The Technical Writer


Scott Saunders

Artist Bio

The Technical Writer is a dramatic, feature length digital video project that tells the story of a man who, by virtue of an agoraphobia complicated by acute social anxiety disorder, has cut himself from almost all physical contact with the outside world. This film’s main character, Merriman Jessup, exists in a place where a simple greeting from a stranger on the street can terrorize him. Jessup lives hidden away like an urban monk, without leaving his Hollywood apartment building. Jessup’s carefully preserved reclusion is shattered by the arrival of a pair of dazzling, cosmopolitan new neighbors. When, shortly after they move in, the husband is called overseas for a two-month job, his enigmatic wife, Slim, decides to play Dr. Frankenstein to the damaged agoraphobic creature she finds lurking near her new home. Scott Saunder’s strategy is to present these characters with a small but defining crisis which reveals impulses and behaviors that they would normally keep hidden.


Discipline
Narrative Film
Award Year
2000
Status

Completed


Themes

Scott Saunders

Venice, CA

Scott Saunders has directed, co-written, and co-produced two features and over twenty shorts. His second feature, The Headhunter’s Sister, won prizes at five festivals around the world. His first feature, The Lost Words, was distributed in the US by Headliner Releasing. He was selected by Variety as one of 10 Digital Video Directors to Watch and was awarded an Independent Spirit “Someone to Watch” Award. He has been a Fellow at the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab, a resident at the MacDowell Colony, and is a founding member of New York’s Film Crash.