A while back, a good friend of mine was getting fired up with his transition from film-making hobbyist to film making professional. He started an ambitious project to do 12 film works in a year and somehow, I forget the exact circumstances, I ended up working with him on a script for a 6-part episodic serial idea he'd had called "Zombies in the Snow". He had this idea of using HAARP as the backdrop for an Alaskan zombie movie and, knowing I'd published serial fiction in the past, eventually asked me to do a script for him. And I did.

I'm not sure if what I delivered was what he had in mind. My most obvious influences are Douglas Adams and Dave Barry, and I think he wanted more John Carpenter and George Romero. But he took it and started working with it.

I generally felt good about the script. We had a few meetings about structure and pacing, but overall he made very few changes to what I'd written, most of the rewrites he wanted were to accommodate budget and time concerns - reworking scenes to reuse locations, that kind of thing. And then we had our first meeting with the cast.

At this point it may sound like I'm bashing the director, but that's not my intention. The cast he'd put together were all local talent (and I mean that, they were all experienced local actors) whom he had worked with in the past and chose based on his experiences with them rather than their fit for the parts. So our first meeting had a lot more of the cast saying "You should do [x] in the story because it'd be awesome!" than actual talking about the script I'd written; it was a bad sign to me, and I expected a lot of script rewrites to accommodate the characters they wanted to play rather than have them play the characters in the script. But, hey, this was my first script project so what do I know? Maybe that's how it's done.

Then we had our first read-through and about half the cast were actually there. Another bad sign.

And then the project got put off for weather reasons.

And then ...

Well, the last script updates were in May of 2012, and I haven't heard a thing about the project since. And now that HAARP is folding up shop, I'm going to assume the project is no more.

But I am proud of this script. I genuinely think it's some of the funniest writing I've ever done, and I'd hate for it to pass unnoticed. So here it is, in handy PDF form.

I apologize in advance for the gas station bathroom scene.