Posts under ‘Narrative Motion Pictures’

Yuppie couple goes back to the land – sells trendy Toronto pad, he quits his job as Head of Hostile Takeovers at DigestCom and she quits her job as a patent lawyer. They use all the money from the sale of their pad to buy a small plot of land on Galiano Island and live out of a lean-to eating deer meat and wild berries. They suffer severe caffeine withdrawal and can’t beat their insomnia. Hilarious adventures ensue.

When the film The Aristocrats came out in 2005, the production company sponsored a contest in which people were to submit video recording of their own telling of The Aristocrats, the now-famous joke whose punchline never changed and which got its humor from everything else the teller created, usually the more vulgar the better, before [...]

The short narrative screenplay was inspired by a chapter on homelessness in Daniel Quinn’s Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, listed in the Potluck library under ecology, anthropology and evolution. This piece appeared in the first and only issue of Mosaic: A Magazine of Arts, Sciences & Everything in Between, which evolved into this website.
Read [...]

This was a proposed television series in which host Dr. Wiley Bonefish and a crew of puppet lab assistants would humorously help kids explore paranormal science using the scientific method.
Read the The Unexplainable Bonefish - Series Proposal .pdf.
© 2000 Edwin Budd, Tamara Budd, Mark Meritt and Alex Diehl
Read the The Unexplainable Bonefish - First Episode [...]

This original screenplay has a serial killer giving clues to a novice newspaper reporter, and includes narrative and thematic twists. It convinced an agent at Susan Smith & Associates in Beverly Hills, CA, to take the authors on as full clients instead of just representing them for their screenplay Citizen Arcane, a.k.a. The Lion’s Share. [...]

This screenplay, originally titled The Lion’s Share, was first written in 1995, then revised in 1996 and again in 2002, when its title changed. It is based on the true story of Sam Byck, who committed suicide during a botched 1974 attempt at assassinating President Richard M. Nixon by crashing an airplane into the White [...]

This narrative short motion picture was produced for a course in filmmaking with filmmaker Marilyn Rivchin at Cornell University during Mark’s undergraduate studies. A spoof of Hollywood spy movies, the story follows an unlucky average Joe into whose hands accidentally falls a canister of top secret microfilm. Effortlessly, the inexperienced protagonist foils each and every [...]

This narrative short motion picture was produced for a course in filmmaking with filmmaker Marilyn Rivchin at Cornell University during Mark’s undergraduate studies. A fake public service annoncement, it comments satirically on the problem of overpopulation, a subject Mark would work a great deal more on in the future. The short was produced on 16mm, [...]

This narrative short motion picture, in which a dysfunctional couple is made moreso when a television ratings company lures them into what is later revealed to be an Orwellian conspiracy, was produced by a motion picture course given at Cornell University during the summer of 1991. The script was chosen via a departmental screenwriting competition, [...]