Notes from Howard Weinstein:

Awesome is a very overused adjective these days. I experienced the real deal on two whale watch cruises off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts some years ago. Watching the black bulk of a 40-foot-long humpback swim casually past a boat that suddenly seems much smaller…watching it flip its broad powerful tail flukes and submerge…and then leap completely out of the water in a twisting playful belly flop… Now that’s awesome!

This epic-scale screenplay is based on the riveting true story of the only rescue of a stranded humpback whale, using contemporary news coverage and the book The Great Whale Rescue as source material.

I got caught up in these events as they happened in 1985, and even in those innocent days before 24/7 news overload, this story made the daily papers and evening news for weeks – and captured the imaginations of people world-wide. Even Wikipedia describes Humphrey as “arguably the most widely publicized humpback whale in history.”

The ending knocks your socks off – just as it really happened. Proof of the story’s continuing power came in 2007, when a mother and calf pair of humpbacks incredibly retraced Humphrey’s path in California – prompting the same media frenzy and overwhelming public interest.

Lost Whale: The Legend of Humphrey was entered in the Motion Picture Academy’s prestigious Nicholl Fellowship screenwriting competition in 2007. The script was evaluated by industry-insider judges, and scored in the top 7 percent of 5000 entries.

Maybe this screenplay will actually become a movie someday. But for now, you can “see” it by reading this script. And it’s a free exclusive download – as Crazy 8 Press’s first-anniversary gift to our readers. Thanks for your support in our first year…and we have more great stories to come!

And now you can read the script by clicking: WHALEScript.Nov2011Crazy8.