Books and Screenplays

Life, Myth, and the American Family Unreeling: The Spiritual Significance of Movies for the 20th Century

I love movies, I love history, and I do a lot of work with generations—so for me this book is a triple treat. You can open almost any page and find a fascinating insight about an old favorite film.
- Neil Howe, co-author of The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy

Combining our national preoccupations regarding family and films with models illustrating the dynamics of personal growth, Family Unreeling digs deep into our cultural underpinnings to reveal why and how movies “move” us the way they do. Using seminal feature films from each decade of the 20th century beginning with Our Town and ending with American Beauty, it blends references to historical events, sociological movements, and classic mythological tales to support how, in the guise of entertainment, the art of fine filmmaking speaks to our human psychological, emotional, and spiritual needs. It is liberally peppered with illustrations, diagrams, charts, and stills.

Hard copy and e-book versions may be obtained through www.universal-publishers.com/browse.php, or through your favorite online or neighborhood booksellers.

 

Novel

Gentlemen of Decision

A well written, fast moving book on a major theme, Gentlemen of Decision is a work of true excellence.
- M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled

Gentlemen of Decision is a crackerjack example of the myth of the 'Illuminati' genre—the notion that there exists a certain secret group of intellectuals, military men, scientists, business men, and politicians who run the world to their own selfish advantage. Stein has done time in Hollywood, teaches film, and knows how to plot a thriller.
- Dartmouth Magazine

Gentlemen of Decision is a political thriller that pits idealism against oligarchy in its protagonist's search for redemption. Computer mogul Martin Offenbach marshals the courage to blow the whistle on a Trilateral Commission type "Star Chamber" that orders the assassination of a “destabilizing” environmental leader. As the largest March on Washington in history progresses along The Constitution Route from Monticello to the Civil War battle site known as The Wilderness, a deadly cat and mouse game ensues that sets off another American cataclysm.

Winner of Honorable Mention in National Writer's Club Novel Contest. Hard copy can be ordered through herospath@bellsouth.net or through your favorite online or neighborhood booksellers.

 

Burying Trash

When Julie comes to Opalaske to bury her cranky Aunt Ida, she finds herself caught up in a tug-of-war between deceased bodies and discarded trash vying for real estate. Pulling for each side, assorted members of the living try to out-con each other to make a bundle. Most of them only dig themselves some unexpected graves. Race relations, environmental justice, land development, and strange burial habits in the rural South all lay about six feet beneath the humor of this outrageous comedy.

This screenplay was offered a Christopher Columbus Society Discovery of the Month Award and was a Fade In semi-finalist.

 

Thriller

Dead Duck River

After failing at everything, as a last resort Mark Selden returns to his childhood Tennessee home with his pregnant wife. Settling into his strange dead mother’s long vacant cabin in the woods, he takes a job in public relations at his corporate tycoon cousin’s pulp and paper company. Peopled with environmental activists, mill workers, executive pragmatists, and downstream victims, it isn’t long before Mark’s midlife crisis turns explosive in this battle between profits and pollution.

Resonant of On The Waterfront, this screenplay won Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest Competition.

 

Action-Adventure/Love Story

The Donor Plan

Have you heard of “The Donor Plan?” You know, about all the rich and powerful who are dropping off the organ donor waiting lists?

I know about it. My screen moniker is Spider-Hanging-by-a-Thread. You’ll probably think I'm paranoid because I know a certain artificially inseminated descendent of Dr. Joseph Mengele is harvesting pre-adolescent organs at a kid's camp up some backwater of the Amazon. Yeah, and that broomstick-up-her-butt boss of mine at N.I.H. may be in on it – wiping out all the stats I’ve compiled. What do I care? I couldn't give two armadillo turds if all the street kids in the world donate their lungs. People ain't my thing anymore… What's that? You want me to go down there with Miss Broom-butt to find proof? Well, now we're really hanging by a thread.

Okay, okay. I’ll go down to the World Organ Transplant Surgeon and Survivor Conference in Rio with that tight-ass. That’s where they’re going to try to eradicate all my backups I’ve hidden in cyberspace. And finally both of us will be fighting for our lives along with abducted street kids at that phony fantasy camp up the Jari River.

In the vein of Romancing the Stone, this screenplay is action-packed and very topical.

 

Comedy

Harry the Mercy Killer

Daniel is a dermatologist who treats wealthy dowagers in Orange County and street hookers in San Francisco. His wife, Alice, is a criminal psychologist who treats patients at San Quentin. Their marriage is stressed to the breaking point by Daniel’s Uncle Harry who believes all things that don’t function properly should be terminated. In this case, one of those things happens to be his stroked-out wife, Aunt Dora. Daniel tries and comically fails to stop Harry, while Alice, as a hostage of an escaped convict, resorts to extreme therapeutic measures to save Daniel from what she sees as pathological dementia that runs in his family.

Richard Pryor renewed his option twice on Harry the Mercy Killer before he stopped making movies.

 

Action-Adventure

Keeper of the Planet

A woman with extraordinary powers steals an unearthly icon from New York’s Museum of Natural History, which legend says sent conquistadors and Nazis to their death. Coercing funds from an eccentric Beverly Hills billionaire, she assembles an arrogant team of mercenaries to search for the icon’s source in the deepest heart of the Amazon. These include the curator archeologist from the museum and an exceptionally lithe octogenarian seeking redemption by returning the icon to its holy site. Drawn on a hair-raising journey down the quickening tributaries of the Amazon, each of these egotists comes face to face with individual personifications of Nature's judgment for hubris. In doing so, Nature itself exacts retribution from the likes of man: the mammons, narcissists, nihilists, self-righteous arbiters, power-mongers, and heedless destroyers of Earth’s “Life Force.”

Won Honorable Mention in Writer's Digest Competition.

 

Docudrama

Modoc

Captain Jack’s is one of the most tragic and dramatic tales of the wars against the American Indians. It’s a story of arrogance, betrayal, confusion, and incomparable idiocy, bordering on slapstick. A tiny band of friendly, mostly teenage, Indians just can’t accept they aren’t free to roam their native Northern California lands. The army pursues, the youngest braves retaliate by killing friendly whites, and the most costly American Indian war ever erupts. In the middle of it all is Captain Jack who talks sense until he’s blue in the face. Then, against his own better judgment, he commits an unpardonable act (assassinating the only full U.S. general ever killed by Indians) and becomes everybody’s scapegoat.

This historically accurate and instructive screenplay is adaptable for a powerful two-part mini-series.

Thriller

The Neighbor Hoods

What starts out as a comic clash of mentalities turns hellish when a pacifistic Chiropractor and a megalomaniacal Mafia Capo go head to head in their attempts to learn how to live together on the same suburban cul-de-sac. A geriatric Don orders the Capo to make nice with his new Chiropractor neighbor. Without asking, the Capo has his construction company start digging a swimming pool in the Chiropractor’s back yard. The construction is stopped when the Chiropractor refuses the bizarre present. The Capo’s son is killed in the swimming pool hole when he tries to operate the dormant earth mover. Blaming the Chiropractor, the Capo’s distorted psychology sees the only way to redeem his son’s death is to have the Chiropractor’s son die also. The pacifistic Chiropractor ultimately finds himself in league with factions of the mafia to save his son and wipe-out the Capo.

In this screenplay, the Mafioso mentality serves as a timely metaphor for any group of people whose only method of co-existing is to forcefully impose their will on others. Whether they be theocratic, ethnic, or political opponents, revenge seems to be their only option when resistance leads to tragedy.

Psychological Thriller

The Resurrection of Augustine St. Clare

This reality-shattering thriller is about a lazy and cynical heir of corporate America who becomes consumed by an alter-ego from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The alter-ego seeks redemption for his failure to confront his culture of slavery, and will only release the heir when he takes on today’s cultural equivalent – the crimes of corporate supremacists in his own family. As if struggling with an increasing psychosis, the heir sees family members, associates, board trustees, and others keep morphing with the fictional characters from the novel to the point where he doesn’t know whether he is real or they are. In a Groundhog Day variation, he keeps waking on a journey matching past and present until he learns that his own redemption can only come through laying his life on the line against the sins of his heritage.

Located in the mystical environs of New Orleans and upper Louisiana, The Resurrection of Augustine St. Clare could not be timelier.