MORE DEMONS
My last feature, HEY ANDROID, came out in 2004. That's twenty-two years. In that time I've written a lot of screenplays and talked myself out of making every one of them.
I've been indecisive. I'd pick a script, live with it for a month, and then another one would start looking better. A comedy. A thriller. Something set back in Pittsburgh. Then back to the drawer. It's a very comfortable way to never make anything.
So here it is, in writing, where I can't take it back. My next feature is THE DEMONS ARE HERE.
A contract killer named Edwin Hershel Goat takes a job. Three young adults have stolen money from some drug dealers who don't forgive anything, and Edwin is hired to find them and settle the account. It isn't even that much money. That's sort of the point.
The three hole up in a cabin in the woods, figuring nobody will look there. They're mostly right. Edwin finds them anyway. That's what he does.
But the woods are already occupied. Something lives out there, and it doesn't care about the money, or the dealers, or who's hunting whom. Before long the hunter and the hunted have the same problem.
It's not a horror movie. It's a crime picture that takes a wrong turn and keeps driving.
Why this one? I've asked myself that. Part of it is practical. A cabin, some woods, a handful of people. It's a movie I can actually make.
The rest is harder to explain. I can put down the other scripts. This one keeps getting back up.
I'm rewriting it now. I'll post here as it comes together. No more switching horses.
GOING MAD
I've put Lots of Nazis on hold. Nothing went wrong with it — it just needs money I don't have, and I got tired of waiting for permission to make something.
So I started a new one. MILO MAD. Shooting in Charleston, on close to nothing, directing and producing it myself.
It started with the title and nothing else. Instead of an idea, I had a set of constraints: I can get a beach house on Folly in the off-season. I know how to shoot road scenes — they're cheap, and they make a small film feel bigger. And I know that low-budget movies that try to look like studio movies never pull it off, and the effort shows. So we decided on the look before the story: naturalistic, available light, long takes, a camera that behaves like a witness instead of an author.
The story came out of those limits. Milo is a bartender in New Orleans who's spent six years as the secret of the man who owns the bar. He's connected in the small, unglamorous way that actually exists. She's being quietly replaced by a younger woman, and she watches it happen at work, on the schedule, in front of everyone.
Then she kills him, takes what's in the safe, and drives to Folly Beach with an ex who still loves her and thinks the worst thing she's done is steal the money. The wife sends a private investigator to get it back. He finds them fast, works out what really happened, and doesn't much care — he just wants the bag.
References, if you want them: Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law for the rhythm. Crimes and Misdemeanors for what's underneath — she gets away with it and the universe doesn't blink.
The audience knows what she did from early on. Nobody at the beach house does. That gap is where the comedy and the dread live.
Four actors. One beach house. One dive bar shot on weekday mornings. A car and the road. One gunshot, which I intend to make an absolute mess.
Nineteen pages in. More as it develops — and if you're an actor in the Lowcountry, get in touch. Casting is the whole ballgame on this one.
Haunting The Better is on Instagram now. I resisted this for years, which anyone who knows me will find unsurprising.
Here's what happened: I have over 300 illustrations sitting on this site, plus photographs going back to the nineties, plus a stack of screenplays, and it occurred to me that an archive nobody knows about is just a very organized secret. So I picked twenty illustrations and posted them. Cowboys, demons, androids, a nun. The usual.
The account is @hillrossin. If you follow it, you'll get roughly one thing a week — an illustration, a still, occasionally proof that a film is being made. I'm told this is called "content." I prefer to think of it as leaving the porch light on.
NEXT ONE
I'm making another feature. I don't know the title. I'm not entirely sure what it's about. I know this much: it shoots in Charleston, the budget is small, the cast is smaller, and the locations you could count on one hand.
This is how I've always worked. Most of my films started the same way — a few certainties and a lot of nothing. The nothing is where the movie is.
More when there's more.
DRAWINGS
I went back through all of it.
Every illustration in the archive — the older series and the new ones — got pulled apart and rebuilt. Mostly it was the shading. I'd been living with flat light for years and didn't notice how much it was holding the work down. Cast shadows, depth, the way a lamp actually throws across a room. Small things. They add up.
The difference is hard to overstate, and I'll try not to. But I'll sit with these now. That's new. For a long time I'd finish a piece, feel the gap between what I saw and what landed, and move on. This time the gap closed.
Same hands, same rooms, same figures. They just look the way they were supposed to look all along.
More soon.
PHOTOS
A collection of stills from 1997 to 2006 is now posted on the site.
There are photographs here that have been sitting in boxes — or on drives, or in the back of memory — for nearly thirty years. Some of them were taken on film. Some were made during production. Some were made for no reason other than that someone was in the room, the light was right, and the moment asked to be held.
They are organized by series. Hey Android, As He Fired Up the Drum Machine, Chicks and Dicks, Make-Up. You may recognize some of those names. A few of them are screenplay titles. The photographs aren't illustrations — they preceded the scripts, or ran alongside them, or arrived years later in a different city with a different cast. The connection is temperamental, not narrative. They belong to the same sensibility.
The earliest images in the collection are from 1997. Pittsburgh, mostly. Adrienne and Marritt. Jessica. Maria and Sarah. Jen. People who showed up and let themselves be looked at. I was in my twenties, and I didn't entirely know what I was doing, which is probably why some of the pictures work.
The 2004 work — the Hey Android series in particular — was made in a concentrated burst. Cameron, Rohni, Lamb, Ashandra, Eric, Adrianne. A lot of those sessions have a hothouse quality. When everybody is in the same room, the boundaries between the shoot and the life around it are not particularly clear. That's in the pictures.
I've always liked a self-portrait from 2006. I'm not sure why I'm including it, except that it's honest.
I'll add to the collection over time. There's material from years not represented here — work I'm still deciding about, or still finding. If I've photographed you at some point and you want to see what made it in, go look. If something's wrong, tell me.
The Photograph page is live now under Portfolio
MANAGER
I've written eight scripts, and I've reached the point where I need someone in my corner who isn't me.
The work is the part I love, and I'll keep writing whether anyone calls back or not. But there's a moment in any screenwriting career where the bottleneck stops being "do I have material" and starts being "who's reading it." I have material. What I need now is access.
So I'm looking for a manager.
Specifically: someone who'll help me find the right agent, who reads the scripts and gets what I'm trying to do, and who can identify actual paths to sale or production — producers looking for what I'm writing, companies with a gap my work fills, financiers when the studio path doesn't fit. The translation work between "this script exists" and "this script is getting made."
What I bring: a real catalog across thriller, drama, and dark comedy. Recurring characters across multiple projects. A point of view shaped by Pittsburgh, PA, and Charleston, SC. And a pace that suggests I'm not going anywhere — the next script is already in progress.
If that sounds like you, or like someone you know, I'd love to talk.
NAZIS
Working on LOTS OF NAZIS.
A Charleston server and her husband — the manager of a restaurant secretly tied to a drug ring — steal from their boss and escape by boat, only to wash ashore on a remote island ruled by a reclusive scientist constructing an army of Nazi robots. As hired killers close in, the couple is caught between the vengeance they provoked and a surreal, far more dangerous force they can’t begin to understand.
YESSIREE BOB
Completed YESSIREE BOB. Took about a month. Not my favorite thing I've written, but the best so far, which is a strange feeling — happy, mostly. Not sure what's next. Going to sit with it for a few days and then start the next one.
ANDROIDS
Finished the rewrite of YES, ANDROID, I DO CARE. It's based on a feature film I wrote and directed in 2004 titled HEY ANDROID. Twenty-two years is a long time to sit with a story. I thought I was done with it back then, but its bones kept rattling around — the amnesiac android, the mission it can't remember, Special Agent Elledge closing in. The 2004 version was what I could pull off then with the people and money I had. This rewrite is what I always wanted it to be. Same skeleton, more flesh. Older writer. Going to let it breathe for a week before I look at it again.
DRUM MACHINE
Finished the rewrite of AS HE FIRED UP THE DRUM MACHINE, originally written in 1996. Mally is a prostitute who wants out — she's dreaming of the ocean. Champ is her boyfriend, a loser musician with nowhere to go. She steals drugs from her pimp, and the two of them try to run. That was the story.
In 1997, I bought a Sony VX1000 digital video camera and set out to make it — my first feature, shot in Pittsburgh. Thirty years ago next year. Wild to pull the script back out and see what's still alive in it after all that time.
DEMONS
Finished the rewrite of THE DEMONS ARE HERE, originally written in 2024. Edwin Hershel Goat is a contract killer on the way down — slower, sloppier, running out of road — and the job that lands in his lap is the kind that used to be simple: recover a pile of stolen money from a young couple who don't know what they've stepped into. Drug dealers on one side, the end of the world creeping in on the other. The rewrite cleaned up a lot of what wasn't working in the original draft. Tighter, meaner, funnier in the places it needed to be.
The plan is to produce and direct this in Charleston, provided I can raise the funding. The city has the texture I want — the heat, the marshes, the way the light falls — and I've spent enough time here now to shoot it as it should be shot. More on that as it develops.