| BEYOND THE PALE |
| Introduction |
| In
1991 I was sitting around with friends lamenting the fact that I hadn't
made a movie in years. As a teenager, I was an amateur film nut, and my
friends and I turned out quite a few different movies; Ninja Preps,
a series of comedy-action shorts that made fun of the social class battles
in our high school between the preppies and the headbangers, Domino,
a buddy cop movie with a white and a black guy (very popular in the 80's)
and a plethora of animated shorts using Star Wars or G.I. Joe action figures.
The longest of these animated shorts was called War World, took us a year
to make, and was about 45 minutes long in the final edit. |
| I
had graduated, had money to work on a project, and wanted to film something.
I was heavily influenced by the few Twin Peaks episodes I had seen and
wanted to do something really bizarre and off the wall. The only concept
I had in my head was "The Mystic Cowboy" as a starting point.
I wrote the first scene of the film around that concept, and in addition
to about 20% of the script, we actually went and filmed a bunch of it.
I still have the footage somewhere. |
| Unfortunately,
the picture's leading lady decided to go on tour with a theatre troupe
and we were left with either the option of re-filming everything or just
leaving it undone. So, like many of my projects in those days, it got
left unfinished. |
| Another
year passed and I ended up working on it as a novel, taking the scripted
scenes and fleshing out the prose. The almost finished result is "Beyond
the Pale." It was written with a Christian market in mind, and evolved
into a book that would have to have it's feet in both the Christian subculture
and normal market in order to have a shelf life. |
| Which
is why I'm re-writing it with a new title and a lot of new elements. I'm
posting the original here as a curio, and also at the unspoken request
of an old friend, who always tells people it's the best book he's ever
read. |
| So,
until I finish the rewrite, here's the Christopher Tolkien version. |
| Prologue:
The Missing Children |
