Screenwriting : author Brian H Appleton by Brian H Appleton

I am looking for a collaborator to create a screen play based upon my novel Immorality and Immortality for possible full feature 90 minute film adaption or TV series. They should have a strong interest in Greek mythology and Greco Roman history and it could be in Italian rather than English. Since the story takes place in past and present and in several countries it will need to be a big budget.

Two page synopsis

In Greek mythology Eros put a curse on Apollo and the water nymph, Daphne making Apollo terminally in love with Daphne and Daphne eternally repulsed by Apollo. To escape his advances, she asks her father Peneus for help, and he turns her into a Laurel tree.

This story begins where the myth left off. At some point Apollo feels guilty that his lust for Daphne caused her to become a tree and he asks his father Zeus if there is any way to break Eros’s curse and restore Daphne?

Zeus reluctant to interfere with Eros and his mother Aphrodite, bargains with them to allow him to remove Eros’s curse on the condition that Apollo and Daphne have their memories wiped by Lethe and become mortal.

The story begins in modern Rome in which the protagonist is beginning to remember his last reincarnation as Velthur an Etruscan military commander but is not yet aware that he is Apollo. He is also able to look into the back of people’s heads and see their past lives.

He encounters his former Etruscan wife, Araziia, now reincarnated as Valeria, whom he has been searching for, for a long time, by chance in the Borghese Gardens. She has no recollection of her former life and does not believe him at first but intrigued by his story she plays along, and they become friends.

They begin to have weekly hypnosis sessions at the villa where he lives by Lago Albano, a volcanic lake outside Rome. With each session they take turns discovering who they were in each successive former life working backwards. They were Lysistrata and Kleonike during the time of the Peloponnesian War and prior to that Agamemnon and Achilles during the Trojan War. Eventually they discover they were Apollo and Daphne and what’s more Apollo finds he is still in love with Daphne even though freed from Eros’s curse. Daphne eventually is grateful that he got Zeus to free her from being a laurel tree even if it cost her, her immortality and furthermore she is falling in love with Apollo of her own freewill.

Circumstances separate Apollo and Daphne for 46 years except when she visits him while out of body when he is in trance. She and her girl friend who is the mortal reincarnation of the Afro Brazilian water goddess Yemanji travel the world. She eventually becomes a successful art restorer working for many of the noble families of Rome on restoring frescos with Greco Roman themes, while Apollo becomes a successful artist specializing in dynamic light shows in Paris, London and Manhattan and ends up living with his mother in a mansion in Westport, CT.

He marries, Sophia, an editor at Vogue, who is the reincarnation of Mary Queen of Scotts and her mother is the reincarnation of Lucretia Borgia and before that Eris, Greek goddess of discord whose jealousy led to the Trojan Wars. Meanwhile two of his former 25 children, Trophonius and Agemathus are tired of limbo in Asphodel Meadows and beg Apollo to let them be reborn as his children again to have a second chance at the Elysian Fields. Agemathus reborn as Georgie is intellectually handicapped and Trophonius reborn as Hunter is on the spectrum. Eventually Sophia divorces him and Hunter goes with Sophia, and he keeps Georgie.

Meanwhile Apollo misses his Olympian family and wonders which of his relatives have kept their immortality and which ones have devolved into mortals with no recollection of their past reincarnations.

Mortals reincarnate while immortals have gone into hiding and merely shape shift and create new personas for themselves as no one has maintained their temples nor continues to worship them once Christianity displaced the Olympian gods. He sets out to find his father Zeus on Mount Olympus with no luck. Finally, while in a trance at his former Oracle in Dephi, his daughter Apollonis appears before him to inform him he is looking for Zeus on the wrong Mount Olympus. Zeus has recreated himself as Sam Raimi, the producer of Hercules, The Legendary Journeys and is living on Mount Olympus in Hollywood.

Apollo goes to see Sam on the pretext of showing him a screen play he has written and brings Georgie with him. They are invited to Sam’s villa as house guests and immediately acknowledge their true identities to each other. Zeus spends several days recounting what identities he has assumed over the ages which include Emperor Constantine, the Renaissance Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondylis, who first translated Homer into Italian, Heinrich Schleimann, who relocated the lost city of Troy and Cecil B DeMille. He also tells Apollo the whereabouts of his mother Leto who is running a resort in Mykonos and Hera a restaurant near her former temple in Samos. Meanwhile Zeus alias Sam has invited a restorer from Italy to come work on his villa and she is accompanied by her daughter. Apollo is dumbstruck to find that she is Daphne, and her daughter is the mortal reincarnation of Thalia, the muse of Comedy who has become a professional comedienne in Rome.

Zeus arranged all this knowing Apollo and Daphne are in love and he also throws a surprise birthday party for Apollo. He invites all kinds of local celebrities who turn out to be the 9 muses and even Aprhodite who has assumed the identity of Alexandra Tydings who played her role in Hercules, the Legendary Journeys. At the climax of the party, Zeus hypnotizes everyone and tells them that Melpomene and Lethe have arrived to restore memory or forgetting to those who desire it and he will restore immortality to those who want it so that they can escape the endless forgetting and rebirth process and move on to the Elysian Fields. It turns out Georgie is not Agemathus but is actually Eros and Zeus insists that he and Apollo make up and then Eros elects to stay with Pysche and Aphrodite in their assumed identities in Hollywood. In conclusion Pegasus arrives to fly Apollo and Daphne back to the real Mount Olympus in Greece where they live happily ever after as immortals.