TOM, HUCK & TWAIN

Synopsis

One snowy winter in Connecticut, 1910, Sam Clemens — aka the great American man of letters, Mark Twain — wakes on his deathbed to see a balding gent who claims to be Tom Sawyer. 

Tom and the ghost of Twain’s deceased daughter, Susy, warn Twain that characters from his fiction are about to storm the house, seeking revenge against their creator. Something terrible has happened to Huck Finn, Tom’s boyhood friend and the hero of Twain’s most celebrated novel, and all of Twain’s literary creations are now in uproar. 

As marauding hordes swarm Twain’s estate, a hot air balloon whisks Twain away with Tom and Susy. Turbulent forces cause them to crash land in the world of Twain’s fiction, where a malevolent influence is causing chaos. There, Twain's critics claim that Twain has duped the human race using humor to mask his dark vision of humanity.

Meeting Mister Clemens

I was in my early years living in America when I stumbled on Justin Kaplan’s book Mister Clemens and Mark Twain. That led me to read or re-read everything ever written by Mark Twain. 

That was a tall order, but I was inspired by Twain's wit and wisdom, that commanding voice, which was compounded by a chance encounter with Hal Holbrook doing his spectacular one-man show Mark Twain Tonight! on stage in Long Beach. I cooked up my own wild ride through Twain's fiction, and was particularly haunted by The Mysterious Stranger, a short story that Twain published posthumously due to its apocalyptic nature.

With a sprawling early draft, I enrolled in a UCLA Advanced Screenwriting class, where my tutor Sy Gomberg announced I was ‘Michelangelo in front of the marble containing David.’

I've noodled this one for years. It still haunts me.