EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

 

TITLE: Once Upon A Time in San Francisco - The Black Hatchet

SCREENPLAY LENGTH: 118 Pages

GENRE: Historical, Action, Adventure, Thriller, Revenge, Martial Arts

BUDGET: TBD

SHOOT: TBD

​

OVERVIEW

​

Based on real people, true stories and events.

 

Think “John Wick” with a “Fist of Fury” melded with “The Punisher” running amok with two razor sharp hatchets in “Gangs of New York" except it is the debaucherous 1906 Barbary Coast.

​

The Black Hatchet leads the audience on a high-octane-hair-rasing-heart-pounding-action-adventure-historical-thriller featuring eye-popping-blood-squirting-limb-severing “Hatchet-Kung-Fu” combat!

​

** Stan Lee read the graphic novel in its early stage of development and liked the story so much he enthusiastically encouraged Michael to keep crafting and evolving his gripping narrative.​

 

LOGLINES

 

1) Once Upon A Time in San Francisco – The Black Hatchet

 

A ruthless vigilante wielding dual black hatchets of revenge, embarks on a heroic, against-all-odds quest to rescue is kidnapped sister from sex slavery and execute the vile Hatchet Men who took her, littering the back alleys with their bloody body parts.

​

2) Once Upon A Time in China – The Werewolf Monk

 

While the Hatchet is hunting down his parent’s assassins in Shasta, his new wife and sister are “Shanghaied,” so the Hatchet and his Okwanuchu warrior blood brother voyage to Shanghai, unite with their Shaolin Werewolf Monk master, then raid the Green Dragon’s lair and savagely dissect his zombie Terracotta Warriors to free his sister and wife.

​

3) Once Upon A Time in San Francisco – The Green Dragon

 

In an ambush, the Green Dragon snares the Hatchet’s wife and sister as they board a ship, then the mobster high-tails it to San Francisco, so the Monk and Hatchet with pirates bolt back to the charred city and viciously exterminate feral street gangs and Hatchet Men in a race to liberate his sister and wife before they are auctioned to sex peddlers.

​

4) Once Upon A Time in France – Ghosts in the Trenches

 

The Black Hatchet and Okwanuchu ghost warriors, armed with their black hatchets, are called upon by a General, toward the end of WWI, who the Black Hatchet owes his life, to perform an impossible, suicidal rescue of American prisoners held in a secret, underground German bunker surrounded by heavily guarded trenches.

​

SYNOPSIS

 

Malcolm Hutchins, a 26 year-old cowboy fails to stop Tong Hatchet Men from kidnapping his 14 year-old sister, Rose, as they stroll to a cattle auction through the San Francisco Barbary Coast. He barely survives the ambush and is left with a gruesome hatchet gash on his face - a permanent reminder of his catastrophic blunder and festering guilt.

 

While recuperating on his family’s cattle ranch near Mt. Shasta and planning his rescue expedition with his blood brother White Crow, leader of the Okwanuchu and masters of black obsidian hatchet weaponry, his home is incinerated and parents burned alive by highwaymen.

 

Filled with guilt, shame and rage, Malcolm, who learned White Crane Kung Fu from the Werewolf Shaolin Monk Grand Master drifter, rushes back to San Francisco and ferociously hunts for Rose using his dual black blades of justice to mercilessly slaughter Hatchet Men who get in his way.

 

Just as he gets close to finding the Pale Devil, the nasty Shanghai Green Dragon Tong albino enforcer who runs the Barbary Coast gangs – and the villain who engraved the Black Hatchet's face while kidnapping Rose – an 8.3 earthquake pulverizes the metropolis followed by a four day inferno that scorches it to near annihilation.

 

Enlisted to fight the fires, the Black Hatchet's suicidal acts of heroism save trapped victims, however he is swallowed by a collapsing and burning building.

 

Miraculously he survives, plunging into the underground network of pirate tunnels. Bruised and battered, as the Black Hatchet searches for an escape, fate guides him to the Pale Devil, trapped in a hideout with three captured girls he is trafficking to Shanghai with the Werewolf Monk, a wanted outlaw with a bounty on his head.

 

To his elation, Rose is one of the girls. As they face off, the Pale Devil reveals he hired Black Bart to incinerate his house and eliminate the Black Hatchet and his family. An epic, bloody, Hatchet Fu battle ensues as he and the Werewolf Monk brawl the Pale Devil and his Hatchet Men. Just when it seems the Pale Devil has the Black Hatchet dead-to-rights, Rose intervenes and saves her brother.

 

Rose and the Black Hatchet barely escape the subterranean lair as it fills with water that sucks the Werewolf Monk into the savage current. Above ground in a hurricane of flames, the Black Hatchet sets his sights on reuniting with his girlfriend nurse Lorna, but finds what appears to be her corpse in the rubble of her hospital.

 

On horseback, he and Rose race through the maze of scorched ruins to safety where the Black Hatchet performs a dangerous, breathtaking, acrobatic maneuver to save the remaining city from burning to the ground.

 

When he awakens from his coma, the Black Hatchet is in the arms of his girlfriend, who thought he perished in the earthquake and fire. Together with Rose and the weary survivors, for the first time in four days, the sun rises over the smoky, skeletal remains and splashes their charred, optimistic faces.

 

Yet, the Black Hatchet knows his journey is not over, as he must find and bring to justice the Highwaymen who murdered his parents, then go to Shanghai and cut the off the head of the Green Dragon, as the Black Hatchet knows he, his sister and Lorna are not safe as long as the Tong lord is alive.​​