Fury – A Clockpunk Screenplay

Joseph Francis, one of the readers of Da Vinci Automata left a comment about a screenplay that he had written some time on what seems to be a Clockpunk story. We thought that it deserved mention on the main page, so with his permission, here the description.

Back in 1995 I wrote a screenplay called “Fury” which was based in the Rennaissance.

The Ottoman ambassador is murdered during peace treaty negotiations with the Venetians.

Not wishing a war to escalate, The venetians engage their best agent, A Renaissance-era superspy, equipped with the latest fifteenth century high tech espionage gear courtesy of a young Leonardo da Vinci, and task him with solving the murder.

The story escalates and we come to learn that the villain is an angry Byzantine who has stumbled across germ theory and realizes he can retake Contantinople by flooding it with plague rats.

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Post 9/11 I rewrote it to deemphazise the Ottoman/Venetian conflict and made the villain the worlds first mafia don, a man who is inventing the concept of organized crime. The story in this version escalates when he discovers an ancient chinese magnetically powered rail gun called “The Horn of the Ram” that smashed the walls of Jericho (mistranslated in the bible as Joshua blew the ram’s horn and the walls fell)

The hero is still my Renaissance-era ‘James Bond’ figure, although in the later version I introduce Lucrezia Borgia as the villain’s “moll.” I also have Machiavelli as the leader of the Ten of War, who fulfills a role loosely similar to “M” in the Bond franchise.

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I’ve kept this material to myself (other than shopping it around Hollywood) for years, but now that I see it is entering the public conciousness more I see no further reason not to talk about it.