Temple Gate Films: The Road to Pre-production Insights and Journey
- markrickerby3
- Mar 31
- 3 min read
What I love most about screenwriting is the ability to live in another place and time. In the first project Rick Balentine and I worked on together - a western series originally titled Big Sky (later changed to Harmony because it captured the story better), we often felt like we were walking the streets of the town called Harmony and that we knew all the characters personally. That's what happens when you're extremely close to a story and its characters. They become almost as real as actual friends and family. It has been a hard climb with many lessons learned, but we have never given up on making Harmony, just as its characters never gave up on building and protecting the town of Harmony itself. It will be made. The town of Harmony will be built. The characters will be brought to life by talented actors. Through dogged (some might say "absurd") determination and refusal to quit under any circumstances, we are finally closing in on the prize.
While creating the various stories we have written since Harmony, Rick, Tanille, and I have "lived" in many places - a college campus in 1990s Illinois with a football team and their coaches, in war-torn Afghanistan, on dangerous streets as a homeless man who lost everything in a gang shooting, in an abandoned and magical drive-in theater, and in 1960s North Carolina, racing down moonlit dirt roads with moonshine runners.
A few well-chosen, very talented writers have also taken us on adventures with them. Alan "Stands Alone" Bryant wrote scenes for Harmony featuring Native Americans that taught us a lot about how they really lived. Michele DeRose McShane, Joe Palubinsky, and Steve Alexander also wrote many amazing scenes for Harmony. Jane L. Fitzpatrick literally took us around the world through the eyes of heroic children with her animated series Moon Drake, and her epic screenplay Sacajawea has won countless awards for its unique and accurate portrayal of its title character. And we visited 1930s Chicago and saw another side of Al Capone thanks to screenwriters Barry Ricks and Tim Stafford.
All of these places and the characters who live in them are near and dear to us now. The first world to come to life will be Wilkes County Line. The time is the early 1960s. Jake, the town sheriff, is determined to put an end to the moonshine trade once and for all after his father dies of a heart attack while running "hooch" for the area's most notorious bootlegger. Though he was doing it to save the family racetrack and pay for Jake's little sister's leukemia treatments, Jake still believes his father would be alive if not for the strain on his heart during the police chase. Jake's younger brother, Brody, idolized his father and is determined to follow in his footsteps as a racecar driver. He starts to run moonshine for the same reasons. This leads to Jake chasing the new "mystery driver" through back roads at night, and almost killing him, not knowing he's pursuing his own brother. Then there's Wacky Wally, a zany used car lot owner who is determined to have the land the track stands on for his new mega-lot, and will stop at nothing to get it, including sabotaging moonshiners and their cars. Throw in an insanely fearless bootlegger, his colorful and hilarious group of moonshiners, his scorned and vengeful wife helping Wally sabotage his operation from within, and an equally colorful department of police officers, and you have a fun-filled, hair-raising, hysterical romp in the tradition of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Smokey and the Bandit.
All of us at Temple Gate Films are determined to make movies that are fun again, movies the whole family can watch to forget their problems for an hour or two, not be reminded of them. So as we prepare to start production of Wilkes County Line, we invite you to walk the streets of Wilkesboro, North Carolina with us, and to live in that slow-paced world for a while - that is, until you race down the road with Brody at breakneck speeds, hootin' and hollerin', the wind in your hair, free of this mental briar patch of a world, your every sense fully engaged, your heart pounding with exhilaration. That's what we intend to give you in Wilkes County Line and all our films. We're almost there. We hope you'll join us for the ride!
Mark Rickerby
Founding Partner/Head Writer/Producer
Temple Gate Films, LLC
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