I’m adding so many of my dead projects as I go along that I’ve changed the button link of this section to reflect the fact. Instead of ‘downloads’, I’m calling it my morgue. Here you can inspect and pick over the remains of proposals that I once cherished and that, like a character in an Edgar Allan Poe story, I still hold too dear to inter.
It started when I had the notion of creating an online archive of mainly unproduced pieces for this website. I’d been looking back over some old material; some original ideas, or my take on something or other. Quite eloquent little essays, all dead in the water for their various reasons and it seemed a shame just to let them rot.
Up until now I have never let anything go. Often a busted pitch would end up in the fabric of something else. A plot gimmick from Sexton Blake was recycled into Danziger and ended up in my Silent Witness. I’ve kept everything as my personal slate, reckoning that to expose unproduced stuff is to take it off the market. But some of it’s been overtaken by history—The 39 Steps, The Midwich Cuckoos—while my interest in some of the subjects has waned.
So I started a list—dead pitches for public sharing, as opposed to IP worth keeping in play. You might look elsewhere on this site and conclude that I’ve had a pretty full-on career, but every writer has a shadow career of stuff you never get to see. I’m following the example here of Middleman creator and Children of Tendu podcasterJavier Grillo-Marxuach, who’s created a downloadable archive of his own scripts and pitches which he’s made available to all.
The files in this list will be password protected in a (probably vain) attempt to shield the material from IP-thieving bots. But not from you, of course. Click on the buttons and then enter the 3-letter code from the accompanying image to open the documents.
We’ll kick off with my take on John Buchan’s classic adventure novel. Often I’d come away from a general meeting and sit down to work out my thoughts on some promising subject we’d discussed. How would I approach it? How would I handle it? Writing is thinking. As an example, Eleventh Hour came out of a discussion about human cloning in which I’d railed at all the misconceptions that needed to be swept away to separate the reality from the pseudoscience. I sat down to lay out my thoughts and in the process, I found the show.
In this case, the springboard was a chat with producer Archie Tait. No, we couldn’t find a broadcaster willing to entertain the idea of a new production. And yes, one of them went on and commissioned an adaptation. From somebody else.
Adding Warriors’ Gate was a no-brainer. From this pitch I was commissioned to outline. It’s brief, just a one-pager, but everything’s there. Apart from the title! Which came later.
Dracula was commissioned by the BBC and cancelled, unread, on the very day that I delivered the script. The producers were Deep Indigo for BBC Wales. It was the fastest, fiercest script I’ve ever written. We opened a discussion with Vincent Cassel’s people, for our Dracula of choice. And as my script made its way to Cardiff a drama executive in London heard of a proposed ITV version over lunch and cancelled our project that same afternoon.
We had a completed script, we were way ahead. The other project didn’t even have a writer yet. But the news took over a week to reach us, during which time the producers of the ITV project got out a press announcement and bombed the BBC’s boat.
The explanation that reached me was, “We didn’t want to go head-to-head with ITV.”
The BBC exec, inevitably, went on to rise in the industry.
I can’t recall if I was approached or if someone put us in touch, but an American producer with a very long track record of TV movies, none of which you’ve heard of, had secured an option on The Saint. I was seriously up for this. On a rainy caravan holiday in Barmouth eleven-year-old me had once devoured Charteris’ First Saint Omnibus over two or three days and then gone back to the local bookshop for the second volume.
The plan was to relaunch The Saint for TV. We had several long phone calls and said producer saw that I was serious and showed enthusiasm for my angle. This was beginning to feel like a project with legs. The option had a time limit and the clock was ticking. I wrote up my take into the document that follows, and everything moved up a notch. Great, I said, call my agent and let’s get going.
There was a call, I believe, and the call was brief. And I never heard from him again.
As I understood it he went on to finance a pilot without attaching a broadcaster, probably under pressure to get something under way before the option lapsed. When the pilot didn’t get picked up anywhere there were reshoots and extra scenes to expand the running time to movie length. In the interim the lead actor had grown a beard for another project. The result was a narrative mess with some decent casting and production values (you could get a lot for your budget in Eastern Europe) plus some ill-advised sore-thumb cameos.
So, click on the button above, enter the three-letter code, and see what might have been.
This one arose from a discussion with Zenith about classic works new to adaptation, based on the usual gnomic signals from commissioners of the day. Anne Radcliffe’s undisciplined and massively influential work has its place in every taught course on English literature—or it did, and it should—but it’s a hard one to find a line through. This was one of my most thorough and ambitious pitches that not only broke story but then laid out a plan for tackling casting and production issues.
Upon submission, guess what. The line now was, we’re only considering adaptations of works already familiar to the audience. Remakes, in essence. OK, I thought, resilient as ever, what could be more familiar, more misrepresented, more ripe for a fresh treatment than Dracula?
See above for how that worked out.
Subtitle, The Birth and Early History of the SAS. The idea didn’t come from me; the various stages of research, the series plan and this screenplay were all a paid commission from Carnival. My work on BUGS had given me some credibility as a reliable fabulist, and now I was being trusted on a big historical. It dates from 2001 and, if it needs saying, has no connection of which I’m aware to the BBC’s Rogue Heroes or the 2015 book on which that show is based.
I don’t know how it compares because I haven’t seen that show; not for any negative reason, but for the same reason I never saw ITV’s Dracula, or Sky’s version of The Midwich Cuckoos. Watching someone else’s work on something you once covered can make for a weird and uncomfortable experience. It’s like an invite to an ex’s wedding. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never had one of those.
So I’d sold a pilot to ABC Signature, which gave me a foot in the door with ABC, which in turn gave me a line on Disney. I mean, not a wide open channel, but one just wide enough to be worth a shot. I took the opportunity to put in a written pitch for a new take on Russell Thorndike’s tales of smugglers and swashbuckling with his mask-wearing horseback hero. Patrick McGoohan played the role in Disney’s 1964 The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, a television three-parter cut down to a feature for UK release.
Disney own the rights in perpetuity, apparently, which I imagined might make them receptive. Give me an edge, even. I put in the pitch and saw it on its way.
And the rest, as the Danish boy once said, is silence.
Producer Marc Samuelson struck a deal with the John Wyndham estate covering all the available Wyndham back catalogue. He set a series of meetings with potential collaborators, of which I was one. Stephen Volk was another, brought in to discuss The Chrysalids. My focus was on The Midwich Cuckoos, whose TV rights were included in the deal. This was my take on the show along with my expanded story synopsis, aiming to recreate the spirit of the original in a twenty-first century context.
It was well-received and all was going great, until it wasn’t. Those involved with Universal’s 1995 Village of the Damned movie remake announced a TV series of their own, assuming rights they didn’t have. Marc went to the lawyers and the Cuckoos sank from view.
I heard nothing further, but clearly something was resolved and Midwich reached TV screens in 2022, made by Sky, distributed by Universal, with Marc listed on IMDB Pro as one of the seventeen producers.
The one-pager you find here is but the tip of a very large iceberg that includes a detailed pilot treatment, a 10-hour season plan, a pitch deck, concept art, a set of production notes, and a four-minute sizzle reel voiced by Teresa (no relation) Gallagher. It began with the three words ‘kids on Mars’ from a producer at a company I’d worked with before. The aim was intelligent SF adventure for a young audience. Momentum was gathered, the trade journals took an interest, and someone jumped in and cybersquatted the domain name—a sure sign that things were getting serious.
Those things ramped up a notch when we got into discussions with CBBC. While this was too big a show for a domestic budget, the participation of a broadcaster is the absolute key piece in a funding jigsaw. After some back and forth, we got a call to a meeting with the channel’s (then) Head of Drama. Exciting stuff. I booked a London hotel and travelled down the evening before; I’d long learned to trust neither trains not roads before a significant appointment.
That morning the producer and I got together ahead of the hour. We went over what we planned to say and how we’d handle questions. We’d brought our notes, plans, copies of everything. Then, thoroughly prepped, we presented ourselves.
With a beaming smile, the exec explained that she’d called the in-person meeting as a courtesy to tell us face to face that they weren’t going ahead with our show.
We exchanged a look and her face fell a bit; I think she was expecting more appreciation for her thoughtful gesture.
I’ll let you imagine what we said when we got outside.
If you’re a fan of Farscape be grateful that this one didn’t make it, because it’s what you almost got instead.
In the 90s I met with Duncan Kenworthy and Angus Fletcher at the Jim Henson company, a day that included a tour of the Creature Workshop (a vivid memory: the team puzzling over assembly of the newly-uncrated parts of the Lost in Space robot).
The subject of the meeting was the company’s idea for a science fiction show to make full use of the Workshop between one-off feature projects. The idea on the table was pretty much the eventual IMDB logline, “Thrown into a distant part of the universe, an Earth astronaut finds himself part of a fugitive alien starship crew”. Notions in play included a main character waking from cold sleep, a dolphin starship navigator. And creatures. Lots of creatures.
Long story short, they liked my pitch; liked it a lot, if I can believe what they told me, but when they ran it by (I think) Fox for approval they said nope, we want an American showrunner. Rockne O’Bannon came in with his own take. I got a courtesy meeting a few months later and we shook hands, and he went on to run a successful show.
But I got a tour of the Creature Workshop, so I can still call it a win.
This one was huge. Early in 2020 I was packing to fly to New Zealand with producer Neil Zeiger. We were heading out to meet with film commissioners, to scout locations, and to begin putting together a diverse writing team appropriate to our subject. The subject was the historic meeting of two cultures, told from multiple points of view instead of the usual colonial perspective. Our base would be Aotearoa but our theatre would be spread all across the Southern Pacific.
I had a tin of Kendal Mint Cake to give to the Maori King. I mean, major diplomacy.
Then Covid closed the borders, and everything went on hold.
It had begun when I was asked for my take on the life of Captain James Cook. Right away my research suggested that there was a bigger, bolder, more faceted and largely untold story there, and that became my pitch. It blossomed into a 10-hour epic in which Cook would feature as one of the players in a much wider and more layered Pacific drama.
Lockdown was a setback. We lost ground but we regrouped. Ultimately the core team was Neil and myself along with veteran NZ producer John (Whale Rider) Barnett and director Lee (Once Were Warriors, Die Another Day) Tamahori.
Click on the button and you’ll see my detailed treatment. This was the show’s foundation document; concept, teaser, main characters and full narrative blueprint for a ten-hour season of period TV. I was aware of being a European, an outsider; Lee, of Maori heritage, didn’t see that as a concern. I knew it wasn’t my personal tale to tell but my aim was to be the builder of a framework into which other, more directly connected voices could be invited for the telling. To establish the material’s factual credentials I took the unusual step of colour-coding the text; what little I had to invent stands out in blue, while everything else is from the historical record.
The setbacks did for us in the end. Our time ran out. The backer of Neil’s company pulled out of the film business, causing a new delay while Neil negotiated to keep the project rights. Then John Barnett died in August 2025. I didn’t see it coming. I see now that he was 80, though from his energy you’d never have guessed it. Lee Tamahori died three months later, not long after returning from the festival circuit for his final movie The Convert (starring Guy Pearce, and recommended).
Well, that was it. I donated my research library to Oxfam books. Made them four hundred quid, at last count.
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
