Category: Projects

Type: Television Series
Length: 1 Hour
Genre: Period Drama

Sunday Morning in Sin City is a quirky, irreverent drama set in the late 1970s about two twenty-something evangelists who plant their flag in the city most other Christians want nuked: Vegas. Struggling to find a church that’s a good fit for their unconventional, contemporary style of faith, they decide to create their own—and spawn one of the nation’s first megachurches right in the mob’s debaucherous backyard.

After falling victim to a robbery that disrupts their plans of evangelizing through Thailand, our idealistic young newlyweds are forced to put their heads down and go to work in Sin City just to make it all back. 

Led by their vision for a better world and refusal to blindly follow tradition, their stroke of bad luck gradually becomes a streak of serendipity after they plant roots that grow into a towering religious empire. Their inclusive, community-based approach draws people from all corners of the city: hotel workers, gambling addicts, prostitutes, musicians, drag queens, hitmen—the people behind the city’s curtain, all of whom yearn for something more.

This is not a story about corrupt megachurch founders or cult leaders. This is a story about some broken kids and their friends trying to live an authentic life in a city of illusion and image that seems hell-bent on changing them.

Written by Khris Baxter & Michael Warnecke

Pilot and pitch available upon request

Type: Novel and feature
Length: TBD
Genre: Thriller

Prosecutor Audrey Hale has been consumed by rage and obsessed with vengeance ever since her sister Claire’s life was derailed by a group of privileged prep school boys years ago. When the justice system failed to hold those boys accountable, she took matters into her own hands. And she has been patient and methodical in meting out her retribution. 

But now one of those boys is about to be confirmed as the next Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, the most revered and least transparent of America’s political institutions, where he will concentrate his power and cement his legacy for generations to come. And he — along with the shadowy political operatives, billionaire donors, and ideological hardliners behind the ultra-conservative Palatine Society — intends to silence his detractors before they shed light on his sordid past.

Now on the defensive, Audrey must play cat-and-mouse with the judge while trying to finish what she started. Little does she know, however, that she’s about to discover just how deep the rot goes, and that her nemesis may be part of a larger conspiracy hell-bent on shackling not just one woman, but them all.

Original Intent is a multiple-perspective, female-focused conspiracy thriller about a local prosecutor struggling to get justice in a system rigged by and for the men who created it.

Written by Amy R. Martin and Khris Baxter

Novel in development

Book proposal and screen pitch available upon request

Type: Feature
Length: 90 minutes
Genre: Christmas romance

When a bookish science reporter is assigned to write a Christmas feature with her polar opposite, a free-spirited Dutch travel writer, she’s forced to re-examine her long-held belief that opposites never attract.

Written by Amy R. Martin

Script and one-sheet available upon request

Type: Feature
Length: TBD
Genre: Heartfelt comedy

Skateland is a quirky 1980s-era comedy about a teenager with performance anxiety (also known as “stage fright”) who, nearing the end of her freestyle artistic roller skating career, resolves to win Nationals to save her home rink from foreclosure. 

After choking (again) at a critical regional qualifier, she vows to go out on top by competing as the female partner of a pairs team, even though she’s never skated pairs before. Losing this time isn’t an option. Losing this time means losing more than just a gold medal. It means losing the rink that is her second home and the club of skaters who are her second family. She may not be able to land a double axel in competition, but can she land a new pairs partner—and a first at Nationals? 

Skateland is about the meaning of success, how we should approach challenges and setbacks, and what our failures can teach us about the people we’re meant to become.

Written by Amy R. Martin

Script in development

Type: Television series
Length: 1 hour
Genre: Drama

Coal Bridge is a high school sports drama about a young, Black financier who leaves behind a lucrative career in Manhattan for the chance to rebuild a high school wrestling program in an economically depressed, southwestern Virginia coal mining town. 

Drawing on his past experience as a college wrestler and gifted with an innate ability to see value where others don’t, he puts together a team of raw talent that challenges the established, competitive programs in the region, while upending the social order in this insular, Appalachian community already struggling with losses brought on by poverty, mental health, and the opioid crisis. 

Coal Bridge explores the themes of race, class, and personal sacrifice

Written by Jon Pineda & Khris Baxter

Pilot and pitch available upon request

Type: Television series
Length: 30-minutes
Genre: Dark comedy

Big House Designs is a half-hour comedy-drama about a troubled but shrewd political wife/reformed beauty queen who partners with an incarcerated fashion designer to create and launch the most celebrated and inclusive new brand in the fashion industry. 

Armed with an Ivy League education, a flair for business, and powerful connections, and bolstered by her new partner’s singular vision and talent, she aims to prove that, at least in this case, the clothes really do make the woman. 

Working against her are the obstruction of her husband — the newly elected Governor of Texas — and his powerful father; a “law and order” criminal justice bureaucracy that prizes the status quo; and the temperament of her intriguing new partner.

Big House Designs explores race, class, gender, and identity at the crossroads of haute couture and the American federal prison system.

Written by Amy R. Martin & Khris Baxter

Pilot and pitch available upon request