The Door People was originally supposed to be a novella. But I never could seem to make it work, and in the interim some of the ideas and themes were incorporated into a larger work that's still going on.

Somewhere along the way, I decided to work the original idea into a screenplay. This was back in 2002.

The first problem with this idea is quite practical, and why I no longer write screenplays. Well, mostly. I can't "self-publish" a movie. Oh sure, I can self-publish the screenplay, but a screenplay is designed to be filmed, right? And I just can't make a movie. I don't have the time, talent or patience to make a movie all by my lonesome. And since I don't play well with others, the chances of a movie I've written getting actually made is pretty much nil. So screenplays are a dead end for me.

The second problem is that I finished the story before I got to the right amount of pages. A hundred pages is the right length for a feature film script, more or less, because the rule of thumb says one page equals one minute of screen time. An hour and forty minutes is your basic feature film. This screenplay is eighty-five pages. So I was stuck for the longest time trying to figure out how to add fifteen minutes of story to a story that was done.

And, of course, I shouldn't do that. So I never did.

So rather than let Jude and the others have their story languish in my hard drive–which isn't fair to them–here it is. The movie you'll never see. The Door People. It's released into the wild under a Creative Commons license. This license basically says you can't change it and you can't make money off of it. Beyond that, just keep my name and copyright information on it and throw it to the four winds.

Like it? Hate it? Tell me.

Please note: if this script was made into a film, it would be an easy PG-13 for violence and language. As Cosette reminded me, there's the hotel room sequence, which no thirteen-year-old should see, more than likely. So R it is.