Earlier Works
Strike Zone

I was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on May 15, 1965. My family lived in North Providence, a small middle class community, where I attended public school and graduated from North Providence High School in 1983.

Baseball was a favorite pastime growing up, watching games, but in those days more reading about the history and following the games in the papers. And, of course, playing ball on the streets and in various leagues. But ever since I was little, my passion has been creative ventures of one kind or another, usually involving writing.

In elementary school, I remember writing these absurd vignettes, short stories which only an adolescent mind would find entertaining. I would have my good friend (surprisingly, he still is today), Ray Cloutier, read these stories out loud in one of our classrooms. I don't think anyone else knew what to make of them, but my friend and
I could hardly keep from laughing as he read these strange tales out loud.
Movies were the primary catalyst for my creative output in those days, with my early influences being Clint Eastwood and - since this was the late 1970's and early 1980's - the horror film boom of that era. I think the appeal of Eastwood's movies for me at such an early age had a lot to do with my father's unexpected death in 1976. His films, particularly the Dirty Harry series, presented this iconic male character, a sort of role model that was suddenly absent in my life. So it can be no surprise that when I came across an old Super-8 movie camera, I played a Clint Eastwood character in my own movie. It was a plot-mingling of both Dirty Harry and Magnum Force, and I called my movie, predictably, Dirty Force. This half-hour homage featured a fifteen-year old Inspector Harry Callahan, with my friends playing the parts of either good guys or bad guys, and sometimes both. The role of the psycho killer, the next best part, was played by Ray Cloutier. He not only read all my zany stories in class, it was his father's camera. But that wasn't why he got the part. He was a natural. He could have been a real "B" movie actor if he wasn't making "D" movies with me.

This was 1981, and video cameras may have been available to some, but they were way too pricey for the budget on this production. It was actually shot with silent film, the dialogue and all sounds recorded separately on a tape recorder that was played alongside the projector. The voices didn't match the lips. It was like watching an old Godzilla movie, but I was proud of it at the time. I wrote it, produced it, directed it, edited it, dubbed the sound effects, starred in it, everything. You know I just had to make another one of these backyard movies. And I did. I made five movies through 1985, each time the production quality improved, the equipment, the effects, everything got better. Yet they were all still wonderfully bad. Does the name Ed Wood mean anything to you?

With all of these films recently converted onto DVD, for posterity, I can now make clips available for viewing, which I have done. Besides posterity, they are good for a few laughs, anyway. So check them out below, if you like.

In 1986 I enrolled in a small film school that was located in Hollywood, CA. I studied film production and screen writing, and when I determined that I wanted to hang up my director's hat, and all my other filmmaking hats to concentrate on writing, I returned home, where I tried my hand at writing original movie scripts. I wrote a handful of screenplays in my spare time. They were original, even if they weren't very good. Horror, science fiction, action, suspense, comedy, I tried them all. While success may have been elusive, I didn't get discouraged. I was learning a lot, anyway; learning what didn't work. I read everything I could, short fiction and novels, in the genres I enjoyed, to see how published writers were doing it. And I continued to challenge myself, writing the first of many short stories beginning in 1988. The first one is still my favorite. It's titled Strike Zone, and it's about baseball and superstition. There were a couple dozen stories through the mid 90's, which I enjoyed writing very much. The creativity level always seemed to be highest for me when I was writing short fiction. The natural progression of things was writing a novel, which I knew I would have to tackle some day. That day was in 1998, when I began writing The Apostate.

To See Paul's movie clips click here