I've been writing screenplays for a while now — across enough genres that I sometimes wonder if I have a type or just a short attention span. A desert mystery, a period drama, a prison series, a fantasy horror show, a globe-trotting identity comedy, a straight-up caper. A few of these have done some traveling — placing in the various final stages of the Nicholl Fellowship, Page International Top 10, Sundance Episodic Lab and Austin Film Festival, and Imagine Impact.
I was repped and building momentum in Los Angeles when the pandemic hit. When the industry slowly spun back up, my life took a different path. I had the opportunity to direct a couple amazing documentary projects and I landed back in Budapest, where I live now — but my love of the craft never waned. These are a selection from the catalog. They're all finished, developed with extensive work with my reps and other producers.
If you would like to read, or you know someone who might, drop me a line.
The Desert States of Ursula
Written by Chip Warren
Format: Feature screenplay
Genre: Mystery / Drama
Setting: Mojave Desert, California (with flashbacks to Taos, Oklahoma, Tucson, Mexico City)
A reclusive artist in the Mojave discovers a child's severed hand in a cactus outside her Airbnb rental cabins. The investigation that follows turns a small desert town against her — but what Ursula is really hiding has nothing to do with the crime. Through flashbacks to Taos, Oklahoma, Tucson, and Mexico City, we learn what shaped a woman who built her entire life around not being found.
The Art of Leaving Me Alone
Written by Chip Warren
Format: Feature screenplay
Genre: Dramedy
Setting: Los Angeles (with excursions to Mumbai, Jamaica, and Moscow)
Colby Sinclair walks dogs, writes eyeglass copy, and lives in a 250-square-foot apartment in Hollywood with a succulent named Francine. After his grandfather's death, he begins building an elaborate ecosystem of fake identities — a bride-to-be on Pinterest, a mountaineer on Instagram, dozens of Facebook profiles — not to steal or exploit, but because stepping into other people's feelings is the only way he's ever learned to feel anything at all. When a scammer in Mumbai, a nonbinary musician, and a couples therapist he's seeing alone all converge on his life at once, the architecture of avoidance starts to collapse. It's a film about a man in real pain who built the most elaborate coping mechanism imaginable, and what happens when he finally has to take it apart.
Tres Papas
Written by Chip Warren & Arthur Gonzales
Format: Feature screenplay
Genre: Comedy / Caper
Setting: East Los Angeles, Hollywood Hills, Malibu
Three best friends in East LA host a podcast that just got nominated for a Webby. Life is good — until one of them gets framed for embezzling $3.2 million by the very boss who hired him. With 48 hours before the prison bus comes Monday morning, the Tres Papas set out to prove their boy's innocence. What follows involves a hallucinogenic cocktail at a pirate-themed mansion party, a phone at the bottom of a swimming pool, a DUI checkpoint negotiated by an Uber driver in a gold lamé bodysuit, a bag of steel-cut oats, and a premature climax in the enemy's bed. Underneath the mess: a story about a man who rebuilt his life after juvie and the people who refuse to let him lose it again.
Black Stump Hollow
Written by Chip Warren
Format: Feature screenplay
Genre: Period drama
Setting: Blue Ridge Mountains, Rappahannock County, Virginia — 1944
Rappahannock County, Virginia, 1944. When his father ships out as an Army doctor, sixteen-year-old David Bannister inherits the family farm, the foreman, and a hollow full of neighbors who don't all wish him well. A moonshiner's son drags him into a bootlegging scheme, and David has to figure out — without anyone to ask — what kind of man he's going to be. It's a story about decency as a choice, not a default.
Raleigh's Prep
Written by Chip Warren (Based on the novel by James Noll)
Format: Television series (7 episodes written)
Genre:Fantasy horror / Dark comedy
Setting: Raleigh's Preparatory Academy — a remote, seemingly elite reform school surrounded by ancient forest
Three misfit teens convicted of arson arrive at an elite reform school by dirigible and discover the old-growth forest surrounding campus is a killing ground. Every semester, the school feeds its students to a race of monstrous human-animal hybrids under the guise of a rite-of-passage challenge — and the train out is even worse. A scrawny ringleader who quotes Latin, his two oversized co-defendants, a bald inventor in a vinyl suit, and a gentle giant who killed two football players are the only ones asking questions.
Lemon Grove
Written by Chip Warren & Arthur Gonzales
Format: Television — 1-hour drama (Pilot + Episode 2)
Genre: Prison drama
Setting: Lemon Grove State Prison, California
Lemon Grove State Prison is a maximum-security facility where the real economy runs on smartphones, drugs, and gambling — and the corrections officers are as deep in the enterprise as the inmates. A 62-year-old gang elder writing secret proposals for unity. A 17-year-old who arrived on the wrong bus. A white man raised Black who refuses a weapon. And a new warden with Ivy League idealism and no idea what he's walked into. The show treats prison as an economy first and a violent institution second. Violence is a cost of doing business, and every character is running a constant ROI calculation on whether peace is worth more than war.
More from the catalog
Brandywine Avenue — Television — Drama Superior Judge Carolyn Pritchett oversees the juvenile and family court complex in a blighted Midwestern city — the nexus point for everything broken and everything trying to heal. A conservative hawk on criminal justice, she's built her career on hard lines. Now the progressive movement is advancing, and she either adapts or watches her life's work get dismantled around her.
Recyclers — Feature — Dark Comedy A couple of ex-cons hit the wall trying to find work in a job market hostile to former felons. Then they spy a unique opportunity: recycling high-end burial coffins harvested from the fresh graves of one-percenters. A working-class Robin Hood story that takes a sardonic stab at wealth disparity, culture clash, and life in 21st-century Los Angeles.
OK, You Two — Television — Comedy Mother, wife, daughter, lover, therapist, author — Alex Deneuve's star is on the rise. But just when her self-soothing lifestyle begins to strain her seemingly ideal family life, her mother moves to California in search of sexual liberation and throws the whole enchilada into chaos. A punchy, upbeat look at love, sex, and relationships across the full diversity spectrum.
Rue — Feature — Drama A punk-rock bicycle courier in Budapest has a collision of conscience when his mother dies and he begins to face the karmic repercussions of his other job — producing adult films. Walking away from the work is easy. Leaving the sticky relationships that come with it, not so much.