IMDB – not to be confused with any other Thucs …
For a full list of screenwriting accolades, please go here
Thuc provided additional literary material with a punch up writers’ round-table for Dana Fox and the Nee Brothers:
The Lost City for Paramount Pictures – World Premiere at #SXSW2022
Academy Motion of Pictures Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) Nominee:
Find Thuc on The Fireland List – cool women genre/horror writers of Ireland
Sundance Film Festival has Thuc back for #Sundance2021
The Chicago Tribune says to make all of Thuc’s screenplays
In the words of Chaedria LaBouvier:
“Narrative Necromancy”
Key available projects Most are completed screenplays, unless otherwise noted
:: LOTUS BLADE
Written by John Lindauer, Jr., Thuc Doan Nguyen (nee Dang Nguyen-Brophy) and Benjamin Anderson (Phoenix Pictures)
This is the true story of Shih Yang, the “Pirate Queen”, who takes over her deceased husband’s businesses on the open South China Seas (modern day Vietnam region as well), commanding hundreds of ships and thousands of crew, enforcing a feminist system.
It’s a tale of sisterhood and how this “queen” and her “sisters” TCB and take care of one another, going up against British and Portuguese fleets. Richard Glasspoole is a sailor from the UK who gets an insider look.
:: FLASH BACK
Concept, beginning to write
Ke Huy Quan’s 2023 Oscar win disrupts the time space continuum. Something happens and he and a handful of our 1980s idols are zapped into a world where they’re advising their younger selves in order to make things right when it comes to mean people, racism, sexism, ageism.
:: THE BLUE DOG’S FORTUNE
For deck, please go here
Two kids and a band of rag-tag animal shelter volunteers, with the help of colorful locals in Southern Maryland, must solve the mystery of the Blue Dog’s fortune in order to liberate a couple of dimensionally trapped ghosts and save the shelter.
The Legend of The Blue Dog is America’s oldest recorded ghost story and first appeared in 1658 in the Baltimore American.
The Goonies x National Treasure
:: THE FINAL FOUR
For deck, please go here
Four friends who went to undergrad together at UNC-Chapel Hill reunite in New Orleans for the 2022 Final Four and must reconcile their past in order to ensure their futures.
Four friends who graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill (yes – Michael Jordan’s school) in the late ’90s all meet up in New Orleans for the 2022 Final Four, where UNC has the most historic showdown in college basketball history with arch-rival Duke.
One of the four former best friends (Tobey) has just moved to town. The others come in from other parts of the United States. They all have quirks and hang-ups in their lives and learn more truths about each other on this trip— that they’ve missed for the last couple decades since college.
There’s also a tornado warning, and all kinds of electric energy in the air with the alumni and fans of four major basketball dynasties all converging in the The Big Easy!
Girls Trip x Carolina Basketball (lead characters with various genders and various races) – all in the Crescent City
:: SCENT OF THE DELTA – Round 2 of Sundance Labs 2020
A Vietnamese American woman returns to New Orleans in order to face the ghosts of inter-generational trauma and become her own person as a Third Culture Kid on the Third Coast.
Deadline: SOTD has found two producers – Maria A. Judice (Neptune Frost) & Le Ly Hayslip (Heaven & Earth)— Status: Looking for more producers, changing director and re-casting
For deck, please go here
*Script is 95% in English: A Vietnamese-American woman returns to New Orleans in order to learn to live with the ghosts of inter-generational trauma and to be her own person as a third-culture kid.
Do you know where your Vietnamese-American centered stories are? In 2025, it will be the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and the world’s eyes will be on the Vietnamese diaspora…
:: MINDY WU TRAN VERSUS SILICON BEACH
For deck, please go here
Based on a true story + personal lived experience
A Vietnamese-American woman start-up founder must battle racism, sexism and white feminism in order to keep her start-up alive (one that doesn’t cater to the 1%). Will she make it out of #Brotopia?
:: PARSONS
An interracial couple bands together with a group of German labor activists to lead massive marches for workers rights in Chicago and around the US. They then have to prove their innocence when a bomb goes off in Haymarket Square in Chicago.
This is the story of The Haymarket Affair, the origin story of May Day, which is celebrated annually globally. PARSONS is a historical drama based on true stories that surround the Haymarket bombing of May 4, 1886, the subsequent trial and executions of anarchists in America who fought for the eight hour work day and to end child labor.
#1 on this Indiewire list, highlighted by Berlin-Los Angeles,
A lovely reading was hosted by Villa Aurora/Forum Berlin in Pacific Palisades
Website with more information is here
The story centers on an interracial couple– Lucy Parsons, a #BlackIndian /Mexican labor activist born into slavery and Albert Parsons, who at age 13 fights for the CSA, and later denouncing his indoctrination to advocate for the rights of freed slaves and the working class.
The story also focuses on German immigrants– Louis Lingg, a young Mannheim born carpenter unionist who emigrates to Chicago and German language newspaper publisher August Spies and his assistant Adolph Fischer. Lingg commits suicide in prison, leaving behind the love of his life. Spies meets his wife as a result of the conspiracy trial. Four men are hung and buried in Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago.
PARSONS is a story for The 99%. It captures the current worldwide zeitgeist of the disparity between the haves and have nots. This story includes suspenseful elements such as the mystery of who really set off the bomb in Haymarket Square & torrid love affairs.
:: THE STROKE AFTER MIDNIGHT
For deck, please go here
A Woman of Color is slain by bad men and then brought back to life in a Voodoo ceremony by her sister. Together these women take out the horrible guys who keep them and other women down.
This is a grind-house revenge story.
“She’s every woman. It’s all in her.”- Thanks, Chaka Khan
:: BLOOD DROP KILLERS
Currently in Round 2 of Warner Brothers x MACRO x The Black List Incubator (2022) and ISA Pitch Finalist, 2022
For deck, please go here
A vampire and a werewolf, both Women of Color, must save each other in order to save the soul of New Orleans from racists!
#StayMACRO
EXT. WAREHOUSE – NIGHT
A #Vietnamese woman, a #BlackWoman and an #IndigenousWoman stand outside a burning building. The flames make their faces glow…
:: HAG STONE
For deck, please go here
Beth, a war correspondent in her 40s, takes time off to write a book at a secluded seaside cottage. There she finds rocks with holes in them, referred to as hag stones.
It’s said that whoever looks through the hole of a hag stone can travel to another dimension. Beth unravels a horrible shameful secret that the house has kept through space and time.
:: BLASIAN TAKEDOWN
Based on a true story
For deck, please go here
A Vietnamese-American woman and a Black woman Erin Brockovich the f*ck out of a corrupt non-profit founder together in order to an expose one example of the non-profit industrial complex.
:: MASH-UP
For deck, please go here
Remember that game we played as kids – MASH: Mansion-Apartment-Shack-House?
Candice and her friends go to their hometown and find their old MASH games. The games start coming true, or maybe Candice is just going insane. She must find out what’s really happening in order to get her life together.
:: WELL
For deck, please go here
Two teenage girls both hoping to be homecoming queen meet at an old well to wish upon it. One girl thinks the other is her friend. She’s dead wrong.
Yes, this is a teen slasher movie
:: HOODOO YOU LOVE
Out on a shopping agreement until 7/21
This is a comedy about 40-something PhD student
Hadley Hawkins drunkenly defiles a hoodoo altar on break during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Because of this she thinks she’s cursed to keep seeing ex-boyfriends she can’t stand the sight of back in New York City. Hadley has to figure out how to remove the “hex” and get on with her life.
:: BANANAS – Round 2 of MACRO Episodic Labs (Charles D. King/Eva Longoria/Lena Waithe), Sitcom/Dramedy with a Vietnamese-American woman lead
:: UNDER YOUR NOSE is a family comedy.
Bailey must sniff out the culprits and save a dog from a band of bank robbing surfing dogs.
Bailey is not your typical dog. He can hang ten and is a surfing beagle, to be precise. Dog surfing is a cultural phenomenon sweeping Southern California, with competitions in Huntington Beach and San Diego.
POINT BREAK, but with dogs:
Bailey helps his person, Steve, who works at the FBI, solve a burglary ring no one can crack.
The story takes them to locales such as Miami and Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge on the Emerald Isle of North Carolina.
For more on Thuc, go here
Additional stories + further descriptions/summaries
Oh, you’ll like them…
Tove is unceremoniously dumped two days before American Thanksgiving, after she thought she and her significant other were at the closest point of their interracial relationship. In flashbacks we learn of some of the complications. Tove navigates the rest of “Cuffing Season” with her friends and learns to sort out other such baggage like having to live in today’s society and her family expecting her to be an example of the “model minority”.
Two Scary Guys
2ScaryGuys is a comedy about Curt See and Rhett Cutler who adore Halloween, always have since they were little boys who grew up in the same small town in Southern Maryland. They’ve worked seasonally at Old Man’s Daniels’ fun park each Halloween. They love it. They live for it. When OMD runs out of money to keep the place going, so goes the guys’ thing that they look forward to every year. A big company lead by Curt’s arch nemesis, Eddie Frost, endeavors to open up a new theme park based on a popular series of teen vampire books and movies called Starkly Dark.
We’ve Got History
In progress:
We’ve Got History is a comedy about three twenty-nine year single women trapped in the present lament their dating lives and long for a time when men were men and women didn’t aspire to be on reality tv shows.
Deb, Whitney and Marcie live normal lives, working jobs where they feel dispensable. They’re bored of the dating scenes where they live. Their prospects are bleak, and looking back on people they have history with proves nauseating.
Deb’s in LA- men are more into their Blackberries and Porsches than courtship. Whitney’s in New York where she tells Deb it’s not much better, where men get their nails done. Marcie’s in the burbs where guys watch sports and play video games instead of wooing. Moving to another city for a fresh supply of men isn’t going to make a difference.
Not that these women want to be princesses or characters in romance novels; they just want to date during ages where romance was part of life and so was actual living-feeling alive instead of being attached to gadgets, machines and screens all the time.
The women find the site “Bangable Dudes in History” and imagine hooking up with bad boys from the past; not their past, but history’s past. Their imagination becomes real. Will they like being lost in time in their searches to be lost in love, or will they long to return to the “now”?
Will anyone notice they’re missing? Will going back in time give them what they want for the future?
Face Time Continuum
(working title)
A modern re-imagining of Eyes Without a Face— sounds scary, right? The setting is Los Angeles. The subjects are plastic surgery and dead girls.
Miriam, the daughter of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, loses her face in a freak accident. After many botched surgeries to repair her countenance, she wonders if continuing these procedures is worth it or if she should pursue a different kind of life out there.
Pinky Swear
Jane must find a way to get out of a marriage pact (bound by magic) that she made with her friend Oliver, as they are about to both go over the hill.
Uncivil Undead
This is different from other Confederate zombie stories where people just get eaten- this one has a social commentary attached. Neo “rebels” talk the same, think the same, look the same, they don’t really rebel against anything. They adhere to their upbringing of hating “outsiders”.
IDEA:
Tannersville is a still segregated small Southern town with a Confederate Cemetery- as many small Southern towns have and highlight with historical markers.
Bobby Calhoun is a young good ole boy who has been raised to wait until The South rises again, like the generations before him who think The Civil War never really ended. They still honor those like Nathan Bedford Forrest, burn crosses in their spare time and put on Civil War re-enactments, but change the outcome to where The South won.
Edie Webb is is quasi-girlfriend, still figuring herself out- raised Southern Baptist, raised to have kids and bring them up in the church. She loses her virginity to Bobby in the cemetery.
Unbeknownst to them, her blood on a full moon awakens long dead soldiers. This is due to a magic spell done by a CSA leader to awaken his troops to seek vengeance against the “Northern aggression” or anyone who by existing, attempts to ruin their way of life, “as the good lord intended it”.
“Murders” of white people happen that rock Tannersville. These “victims” happened to be glad to see the soldiers march again, until they got eaten by them.
The victims appear dead for three days, then become zombies themselves…
Hanh Le, Nairey Pygosian Ramirez, Sanjit Patel, and Tim Smith are new graduate students at the local college that lured them from out of state with the promise of financial support, then tried to load work on them and discriminate against them. This group of minorities and Tim, along with local Adam Jenkins, figure out what’s going on. Samara Brown is a young black woman who grew up in Tannersville who stands with the cause. Her brother Lavarius and his friend Joe Edmonds also help the out of towners with the Rebel zombies.
Edie and Samara are attracted to each other. When they kiss, the zombies’ heads explode. The future of Tannersville and towns like it are at stake… What will have to happen for them to survive?
Man 9 From Outer Space
Synopsis only
Man 9 is a comedy. Irv’s an alien from the Man 9 series. They’re average seeming guys. Man 1 series – Aldous, Alex, Alan- were all too hunky and failed in their mission. Man 2 Series- There are others- Brad, Brent, Brandon, Ben. Man 3- Calvin, Man 4- Derrick, Man 5- Evan, Man 6- Freddie, Man 7- George, Man 8- Henry– you get it. Invasion is just too messy and then you have to deal with the aftermaths.
What was their mission you ask? — To get gold from Earth’s women. Their home planet runs on gold- it keeps their vehicles going, it heats their homes, operates their plants. Man 1 series were foxy gigolos who loved ‘em and left ‘em and swiped their gold. Women with low self esteem fell for that.
Man 9 series will woo them, go with a more long term effect. Man 9 will take them panning for gold. Man 9 will be dentists and extract the gold from their very mouths. Man 9 will out smart these Earth women. Elvi’s didn’t fall for Man 1. She’s been burned by a pretty face and six pack abs before. She’s not falling for Man 9 either. Nice guys turn into dicks when you give them the time. Elvi’s a smart individual investor. She has a safe under her bed and she’s been buying up bars of gold in anticipation of the failing Earth economies. She wears the key for the safe around her neck and never takes it off. The aliens send in a special agent- Irv.
Irv begins a complex way of “getting to” Elvi. Does she go for it?
Consider8-Content 