Short Bus

Last week I finished the script for what will likely be my directorial debut. The working title is Short Bus. Here’s part of the one page-

On a desert work detail, the kids from D Block juvenile detention are framed for a heist and use their collective criminal insight to turn the tables and take a shot at freedom.

When a mining operation hits gold unexpectedly, the technicians split into two groups. Both sides want to hide the fortune from their employer, a selenium prospecting firm, and independently approach Cunningham, the head of security. Cunningham decides to kill them all and take the gold, but he needs to cover his tracks. A small group of inmates, the hard cases from D Block, are sent out into the nearby desert on a work detail as part of the plan. The dead technicians will look like casualties in an escape gone wrong. Everything is planned with military precision, but the junior criminals from D Block are far more resourceful than anticipated. While they attempt to reverse the set-up, they tell their origin stories and come to an empowering new understanding of who they are, what they are supposed to be, and what they might become instead.

Writer Jeff Johnson was on D Block in the Albuquerque Juvenile Detention Center in 1985. Shot entirely in New Mexico with a cast that is primarily Hispanic, Short Bus is a noir designed to showcase emerging talent while making the most of film incentives.

“Jeff Johnson is a gifted and natural storyteller, and he knows about things you don’t know.”–John Irving, Academy Award Winning author of Cider House Rules

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Life is funny. I write about circles in life often enough, and one of them just came to the surface. Before I was on D Block al those years ago, I was in a foster home in Springfield, Missouri. I was 15, and the State was kind enough to subsidies my employment do I could buy weed and save up enough money to make a break for it. And I loved that job. I look back on it fondly at the oddest times, too.

It was a the University day care center. The place where all the staff teaching summer school dropped off their kids. My boss was this cool hippy dude named Tom. Guy was a character, and I learned a great deal from him. He was educated. Wise. And he was a rebel, all the way down in the marrow, where things don’t change. We took the kids on field trips, but what I remember most of them was this kid named Simon. He always got bummed out at nap time on the days when we weren’t out anywhere. I felt compelled to sit with him, poor little guy, and he always wanted me to tell him a story. Over the course of the summer, I told him a garbled version of the Hobbit and the entire Lord of The Rings, and that kid must have thought I was the greatest storyteller of all time until those movies came out. Fun to think back on.

But I think back on Tom the most. The guy knew I was in a foster home. He knew I was saving to make a run for it. He never knew what happened after that. About the long run, the strange splatter of New Mexico, the characters I met and now use in stories. When I knew him, before all that, Tom peppered me with odd advice that came in handy, and he had a cheerful quality I often emulated, so often that it became a part of me, and eventually, over the years between then and now, I became a cheerful guy.

I just found Tom on Facebook. Hey dude. Thanks for everything.

-Jeff