Julie Rogers

How a 2023 novel became a 2024 screenplay—and how a 2001 idea finally found its home.

(Reprinted from Stage 32, September 18, 2024)

I came full circle this year, adapting my 2023 novel Falling Stars into a screenplay and signing with Buffalo 8 as Executive Producer. But that circle began decades ago—back in 2001—when I first started the original script. To understand how those threads came together, you’d have to start with my earliest attempts at screenwriting.

Reprinted from Stage 32, September 18, 2024

I wrote my first screenplay in my mid-twenties when Syd Field’s Foundations of Screenwriting was the major go-to for the craft. “Spa Wars” was a parody steeped in small-town politics and, of all things, an ongoing economic rivalry between two competing health clubs. Really tacky stuff. I requested script notes from Sam Havens, Professor Emeritus at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Solution: Rewrite the damn thing.

I did what most mystified young screenwriters do—chalked up the project as curiously unsalvageable and started another script instead. I don’t remember a lot about the second one because it came on the heels of a divorce, but the members in my informally arranged table read said “Driver” incorporated a lot of explosions. I vaguely recall wanting to craft an action/drama portraying the temptation of Christ set in the modern day. That script won first place at a regional writer’s convention in Beaumont. I was also remarried by then to the kindest man in the world, where I could finally step away from my day job and get a good running start. I was pregnant too.

During gestation, I wrote like a crazed cow on steroids. When I wasn’t swimming, I was writing. I cranked out a self-help book on divorce recovery. A three-act comedy for stage. Staged it, directed it, ran the lighting board. All in the tiny community of Mena, Arkansas. Since my degree was in journalism, I also contributed articles to the Mena Star as they came along. I wrote a short story set in Mena that won the Writer’s Digest 1999 Grand Prize.

Part of my prize was an all-expenses-paid trip to the Maui Screenwriter’s Convention. Shit. I needed to write another screenplay!

I Got One For Ya

I got one for ya, Mena Star’s then chief editor, John Corbitt, told me. Plunked a cardboard box brimming with files on his desk. Here’s a true crime. Russell wanted me to do something with it—it’s one of his. But I can’t really write fiction, you know?

The case that Russell Welch had handed off to John was a parricide. He got the kids off on self-defense because the abuse was so extreme. I went to interview Russell with a thick, three-ring binder of color-coded notes. I’d studied up.

He seemed impressed, and politely rushed through my questions regarding that case, enough for me to ultimately craft the psychological thriller “Grave Jumper.” Kids kill dad. Dad comes back. We seen him around in these hills, yeppers.

That day, Russell spread a large roll of butcher paper over his Formica dining room table. Took out a Sharpie. I’m going to show it to you in a timeline, okay? What happened when I investigated drug-running at Mena Airport. He then opened the door to his son’s old room and evidence boxes stacked to the ceiling. You see, it wasn’t just Barry Seal. It was way more than that.

I polished “Grave Jumper” to the nines with my first editor (for the self-help book) and lifelong friend, June Ford. Dragged out my next quarterly issue of Hollywood Creative Directory and started seriously shopping a script for the first time ever. Learned how to send emails and rock a baby simultaneously. That sort of stuff.

I started attending USC Screenwriting Professor Rich Krevolin’s writing workshops in Oklahoma City whenever I could, a roundtable of screenwriters crafting pages. Always more pages.

I got a call one day from Peter Saphier, one of the producers of the 1998 film Black Dog. No, I can’t handle your script right now, but I wanted you to know it’s good. If you don’t already have a manager, contact Jeff Ross. He’s getting started in the industry and doing some good stuff. Tell him I sent you, okay?

By that time, Jeff had been in business for twenty years.

I signed with Jeff. So, let’s keep “Grave Jumper” in the wings for now, he said. I want to go after what Russell has on Mena. Can you get a treatment to me? I’ll shop that first. And can we get his life rights?

The Maui Screenwriting Convention

Maui Screenwriting Convention was coming up soon, and Holy Godzilla—I needed some pitches. Ron Howard (sigh) had already withdrawn that year—his mother had just passed away.

So, I dropped into treatment/pitch writing mode. Cranked out eleven pitches including “Grave Jumper,” and threw in the prize-winning short story for good measure. One of those pitches was a zany little idea I had about a young boy with a terminal illness who believes he’s a vampire, “Falling Stars.”

My son was teething and tossing his toys from the top balcony of our veranda, so my husband decided they’d take a drive out to Charles Lindbergh’s grave while I attended the day’s seminars. His dad fought in New Guinea and had trained alongside Lindbergh—extending the range of those bottom-heavy Jugs so that many of our boys could come home. He penned a historical fiction novel about his experience after the war called Outcast Red.

I attended some panels, chatted with Chris Vogler about his second edition of The Writer’s Journey, and headed off to my pitch session. The acoustics in a conference center of that size with 75 people pitching concurrently were LOUD. I didn’t have the sonar for it. But Allison Rosenzweig, co-producer of the upcoming Windtalkers, truly had hyperacusis, I decided. She also had the skillset for saying “no” before I put a period on most of my loglines. She agreed to look at the short story.

I returned home to pound out “Unraveled,” the treatment Jeff wanted. Got a pass from Allison for any further crafting of said grand prize winner to screen. Then I got an offer from William J. Grabowski, former interviewer for Horror Show Magazine. He wanted to publish the piece in a horror anthology he was crafting, The Black Book. I said, thank you, yes. He sent me a check, and the family was off to Lakeland Theater in North Carolina, a staged reading of my three-act comedy that my aunt had orchestrated. I’d revised it, cut the cast in half, given it more of an edge—something I thought might ultimately translate better into low-budget film. The audience was shocked. My aunt was mortified. Not one of my better receptions. On the way home, the Twin Towers started coming down as we passed through Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

Jeff called me. This one’s dead in the water now, Julie. You’ve just been preempted by an act of war. Nothing unheroic will sell for the next ten years. Forget Mena.

I Got Another One For Ya

I didn’t hear from Bill or The Black Book project for a while. He didn’t answer my emails. What happened? Where’s Bill?

I got another one for ya, Russell said. So, I took notes on one of his more bizarre cases and wrote “The Calling,” an action thriller set on the outskirts of our little town. Backwoods biowarfare stuff. It was getting there, but we frankly didn’t know all the potential ramifications then, what happens when someone walks into an airport and intentionally sneezes.

I got another one for ya, Rich said. There’s a guy who owns a theater in Marina del Rey who piddles at writing now and then. Word of note: piddle. He wants to collaborate on a screenplay. And he’s got some connections. I spent the better part of one summer writing that script, the idea being that at some point, he would craft revisions. He didn’t. It’s great, he said. I’m taking it to Sam Raimi’s assistant tomorrow.

Rich asked me the following day how the collaboration was going. I told him. Oh, no you don’t, he said. You need to ask for a bigger split.

Jeff jumped in. Oh, no you don’t, he said. Give me this guy’s number. But—it’s Sam Raimi, I said. Jeff ripped the guy a new one. End of story.

Then Life Happened

I took a film class at Rich Mountain Community College. Worked as assistant teacher to Dr. Rudi Timmerman, head of the department. Rudi was an engineer extraordinaire. He taught me not to panic in the face of an inevitable clusterfuck. You know, the VHS you popped in at the station’s low-power transmitter you hope keeps looping. Besides your standard community events, we filmed student documentaries, music videos, and short features. I bought my own cameras and shot a handful of short films. Wrote a Christmas comedy. Fun stuff.

We’d noticed some developmental differences during my son’s first few years, enough to take him to UAMS for a psychiatric evaluation. The diagnoses came back, blow by blow. I needed to vomit. My son was sick. So very, very sick.

I conceded to Jeff. I must homeschool him; it’s the only way. I can’t write for a while. We moved to Texas, and eventually, the Austin area—known for its glut of homeschool networks.

Ghostwriting

Once my son was in high school, it was easier to pick up a few ghostwriting and editing projects. Upwork stuff. James Innes Group. Then I started getting requests to ghostwrite screenplays. Damn. I pulled a Final Draft floppy out of my desk drawer and dusted it off. Version 1.01. We were at 9 by then. I wrote for Afghani and Arab TV. Cartoon stuff.

Seeing I was maybe stepping back in, I decided to contact Jeff Ross. Nothing pushy. I texted him.

Is this still a good number for you?

Sure is. Who’s this?

Julie Rogers. How are you?

Not good. Pancreatic Cancer. Stage IV.

And just how fast could I thumb in how sorry I was? My heart sank.

Working on anything new?

I was scooting around online one day and found Bill Grabowski again. He was running a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for his wife’s breast cancer treatments. I funded. Damn, Bill. How can I help? Buy a couple of your books? What happened to you?

A family split over his parents’ estate had left him penniless. The Black Book never happened. He’d pulled himself up by the bootstraps, had (mostly) recovered, and edited for a living.

I hired him to edit my next two books, Seven Shorts and When Pigs Fly Over the Moon.

Stage 32

Ron Howard produced American Made starring Tom Cruise as Barry Seal. I wondered what Russell thought about it. I hadn’t talked to him in years.

I had regular lunches with my proofer, writing colleague, and tarot card reader Lois DiMari. When you ghostwrite, you vent at times. She listened. And corrected mistakes that would’ve put egg on my face. At some point, I told her I had no idea what I’d tackle next because I’d run into a problem: the jaded side of me had decided most original stories weren’t worth telling in the first place. Did I have one? Would she pick it? I gave her a list. She chose Falling Stars. Okay, I said. But I’m going to write it as a novel this time. Bill, are you on board for the edit? He was.

I pulled out all the stops, hired two publicists, and pushed the river with all the salmon swimming upstream for the first year with the novel Falling Stars. The story was set in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. We were soon moving to Eureka Springs, a destination home on our bucket list. I hired actor Keith Michael Pinault to narrate the audiobook like nobody else can. As I audited all the edits, I knew then I needed to adapt it to screenplay.

A Nashville musician named Bart Bryars posted online that he was looking for a screenplay collaboration, adapting his prison memoir, The Rabbit in Me, to film. He was incarcerated during the “Just Say No” era, seven years for trafficking cocaine, the same time Russell Welch was investigating Mena. He’d managed to stay alive regardless of multiple inane escape attempts and discovered he was good at music. Bart sat in the same cell block in Baton Rouge with one of the six Columbians who gunned down Barry Seal. Small world.

Our experience shopping Bart’s screenplay convinced us we needed a new model for selling scripts. We joined Stage 32 and other social and educational networks for film professionals.

When I had “Falling Stars” ready for a script evaluation, I signed for one with Sean Hussey, Deliverables Coordinator for Buffalo 8. Within a week, their team was on board as executive producers, and its early development continues with Scottish director Michael Hines now attached. As I look back at this chessboard of messy moves, I still smile—because I see now how life’s sweat and grit brings us into the wake of influential living.

Reprinted from Writer’s Digest, June 9, 2023

The alien romance you just downloaded because someone raved that it was hot, hot, hot? That might have been me. The next MI6-worthy James Bond storyline? Also me. The YA fantasy readers swear they could read again and again? Could be me too.

That’s because I’m a ghost.

A ghostwriter, specifically.

My dual identities—ghostwriter and author—did not develop together or overnight. After my dad and I stomped across several college campuses and I ultimately chose Southern Methodist University’s school of journalism, I spent years balancing athletic training as my day job with contributing articles on the side. Writing was something I loved, but for a long time it lived in the margins of my life.

My first book was published at 42, and I was deep into my fifth novel when I stumbled into the world of ghostwriting and editing. At the time, I was active in an Austin writers’ guild, and my only understanding of a ghostwriter was someone who wrote in another’s name—like those who continued the legacy of Louis L’Amour, V. C. Andrews, or Ernest Hemingway. Some of those works were unpublished originals, but others were crafted in the authors’ styles by ghosts like me.

What I quickly learned is that most of my clients aren’t heirs to literary estates—they’re busy people with great ideas and no time, or English-language learners who need clarity, or aspiring authors who can’t get their stories organized. And this work—helping others bring their books to life—became my full-time career for the past decade. I especially love guiding first-time indie authors as a one-stop shop to help them write, package, and publish books they can be proud of.

But make no mistake: ghostwriting comes with its own unique challenges. Every ghost or editor needs a circle of trusted listeners—wise readers, fellow writers in the trenches, people with whom we can anonymously share “bytes” of client dilemmas. Very few clients enjoy having their ideas picked apart, after all. My proofreader and I even have standing Friday lunches to decompress over the week’s battles. Developing healthy critique habits, strong market instincts, and a thick skin takes time, experience, and more than a few hard knocks.

Once you hang out your shingle, the work moves fast. After just a few years freelancing with platforms like Upwork and the James Innes Group, I’d already worked with clients around the world on everything from novellas to multi-book fantasy sagas, from screenplays to stage plays. I’d ghosted self-help, how-to, spiritual, technical, academic, and inspirational books. I’d written résumés, revised LinkedIn profiles, and handled a long menu of genres: YA, children’s, adult fantasy, true-story adaptations, memoirs, paranormal, sci-fi, romance, thriller, horror, and action-adventure. If it required words, I probably touched it.

By 2020, however, burnout had crept in. I had written so many stories—thousands of pages—that I started wondering what made a story worth telling. Then the world shut down. I lost both of my parents within two years. I stepped away for 14 months and didn’t write a single word for myself. Still, I kept a running list of story ideas that sparked while finishing work for everyone else. Eventually, I asked my intuitive writer-friend and longtime listener, Lois DiMari, the question I’d been avoiding: Which of these stories is worth me writing—as myself? She chose Falling Stars. I had a good feeling about it too.

I’d studied vampire lore since grade school and had already ghosted three vampire books—grim, dystopian novels set amid future world wars, clan hierarchies, and militarized wastelands. Those vampires were feral creatures, driven by power and survival.

But with Falling Stars, I wanted to return to the romantic vampire—the mythic beginnings found in the ancient Greek tale of Ambrogio and Selene, the young adventurer and the temple maiden who inspired some of the earliest vampire legends. I cast Viscount Claudius Fallon as a sick dhampyre, a vampire-human hybrid whose greatest struggle isn’t bloodlust but congenital leukemia.

The nine-year-old boy in the story, Tommy Lucas, believes Fallon—the local urban legend—is still alive. Tommy himself has paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH), a rare blood cancer, and sees his condition as proof that he too must be a vampire.

His belief isn’t entirely irrational. Historical “vampires” may have been people with porphyria, an inherited disease common among Eastern European nobility in the Middle Ages. Like PNH, porphyria caused sun sensitivity, darkened urine, and intolerance to sulfur-rich foods like garlic. Medieval doctors even prescribed drinking animal blood to supplement heme levels. Severe sunburn sometimes caused the skin to recede from the gums, exposing the teeth—classic vampire imagery. Tommy sees all of this and convinces himself he is a sick vampire too.

Falling Stars had been sitting on my bucket list for decades. In the darkest moments of 2020, I wasn’t sure I’d ever return to it—or write anything for myself again. Grief is a strange, unpredictable process. One day a switch flipped, and I felt the spark again.

I’d originally outlined Falling Stars as a screenplay treatment and pitched it at the Maui Writers’ Conference in 2001 to Alison Rosenzweig, producer of Windtalkers. It wasn’t green-lighted, so I tucked it away with the others. In 2021, twenty years later, I pulled it out again and realized I was finally ready.

Now I tell all my clients the same thing: If a story idea suits up and shows up, it’s there for a reason. Trust that. Yours is next.

A sequel to this article is coming soon: how I came full circle to crafting Falling Stars as a screenplay in 2024 and signing on with Buffalo 8 as Executive Producer.

I’ve always loved special-edition magazines—the kind you find around the holidays, like LIFE’s December issue, The Story of Santa. In it, Robert Sullivan does what he does best: pictorially chronicling the evolution of Santa Claus. In the 2015 issue, he made room for a disappearing breed—Volunteers of America’s Sidewalk Santas in Manhattan. Which got me thinking: could this be one of the many things that have quietly, tragically vanished from our world?

We need to bring back Sidewalk Santas.

The first ones appeared in Los Angeles in 1902, ringing bells on street corners and inviting passersby to drop money into cardboard chimneys. Police, baffled, initially hauled them off as public nuisances—but the tradition had already taken root. For 110 years, these surrogate Santas collected donations and embodied holiday generosity. Until 2013.

Restructuring within the nonprofit shifted the model toward more efficient methods such as food vouchers and digital access points. And yes, those systems have advantages—voucher programs let families buy and prepare their own meals with dignity rather than relying solely on soup kitchens or pantries. But something meaningful slipped away in the process.

We lost volunteers like Dale Keyser, a man with a long struggle through bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and homelessness, who cherished those few weeks each year when he donned the red suit on Fifth Avenue. The Sidewalk Santa program helped Keyser—and many others—stay sober, find purpose, and rebuild their lives. One of his fondest memories was the day two busloads of children spotted him, rushed toward him in a joyful tidal wave, and knocked him clean off his feet.

Manhattan’s Sidewalk Santas once planted their portable red chimneys wherever the holiday crowds gathered—from Rockefeller Center to FAO Schwarz. Many came from city shelters with approval from the Department of Homeless Services. Others simply volunteered. All of them endured the cold from noon to eight, Wednesday through Sunday. They traveled in small groups on buses, trains, and subways—car 8065 on the Metro-North out of Grand Central was practically an unofficial Santa shuttle.

Because Volunteers of America’s mission emphasizes “giving every last opportunity for a person to turn his or her life around,” the organization ran a kind of finishing school for its Santas. Don’t smoke in your suit. Avoid onions and garlic. Follow the code.

England took its Santa prep even further. In a 1957 LIFE photograph, Dr. Amy Cohen, an etiquette expert, instructs aspiring Father Christmas stand-ins in Birmingham. To her—and to the culture at the time—Santa was not a role to be played lightly. There were standards. Expectations. A sense of duty.

And when you look at those old guidelines, they feel strikingly relevant today:

Don’t:

1. Kiss the children (it spreads infection).
2. Promise too much.
3. Ever lose your temper.

Do:

1. Smile always.
2. Be clean and neat.
3. Remember you are real.

Maybe, just maybe, these are the ingredients we’re missing—the simple reminders once given to Sidewalk Santas who, despite their own hardships, tried to embody the true spirit of Christmas. For a few brief weeks each year, they remembered they were real. They looked inside their hearts and found hope.

And maybe the rest of us could use a little of that again.