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DENIS MORTENSON

ARTIST & WRITER

About

IT'S ALL THUMBS UP FROM NOW ON.

Bonjour! Welcome to my little online home. Here are examples of my art, video, and writings. If you are interested, let me know.

ART

Like love, it's a many splendored thing.

I've worked as a CD (art and copy), illustrator, animator, storyboard artist, and screenwriter. Here is a small sampling of my work. This site is quite new and evolving. If you have an interest in these works, or my writings, email me at denis.mortenson@gmail.com

Portfolio

MAKE ME AN OFFER I CAN'T REFUSE.

WRITING

I worked in advertising, doing creative writing and design on a variety of accounts. Yes, sort of like Mad Men. I now spend most of my time writing screenplays and novels. My short stories, and excerpts, have been published online, in magazines, and anthologies. My screenplays have placed in many well known, national contests. Thus far, I have written seven novels, eleven feature screenplays, a sitcom, and one play. To read my writings, particularly my screenplays, visit the ISA website listed below. I am quite interested in optioning or selling my screenplays. You never know, something might pique your interest. If you are curious about my work, please contact me via email. I welcome the opportunity to send a query to a publisher who has a keen interest in my work. I am open to freelance assignments. Here is one of my published stories:

https://www.redfez.net/fiction/sleeplessness-somnambulist-in-love-972

Clients

SCREENPLAYS

If you are interested in my screenplays, visit my ISA website at:

https://www.networkisa.org/profile/denis-mortenson

21 Days in Paris – (Surreal Romance, 102 pages)

While in a coma, an art professor in Seattle dreams of meeting his soulmate in Paris. Upon waking from the coma, he goes to Paris to discover whether the woman he loves is real or a fantasy.

The Meteorite – (Sci-fi, 104 pages)

An alien life form, which arrives on a meteorite by the home of an accountant in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1964, makes the accountant unusually popular in order to accomplish its plan of regenerating itself as a human to return to its home.

A Love Down Under – (Romantic Comedy, 110 pages)

While on a quest to find his bliss, Donovan, a Venice, California surf bum, and aspiring painter, finds an Australian woman architect online he was madly in love with years earlier in London, and risks everything to win her love, while reinventing his life Down Under.

Forget You?! – (Comedy, 101 pages)

When David Honeyman takes his family to visit his parents on Christmas, he believes there’s no hope of salvaging his relationship with his father, especially with his father’s Alzheimer’s. But hilarious and horrendous circumstances arise that force him to realize that it’s never too late to say “I love you.”

NOVELS

Summary: Ryan Hollister, a professor of art in Seattle, is in a coma after falling off the roof of his house. His soul travels to Paris, and he wakes in an old apartment in the 19th arrondissement. On the stairs of a métro station, Ryan hears the distorted voices of a nurse and doctor talking about him. While riding a métro train, Ryan meets an attractive young French woman named Aurélie. She drops her purse on the train platform and he returns it to her on a sidewalk above the station. He asks her out to dinner but she rebuffs him. He goes to the Musée d’Orsay, and is intrigued by a painting by Degas, titled Dancer in Her Dressing Room. Suddenly, Degas appears and suggests that Ryan can free the dancer, Colette, from the painting, but Ryan does not believe him. A few days later, after seeing the tourist sites of Paris, Ryan does landscape drawings in the Parc des Butte-Chaumont. While doing sketches he is amazed the landscape appears to transform into an Impressionist painting. Aurélie and girlfriends pass by at some distance and Ryan follows them to the Rosa Bonheur Café. In the café, Ryan tells Aurélie he has seen Degas, but she doubts it, so in order to get a date with her he dares her to meet him at the Musée d’Orsay that night and she agrees. At the museum, near closing time, while Aurélie is in the ladies restroom, Degas appears again, and encourages Ryan to help Colette escape the painting. Colette offers her hand and Ryan helps her step out of the painting. Elated, she dances ballet around the now empty room. Many magical experiences follow, and Aurélie and Ryan gradually fall in love. On the eve of asking her to marry him a bomb goes off and he wakes in a hospital in Seattle, where he has been in a coma for twenty-one days. Convinced Aurélie exists in the real world, he goes to Paris to find her. Frustrated in his search to find Aurélie, he goes to a bar one night, La Fée Verte (the Green Fairy), where a woman in a green dress tries to seduce him. He realizes it is Thursday, the same day he and Aurélie went to the Musée d’Orsay in his dream, but she is not there. On a sidewalk near the museum a woman runs past and he realizes it's Aurélie. Ryan follows her to a métro station, and they meet and tell one another they have seen each other in their dreams.

Summary: Fran Gold, on medication for schizophrenia since she was a child in San Francisco, believes the voice she hears is coming from a race of amphibian aliens named the Vargoolians. Under the control of the voice in her head, Fran marries a man named Mylon, and they move to Eugene, Oregon, where she is told by the Vargoolians to save the rare Oregon Spotted Frogs in their backyard pond. Abducted on a regular basis, and meeting with a Vargoolian who appears as a Danish man she dated in S.F., Fran loses touch with reality and is put in a sanitarium for observation. She escapes and meets a Native American man named Charlie. After a series of events, Fran and Charlie return to her home, where she finds Mylon in bed with a copywriter named Nina. Kept from divorcing Mylon, she becomes pregnant with her third child. The Vargoolians tell her they will return to save she and her family, and part of downtown San Francisco, before the arrival of a planet killing asteroid.

Summary: Alden White's mundane bachelorhood, and work as a career postal worker takes a sudden turn with the arrival of Nora Rossetti, a beautiful young woman, and seasonal employee (and former pole dancer), at the mail processing plant where Alden has worked for the past twenty years. After Nora leaves him, Alden quits USPS and begins making short films with a camera he's bought at an estate sale. This hobby comes into play when he covertly films Nora from a window of the apartment where he temporarily resides. He is beaten up by Nora's new married boyfriend and he mails his pistol to Nora for her protection. Nora uses the gun to coerce her boyfriend and his wife to give her cash. She frames Alden for their murders and Alden is pursued by the police and captured. Nora collects the reward and plans to leave town. Two young women who have kept the film for Alden, turn it into the police. Nora is pursued for questioning and she tries to wreak her revenge and in a struggle on the roof of Alden's apartment building, is shot and killed by detectives. Alden embarks on his new career as an Indie filmmaker, with his first trip outside the country. He goes with the two young women who helped him, to southwest Sicily to record the Mattanza, the annual bluefin tuna harvest.

Summary: From the patio of her hilltop house, Gabriela Diaz sees a beautiful white yacht, the Castilla, piloted from Miami in 1918, by a man named Umberto, shipwreck on Santa isabella, a mysterious island that is hidden by an electrical field. She and Umberto soon fall into a love affair and marry. Soon, Umberto's infidelities begin to destroy the marriage. Umberto drowns in the cerulean waters inside the reef while fishing for lobsters. Gabriela's mother, Luna, conjures Umberto from the grave on the Day of the Dead. Fearful her spell will not work, Luna asks the old postmaster to come visit Gabriela. They walk up the hill, and exhausted, collapse into the wicker chairs by Gabriela's front door. In the morning, Gabriela is happy, and Umberto has disappeared. Luna and Gabriela decide to sell their pastries in the village. Weary from all the work and walking up the long clay road to Gabriela's house, Luna decides she will play Umberto's old piano, which has been salvaged from the wreck of the Castilla. She plays all the songs in the music bench, and finds an enchanted song Umberto has written. She is possessed by the song and it causes everyone in the village to misbehave. The village priest follows the strange notes and he and Luna ride the piano down the hill into the village. It crashes and the pair fly through the open doors of the church and and land in the baptismal basin. The holy water puts out the devilish music. Many other chapters tell the stories of Gabriela, Luna, Umberto, and the villagers.

Summary: Jules Shineman, a fourteen-year-old moderately autistic and unusually gifted half-Indian boy who lives with his mother, Maya, (a hoarder), in Santa Barbara, CA, has been recruited by a man from The Cerulean Corporation because of his budding talent for telekinesis. The government is about to enforce a new law regarding RFID chips as the world transitions to a cashless society. Jules, his friend, Hannah, (the next door neighbor), and John, an old homeless man Maya hired to do her yard work, are opposed to being chipped. John suggests they drive to NYC and stow aboard a Norwegian ship bound for France, where John's so-called college age soulmate is going to study for a year. The three are soon captured and chipped. On his first espionage mission, Jules double-crosses his employers at the corporation and he and Hannah begin working with the French resistance.

Summary: Langley, an eleven year old orphan girl who has bounced from one foster family to the next, is relocated from the rat infested town of Shaftsburg to the desert town of Limbo, which is renowned for its rattlesnakes. After the foster mother steals Langley's hidden cache of money, Langley runs away with two fellow foster children, and the old man who drives the dump trucks for her foster parents. Meanwhile, Langley's mother, who hasn't died but had extended amnesia from being hit on the head by a reference book, when the library she works in slides into one of the many coal tunnels of Shaftsburg, has recovered, remarried, and remembers she has a daughter named Langley. She and her new husband arrive at the foster home. Langley and her friends have followed a map and found the legendary diamond mine of a deceased Australian man named Franklin Wigglemayou, (who founded the town of Shaftsburg). There is a happy reunion, and a statue is erected to Langley in the town of Shaftsburg, due to her efforts to fill the coal tunnels that undergird the town. Langley has discovered that diamonds can still be a girl's best friend,

AWARDS

2023 Semifinalist in the Emerging Screenwriters Contest.

2021 Finalist - Nominee - Paris Film Festival.

2020 Semifinalist in the Capital Fund Screenplay Competition.
2019 Semifinalist in the Los Angeles International Screenplay Awards.
2019 Screenwriting Staffing Contest – 2nd Place.

2019 Quarterfinalist in the WeScreenplay Contest (TV sitcom).
2018 Gold Kahuna Award in the Honolulu Film Awards Screenplay Contest.

2018 Semifinalist in the Byron Bay Film Festival Screenplay Competition.
2017 Quarterfinalist in the Book Pipeline Story Contest.
2016 Quarterfinalist in Bluecat, and the Scriptapalooza screenplay contests.
2015 Quarterfinalist in Cinequest Screenplay Contest.
2012 Seattle Readers - Jewel Box/Rendezvous Theaters, performed three of my scripts.

2010 Finalist in the Oregon Quarterly essay competition (University of Oregon).
2009 Nicholls Fellowship competition – top 20% group.
2008 Kay Snow Fiction Award Winner (Willamette Writers organization).

2007 Quarter-finalist in Slamdance Screenplay Contest.

POUR VOTRE AMUSEMENT

I enjoy making short films. Let's just say I am a writer who could have become a feature film director. Ah well. C'est la vie. For the last decade I have made promo videos for my work. À bientôt!