Sparky!

FINALIST - deadCenter Film Festival, Best Screenplay

Logline

Sparky, a meth addict in Oklahoma, has a big score planned that’ll settle all his financial woes. But when the plan goes awry, he’ll do anything to scrounge the cash to settle a mysterious debt.

Director’s Statement

Hello – I'm J. Logan Alexander, the co-writer and director of Sparky. This script explores a dark world that exists parallel to our reality, right under our noses. We see this realm's lifeforms every day, though we choose to ignore them. Acknowledgment of their existence would shatter every notion of our placid reality. This is not a science fiction or fantasy realm. It is a very real and all-consuming vortex, and those who have explored its depths have seen the kind of hellfire only seen by Virgil and Dante. It is the world of Methamphetamine. 

Growing up in rural Oklahoma, which by some accounts is the Meth Capital of the United States (Walter White's lab notwithstanding), the drug's effects — on communities, families, people — became impossible to ignore. This story is not meant to valorize or make meth "cool"; quite the opposite, it is intended to delve into the minute to minute life of a user. While this is not "Based on a True Story" in a literal sense, it is inspired by the true stories of friends, family, and loved ones that have struggled with addiction in its many forms. 

Sparky is an unrelenting Dark Night of the Soul saga of a deeply lost man attempting to make a connection to a past now shaded by half-truths and tall-tales cooked up in an amphetamine haze. Not unlike the Joker, his past seems to be multiple choice depending on the situation. Tinged with absurdism and dark comedy, he is a picaresque antihero on a quest not entirely clear to the audience or the characters around him; but crystalline to Sparky.

I've long admired the films of the 60s Italian Neorealist movement – The Bicycle Thieves, Roma Open Citta, Accattone — and how they chronicled the lives of Italy's proletariat class with nuance and dignity, mixing actors and pedestrians to sublime effect. The films are authentic because of the director's commitment to the reality in which the characters existed. This is a through-line I wish to carry through with Sparky, along with the DIY attitude of Linklater and the Duplass brothers. 

After several years of writing and directing short films, music videos, and branded content in Los Angeles, this is my first feature script. Most recently, my short script, A Beautiful Day, was a Screencraft Short Screenplay Finalist and Slamdance Quarter-Finalist; and my music video work has been featured on Booooooom TV and the Shiny Network for New Directors. We seek a portion of our overall budget of $75K to leverage strategic partnerships and additional funding for production and distribution.