Profile in Silver: And Other Screenwritings

by J. Neil Schulman, Brad Linaweaver

After the publication of his Prometheus-Award-winning science fiction novel, The Rainbow Cadenza in 1983, J. Neil Schulman published no new books until 1994. What became of this promising author's career in the missing decade? What happened was the sale of a film treatment to a major movie production company in late 1983 and the broadcast of Schulman's original script, "Profile in Silver, " on CBS's revived Twilight Zone series at 8:00 PM EST, March 7, 1986. For most of the 80's and early 90's, J. Neil Schulman was writing screenplays and stories, including other scripts for The Twilight Zone. You never saw Schulman's second Twilight Zone script, "Colorblind, " a scathing attack on prejudice which Harlan Ellison slammed as "too knee-jerk liberal" for production. You never saw the movie Schulman wrote about the divorce proceedings of the Prince and Princess of Wales, written when the tabloids were still portraying their marriage as a fairy tale come true. You never got to see the musical screenplay J. Neil Schulman wrote, where a rock band invades a symphony orchestra, or his screen story about the discovery of ancient artifacts on Mars, or his story about a cross-dimensional time-traveller we first meet at 16 when he's seduced by an older supermodel at the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention, or the unsold spec script he co-wrote for Star The Next Generation, in which the Enterprise causes an ecological disaster on a planet for endangered species...and the Ferengi save the day. Now you can use your imagination to see all these stories in your own private screening room, and learn the stories behind the stories as Schulman tells about his own adventures inmovieland. For devotees of TV, movies, and science fiction, this book shows that sometimes the stories that aren't on the screen are as compelling as the ones that are.

504 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1999