the best stories adapt
I move work from one form into another: footage into story, ideas into objects, a novel into a screenplay, and the problems of adaptation into software.
Current work
The Bostonians
A stage and screen adaptation.
Chronos
Software built through the adaptation.
Film & television
Nearly four decades of production and editorial work.
04 / The cut
The cut changes more than the sequence.
I learned the cut in edit rooms: select, remove, shorten, move, join. A scene can be beautifully made and still be wrong for the film. A line can be true and still break the paragraph. I have to decide what the whole requires, then make that answer material: a new duration, a changed emphasis, an absence everyone can feel.
When I remove something, it does not leave cleanly. I hear it in the next cut, feel it in the changed rhythm, and meet it again when the structure will not settle. Discarded material does not vanish.
05 / Resistance
Living things resist their imposed forms.
I have met that resistance in footage, performance, dough, chocolate, packaging, a nineteenth-century novel, and software. Bread does not care about the schedule. Chocolate records every shortcut. An actor can expose a false sentence by trying to breathe inside it. A source text will not become a screenplay merely because the margins changed.
These are not hobbies arranged beside a career. They are different materials, and their objections are specific: dough that missed its rise, chocolate gone out of temper, a label that promises more than the tin can deliver, an actor stopping because the sentence cannot be spoken.
06 / Play
I keep changing materials because each one catches a different lie.
I enter a new material because it can show me something my old tools cannot. I learned the chocolatier's craft to understand a company I was helping lead. I build software because a notebook could no longer hold the adaptation. I return to a small theater because an actor breathing a few feet away can settle an argument a screen cannot.
I love the awkward first pass: the blocking that fails, the package that looks better than it works, the tool that breaks on a real book. It gets the mistake into the room where everyone can see it. Then we can play again, with better information.
07 / Notes
A note can be wrong and still find the problem.
I have spent nearly four decades receiving notes from producers, directors, clients, actors, writers, and audiences. Some are exact. Some mistake the symptom for the cause. Some propose a solution that would make everything worse.
But the note means another person met the work and felt something resist. My job is to hear that without surrendering my own judgment: find the pressure beneath the suggestion, return to the material, and make an answer that belongs to the whole.
08 / Present work
A novel is teaching me what the next form requires.
The work in front of me is The Bostonians, adapted for stage and screen. A complete 38-scene working draft exists; the revision continues around Verena's agency, the ending, Miss Birdseye's inheritance, and what a live room and a camera can each know.
Chronos is the instrument built through that work: a working Mac application in active private use that keeps the source, the writer's decisions, and the screenplay connected. It does not use ML agents or write the adaptation. The screenplay is the creative work. Chronos helps me remain in contact with the book while making something new from it.
The earlier work has not become background. Nearly four decades of television remain in the cut. Products and ventures remain in the demand that an idea survive a shelf, a production day, and a customer. Writing and research hold the questions that do not need to become companies.
Work together
Bring the work before the pitch.
You do not need to have solved it or turned it into a deck. Tell me what exists, what has to happen next, and why now. If there is useful work to do together, we will know what to discuss next.
Choose a way in