from the writer

I Nearly Lost You — Feature Screenplay

Why I Write These Stories

I grew up in a broken home where music was the only language that made sense. My family was musical, chaotic, passionate, barely holding together, and I watched my mother struggle with impossible choices between survival and connection. The question that haunted me wasn’t “What if things had been different?” but rather “What would I want to tell my younger self, or a child I never had, about finding your way when the world keeps breaking you?”

I wrote “I Nearly Lost You” from that place of longing, for connection, for second chances, for a world where music still had the power to heal instead of being flattened into algorithmic content. I wanted to explore what it means to be a parent who fails, not because they don’t care, but because they’re drowning. And what it means to be a child who grows up with everything except the one thing that matters: being truly seen.

The 1990s grunge era wasn’t just a backdrop for me — it was survival. That music saved my life. The raw honesty, the refusal to be packaged and sold, the understanding that beauty and pain aren’t opposites but partners in the same dance. When I look at today’s world — everyone staring at screens, young people reporting unprecedented loneliness despite being “connected” 24/7 — I see the same pain I felt back then, just mediated through technology that promises connection and delivers isolation.

This story asks: What if you could go back and save yourself? What if the person who needed saving was your own child, but you were too young, too broken, to do it the first time? What would you sacrifice for that second chance?

This isn’t a story about music — it’s a story told through music, where every guitar riff carries emotional DNA, where time travel happens because a song reaches across decades and says “I remember you, I’m still here.”

Two Worlds

1996: Analog, visceral, alive. Film grain. Saturated colors. Bodies moving in real space to real music. The Electric Banana is a sweaty church where people come to feel something, anything, without mediation. Rachel’s world is dangerous but present. When she looks at someone, she actually sees them. When she listens to music, it rearranges her molecules.

2026: Digital, sterile, disconnected. Clean cinematography. Cool tones. Symmetrical framing that feels like a prison. Everyone alone together, performing intimacy for an audience of algorithms. Ann’s world is safe but suffocating. The coffee bar is full of bodies but empty of connection.

The film’s aesthetic question becomes: Can analog warmth penetrate digital cold? Can a mother from 1996 teach her daughter in 2026 that being alive means being messily, dangerously present?

The time portal isn’t sci-fi spectacle — it’s magical realism in service of emotional logic. Of course music can bend time. Of course a mother’s love can break physics. The surreal sequences blend eras through overlapping audio, visual echoes, and the recurring haunting arpeggio that works like Proust’s madeleine: memory made tangible.

Why These Stories Matter Now

We’re living through a loneliness epidemic. Seventy-three percent of Gen-Z report feeling alone. Suicide rates are climbing. Young people are hyperconnected digitally but starving for authentic human contact.

“I Nearly Lost You” offers an alternative. It says: You are allowed to fail. You are allowed to be messy. You are allowed to need people. The path to healing isn’t through perfection or self-optimization — it’s through showing up for each other, imperfectly, repeatedly, across whatever distances separate us.

Rachel learns she can’t undo the past. Ann learns she can’t escape into the past. Together they learn that the present moment — this one, right here — is where love happens or it doesn’t happen at all.

What I Bring to a Film

Musical authenticity: I’m a composer/guitarist with decades of experience. Every note of the diegetic songs is intentional. Every guitar part could be playable live on set.

Emotional honesty: I understand trauma, broken families, and the desperate search for belonging. This story doesn’t sentimentalize pain or offer easy redemptions. It earns every moment of hope.

Collaborative spirit: I’ve worked in ensemble theater for years, where I learned how subtext can serve actors, and how to create scenes with vulnerability, chemistry, tension, conflict.

Craft discipline: I’ve studied screenwriting through Roadmap Writers (where this script received a rare “Recommend”), worked with a creative producer from Severance (AppleTV+) on development notes, and attracted interest from Oscar-winning producers.

My Promise to Investors, Cast, and Audiences

Honors the emotional truth of broken families without exploiting them

Uses music as transformative magic, not nostalgic decoration

Features two complex female leads who earn their reconciliation through painful, honest work

Can look gorgeous on a modest budget because it prioritizes craft over scale

Can play at SXSW, Sundance, or Tribeca and find its audience through festival buzz

Delivers a message of hope without denying the darkness that makes hope necessary

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