For "The Teenage Bodyguard" True Crime/Drama
see screenplay section below.

Reviews for "Pvt. Ravel's Bolero" -
Indie Shorts Magazine Review
Tokyo Short Film Festival Interview

"Gumdrop', a short horror & The Rapping film page at LgN Productions

"Pvt. Ravel's Bolero" - Documentary - Best Film 2022 winner

JZ Murdock drawing by Olav and Hannah during Studio 724 Author Reading, 1/13/18

BACKGROUND -
Aside from working toward a degree in Psychology, JZ Murdock's first screen and script writing experiences were at Western Washington University toward a minor in creative writing. After being told he needed more work on dialog in his fiction writing, even though without it his stories were was at the top of his class, he was sent over to the Theatre department to take play writing. At the end of that quarter he was he was chosen along with eight other special students and offered a special set of classes on team screen and script writing. 
The year after graduation he attended a series of film production seminars given by famed Hollywood director Stanley Kramer.
Murdock worked for years in Information Technologies as a Senior Technical Writer including companies around the Pacific Northwest such as US West Technologies where he worked on a high level development team. During the early 90s Murdock was a Viacom Cable TV Public Access producer where he produced, wrote, edited, directed, operated cameras and acted as on screen talent.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s he worked remotely as an unpaid in-house screenwriter with the now defunct east coast film production company Scorpio Pictures, with Executive Producer Kevin Summerfield and Producer Sean Davis (who eventually left the company for Hollywood). Murdock learned a lot about working with producers and screenwriting during his time with them. 
Beginning in 2010 as his two kids were about to graduate high school and move out, he made the decision to start getting serious again about his writing. Finally he was turning back to writing screenplays and fiction with the ultimate desire of retiring from his years in Information Technologies. Working day and night he spent all his off hours from work for several years producing screenplays, two horror genre books (one a collection of short stories, the other an epic horror story), as well as multiple new horror, sci fi, and comedy short stories. He turned some of those into ebooks and produced several into audiobooks which he also narrated after teaching himself the software and process.

Events
Gorst Underground Festival (annual)
Annual event founded in 2019and ongoing by Kelly Hughes and JZ Murdock, in the nearby Bremerton, Washington small town of Gorst. The Festival has been held at a rustic metal working warehouse run by artist Ray Hammar at his  BlueCollar Art Work. 

Slash Night Film Nights (monthly)
A great but short lived/COVID killed, monthly event founded by Kelly Hughes and JZ Murdock at Bremerton's History Roxy Theater. It was set up to showcase local (and imported) indie filmmakers. It lasted from 2019 until CO VID-19 shut it down permanently. It was a very enjoyable event that aided in networking of locals where several films were eventually produced from those connections. Including a music video, "The Fingers" by The Electric Kühl-Aid Party band with Jack Moriarity (son of cartoonist, Pat Moriarity). Films by both Kelly Hughes and JZ Murdock were shown as well as by the Darkow brothers (Tyler & Travis) and Lazlo Productions. One short silly little film was shot by Kelly, JZ, the Darkow brothers and one of the theater workers, Aleighsah Akin (who eventually was promoted to theater manager) using a mannequin and titled, Roxanne. 
Films 
As Executive Producer (uncredited\co=owner of LGN Productions)

Lost in Space, a documentary (1994) - LGN Productions (Facebook) 
Untitled As Executive Producer

The Rapping (2018) - Writer, Producer, Editor. Director: Godon Hayes. Actors; Nikolas Hayes, Tom Remick (Voice actor) With LGN Productions. Winner of February 9, 2019 Once A Week Online Film Festival. Festival Selection of New York Midnight Film Festival 2019.  Review on Short Films Matter.

​Below in the Dark  (2018) - Also Writer, Editor. LGN Productions

"Gumdrop", a short horror (2020). Available now exclusively on Vimeo! A short film noir/horror film in the vein of "Henry" Portrait of a Serial Killer", written, produced and directed by JZ Murdock and based on his 2012 published, true crime, short horror story, "Gumdrop City". This film presents a fictionalized origin story for the criminal depicted in the original true crime story. Winner of 17 international awards including:  Cult Critic Movie Awards Jean Luc Goddard Award Nominee and Outstanding Achievement (May 2020 ), Thinking Hat Film Challenge for Best Noir Film,

Pvt. Ravel's Bolero / Trailer  (2022) - An antiwar, Filmic Poem and Historical Documentary film which won an award almost as soon as it was submitted to its first film festival. Interview with Tokyo International Short Film Festival. It's now won awards and been an Official Selection in film festivals around the world.
The film, up of public domain music, film and photos, is about the one-time "world's greatest composer", France's Joseph Maurice Ravel and his time in WWI as a truck (or, Camion) driver. The poem is a composer's/musician's/soldier's fantasy about creating his "Bolero" while in the trenches, and the surreal effect it could have had upon all involved...both the living, and the dead.
From LgN Productions, completed January 2022.
A historical documentary and filmic poem wrapped in WWI & the music of Maurice Ravel. It is essentially, an antiwar film.
When WWI began, Maurice Ravel had a desire to serve, but also to experience adventure. And so he signed up. "Pvt. Ravel's Bolero", is also about Ravel's most famous musical piece, "Bolero", and how it could have come to be during, "The Great War". Which was how that war was referred to. Until one day people found a need to number Earth's World Wars.
This film is also an "experience", presenting how war affects people. Just as war is often too fast to "read", or to assimilate at times, the viewer will find the experience moving too quickly, serving up too much, too fast. Or they may find what they see & hear is not beautiful, not perfect, as they are used to in documentaries. But not necessarily because they are too graphic to behold. There are scenes shown in this film that have likely never seen a public audience before this. Because they are not perfect, or pristine.
For such is War.
A companion Outtakes reel (as noted at top of the end credits at film's end) are available here:
https://filmfreeway.com/projects/2376181
Combined film with Outtakes reel are available here:
https://filmfreeway.com/projects/2377129

As Talent, acted in:
The Mephisto Box - 2016-17  - Street Preacher. Director: Kelly Hughes Leprechaun Studios
Don't Kill Grandpa Until We Strangle The Baby Sitter - 2016 - Grandpa, Grandma's Ghost Director: Kelly Hughes
BBC1 QED - Uden Associates Ltd. (UATV) - documentary episode, "The Love Lab" (Feb. 21, 1990) as: lab subject\interviewee
Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics newsprint advertisement photo: classroom students - 1968
Aviation News Pictures, NY International Airport, Ken Fletcher, Public Relations, TWA World Wide release - 1958 - Ad photo: As Sailor boy with army rifle

Stage
Denude, a one act play - An original one act play about two soldiers in a fox hole, in a war. They work out some issues and come to find that reality isn't quite what they imagined. The unique thing about this play is its ability to be fine tuned to more than what it presents, allowing an updating over time and social structures  and commentaries. 

Screenplays (see also listings on: IMDB, Script Revolution, The Blacklist, Moviebytes.com)

The Teenage Bodyguard (Original Feature) - True Crime/Drama, narrative feature screenplay with producer Robert Mitas attached (head of "Originals Department" at Voyage Media).  There are actually now 3 versions: original 1974 version, and two rewritten with Robert's input: a 1974 version and one updated to the present.
Logline: True story of the remarkable teen who shields a vulnerable waitress in 1974 at Tacoma's first topless restaurant, witness to a brutal mob murder, and faces down the powerful forces determined to silence her.
TAG - Sex, drugs & rock-n-roll meet sex, guns & mayhem.
A true crime biopic where in 1974, "Gordie",  who at seventeen years of age acted as a bodyguard for the first time. There were others over the years after this. He spends a week with a woman in her late twenties who asks him to protect her as she is hiding out from the local Tacoma, Washington mob. He agrees to protect her until she can leave town at the end of the week. She is obviously afraid of her previous employers and wants only to escape, to live her life in peace. They however believe she witnessed the now notorious Tacoma Tiki Restaurant strip club murder of their bouncer, Danny McCormick. A murder she is convinced they committed which to this day is ruled a homicide by a lone and unknown gunman. Ruled by a corrupt Sherriff's department in the pocket of the mob.

This screenplay was the subject of the "Scene of the Crime" podcast in the PNW, titled, "The Enterprise." However they had the same problem some have had with this story in that they ascribed to "Gordie" typical teen attributes which had nothing (a little) to do with his personality, motivations, or actions (that is, they hadn't read the screenplay).

Winner of 13 internatioanl awards. 
​
Gray and Lover The Hearth Tales Incident (Original Feature)  - A woman hires a voodoo priest who has ulterior motives, to summon a demon to kill her famous horror author husband. Gray and Lover, a steampunk wearing demon hunting duo are hired by the priest to save the author who is visiting Seattle as the demon tears that city apart trying to find its prey.

In 2023-24 Official Selection in four Film Festivals, winner of four international awards, and semi-finalist in the 2014 Circus Road Films Screenplay Contest.

Ahriman (Original Feature) - This was my first screenplay ever back in 1984 about a prophet prince on a violent desert planet who is accidentally brought to earth by scientists during an experiment. 

Dark of kNight (Adaptation of a Tracy Mitchell paranormal romance novel at her request) - A young college coed returns home for her father’s funeral and discovers that her world is not quite what she had thought it was. Aren’t you sick of Vampires yet?

Sealed in Lies (Adaptation of a Kelly Abell spy romance novel at her request) - Jack Weaver, a super sexy ex- SEAL and under cover operative for the CIA, can’t escape a life of lies. Working in the largest drug cartel in Columbia, Jack lives a life of guns, drugs and beautiful women. All that ends, when Jack is betrayed by his own Deputy Director, Kent Larson, in conjunction with a plot to kill the President-Elect on Inauguration Day. Jack is forced to make a decision that lands him in the middle of a mystery that entwines all of Jack’s former SEAL team buddies whom he’d once trusted with his life. Previously optioned.

Poor Lord Ritchie's Answer (Original Short) - A medieval Lord is tasked by his family to deliver their crucible sword as a truce as he descends either into madness or a surreal world he alone can see. Lord Ritchie finds his life is slipping back and forth in time, or is he going mad? Or is it the revenge of a wizard he killed? This is based on a story that was chosen by actor Rutger Hauer in November 2001 as a winning story in his international short story contest.

Sarah (Original Short) - The kernel of this story came from a coed one day after our university Abnormal Psychology class, when she told me what it was like for her grandmother who was suffering with presenile dementia. I used some of those real life experiences in this story. Sarah lives with her daughter Terri’s family, her young teen granddaughter, and an ex-special forces son-in-law, all in the house Terri grew up in. They’re good people but Sarah is in a trying state of mind for the young family. Alzheimer’s makes it difficult to sort reality from imagination. Her imagination is terrifying to her to the point of her mostly feeling frozen within her own body and life. And then things go seriously wrong.

Popsicle Death (Original Short) - Don’t forget to pay your Popsicle vendor because Death incarnate doesn’t care if you’re only a kid. A young boy doesn’t pay a Popsicle vendor who then kills himself. Not to worry, Death incarnate returns to collect.

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