Thomas Zarnoch

Sixteen years ago, I was a Middle School Student in a small New York town that was made up of kids whose parents commuted to the city everyday. None of us thought there would ever be anything interesting about this town. Then one day in September a student was called to the Main Office for early dismissal. That wasn’t unusual but only minutes later another student was called, then another and another. We all knew something was wrong but it wasn’t until the end of the day that the teachers told us two commercial jets crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and hundreds of people were killed.
Some students saw this as a day without homework but I wasn’t one of them. My Father was an NYPD Homicide Detective, I didn’t need a phone call to know he was there. It felt like my heart was going to explode until I saw him the next day.
The next few months were filled with Patriotic Signs and Slogans, everyone was ready to fight for our country and restore the world we’d known before. Those months turned into years and the world never returned to the way it was before 9/11. It took some time but I eventually realized we were looking for something we couldn’t get back.
Having been interested in film ever since I first saw Star Wars, I felt the urge to tell the story that had become so important to me through the medium. However, I always felt that I needed to tell this story through the eyes of a person who lived in a world where the dangers of fighting to restore what was lost to us was reflected around him so strongly it couldn’t be denied. I needed the Allegory of Science Fiction.
So many ideas poured through my head but the most common story was about a character who lost something he or she thought was an essential part of them and their fight to get it back but what my characters had to realize is that what they lost was never coming back. Their obsession would hurt them but change them and ultimately teach them they needed to build a very different world to move into the future. It didn’t take long for me to lose count of how many hours I spent in front of my laptop trying to figure out who these people were, what trials they would face, how they would change and how they were like me.
A Best Screenplay award from the Pocono Mountain Film Festival encouraged me to relocate to Los Angeles to find new stories and I know my desire to share them will never go away.