I wrote seven feature length screenplays between the ages of twelve and seventeen. That’s one per year plus an extra one junior year when I got too stoned by myself for the first time. None of these screenplays were ever produced because I both was underage and undertalented (that’s untalented with an extra der). I list them here so my sister’s future children shall be able to see how much cooler their uncle could have been than them.

Deathbringers vol. 1 & 2 – Quentin Tarantino meets Martin Scorsese meets my grandfather died when I was twelve so the second semester of seventh grade was extra angsty. I spread this screenplay around school like a scabies outbreak. My preferred pick for leading lady described her part as “get away from my locker!”

The Carving Man – An unauthorized adaptation of a local Stephen King wannabe’s unpublished novel. Glenn Woods was a middle aged sawmill worker who ran a writer’s workshop for teens. I didn’t ask permission to turn his manuscript into a screenplay until after I completed the first draft. I found his terms, well, queasy. He was banned from the middle school library shortly thereafter.

Look Upwards, Alien – An eccentric teenager discovers the reason he is so unusual is he is straight up an extraterrestrial. Half E.T. and half Thomas Wolfe but the half that is E.T. is better because I never did finish that Thomas Wolfe book. I wrote the main character with an acquaintance in mind. He didn’t appreciate my high concept sci-fi explanation for why he was such a loser.

Dragonriders 2: Dragonridden – Once I realized my previous screenplays were overly ambitious, I crafted a two hundred page fantasy epic about dragons. One of them is evil and one of them is dumb and one of them is just a rip off of that giant dog from NeverEnding Story. I figured I would manage the requisite special effects through stop motion precisely because I had no idea how stop motion worked. The first Dragonriders was a five minute video shot around an inground swimming pool. It starred a float. The sequel would have been infinitely inferior.

All the Secret Agents – Two things happened when I was sixteen: I read Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and I gave into peer pressure again and again and again and really I just liked getting high. That explains this piece of absurdshitty. Two down-on-their-luck fools speak in aphorisms while being menaced by sinister agents from a vaguely fascist police state. There was also a vampire for some reason. It was only forty-six pages long because even sixteen year old Lee knew you cannot masturbate indefinitely without convincing yourself you have herpes. Pretension is an STD no topical ointment can ease.

The Dank Dick – A black and white film noir mystery about a private detective investigating the theft of a French Canadian femme fatale’s secret stash. This screenplay came the closest of the seven to actually being produced but funding was pulled at the last second when my second best friend and cinematographer Jake pointed out that it would be illegal to film a high school junior topless and that fedoras are for fags.

Wound Up Like A Clock – Semi-autobiographical dramedy ala American Graffiti or Avatar. A group of friends drift apart over the summer after graduation, bound for college and adventure and the marina. All to a real Wes Andersony soundtrack we never would have been able to afford. WULAC was to have been filmed from early June to late August but unfortunately my real friends abandoned me much faster than their thinly-veiled fictional counterparts did. I played a lot of Fallout that summer instead.

I never did make a movie. If my twelve-year-old self could see my twenty-seven-year-old self, he would probably say, “So we never grow out of that puffy nipple thing?”

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Lee Blevins lives in Lexington, KY. You can follow him on Twitter @BleeSevens or visit his sad, bare-bones website byleeblevins.com.