PROPERTIES | eliseoent

Film Properties

COTTONWOOD

Genre: Feature Film - Drama

Format: Screenplay and Novel

In West Texas in the summer of 1937, "COTTONWOOD" tells the story of two families thrown together by tragedy and the bounds of racial injustice.

Rube Whitlock is faced with raising his two young sons after the death of his infant daughter leaves his wife mentally incapacitated with grief and unable to care for them. Overwhelmed with the responsibility, Rube hires Esther, a local black woman whose husband- in an attempt to establish himself and his farm as competitive cotton producers- has just purchased his second mule and ignited a stirring of dissonance and contempt within the usually quiet community. As Esther's natural maternal presence begins to fill voids in the Whitlock house and racially charged animosity percolates in the dim-lit bars and shacks just beneath the community's surface, Rube is forced to choose between the boundaries set by the laws he has sworn to uphold and the boundaries set by the moral convictions of the human heart.

Amidst painful pasts beginning to resurface and new secrets freshly buried, it would take a "knobby-kneed buckskin" mule, a cheap pocket knife and a lifeless COTTONWOOD tree to form a lasting friendship that would gray the stark lines between black and white and begin the delicate mending of family ties in the tender heart of a young boy.

WHERE THE HEATHEN RAGE

Genre: Feature Film - Drama

Format: Screenplay

On the backside of Little Black Mountain above the sleepy coal town of St. Charles, Virginia, Hollis Kokker, a down and out miner digging for ginseng stumbles onto a newborn baby hidden in a hollow log. As the child’s raggedy band of heathen relatives learn of its survival, they begin a search to find and destroy the baby, eliminating any possibility of exposing the grotesque lineage of the child. Deciding to keep the child and raise it as their own entangles Hollis and his wife, Anna in a dangerous secret that could ultimately cost them more than they could have ever imagined.

TRUCKSTOP CANDY

Genre: Series - Drama

Format: Screenplay

Based on the short story of the same name from the collection "Rambling Heart: Stories, Jargons & Songs", "Truckstop Candy" finds a young runaway stranded at an interstate truckstop and facing the ultimate consequences of her tormented young life.

When a young runaway teen makes her way down an interstate off ramp, across a truckstop parking lot and into the diner, she enters a surreal world of ramblers, drifters and highway junkies all more than willing to offer her a "soft place to fall". Running from a home life of abuse she finds herself stranded and as the diner closes, facing a decision that will hurl her into the depths and "murk of party row where sits lines of idling trucks lurking in the dark."