nostalgic regret and trying to alter the course of his life. The story was inspired by Lawrence Durrell, and his experiments with metafictional techniques in The Avignon Quintet ("fictional" characters interacting with "real" characters) and The Alexandria Quartet (the Rashomon of literature, with multiple points of view). This is a coming-of-age buddy movie, with fantasy, humor, adventure, romance, alternate history and a touch of magic. The script reads like a heightened junior year abroad, with independent 20-somethings instead of traditional students: "L'auberge espagnole" meets "The Motorcycle Diaries." It might be described as a hedonistic tale in the shape of a Möbius strip, trapped in an Escher wood engraving: magical realism with just a dash of irrealism, drenched in Mediterranean sunshine.

The screenplay is available here: 9TimeZones.com/cote.pdf

Enjoy!

Bibliography ~ Filmography ~ Côte d'Azur ~ CV

Labels: acbpage, BookTok, pitch