updated Autumn 2023
Take The Doom Generation, Bowling For Columbine, a bit of Cloud Atlas, a high school set in the middle of John Waters’ Desperate Living, put it at the base of Colorado's Front Range, add the tension of recent and present anti-LGBTQ sentiment, fundamentalism, and political apathy: this is April In Colorado.
April In Colorado is about a political situation that began when the teens of the late 1990s were children. The children were unaware. They carried out the messages they were given. An influx of new residents were oblivious. No one suspected politics were part of the problem.
April in Colorado
April in Colorado was the title of talks I gave when I started work on this story. I also gave that title to the first draft of the screenplay I completed in 2022.
I began the talks:
April in Colorado is lovely. It is in the 70’s nearly every day. By May it will be in the 80’s and too hot (at this altitude) to be out in the mid-day sun. On a particular morning in April, I went out to my backyard garden to harvest some greens for a salad.
My neighbor grew up in the house I lived in. We spoke often. A few days ago she told me she had given notice at work that she would retire at the end of summer. She is a nurse at a hospital in Denver. She has “had enough”, she said.
On this day my neighbor came out of her house to tell me the hospital called to tell her to be ready to be called in. There is an emergency somewhere south of Denver but she doesn't know what it is. I wonder out loud if there is a power outage, or if a tornado has passed through the area. She says she is going in to see if there’s anything on TV about it.
I went in and did the same. I’d look on the internet, but the first message on the television is a request that we not use our telephones unless it was necessary because the telephone system is overloaded. And dial-up was all we had.
This is the beginning of the personal side of the story. This is not how the movie begins, nor it this in the screenplay. It is the point at which I began to form the complete story.
At the time of the event I had been living in Colorado for nine years.
an event
never forgotten
The WGA strike is over, call me by your (company) name and leave a text: Four four two, two three four, seven, two twenty.
Los Angeles
Contact
Email: inquire@aprilincolorado.com
Thank you for reading.