This is Duncan Birmingham's homepage. It is where you go when you want to find out what Duncan is up to without actually having to talk to him. He apologizes for this site's lack of content and coolness--he's working on it.

He has written the screenplays for Low & Inside, a con-job baseball comedy for Marc Platt Productions/ Universal Studios, M.I.L.F, a black comedy about a dangerously high-strung mother-in-law for Craig Gilespie and Thousand Words Productions and Jonesgate, a coming of age story set against the Clinton sex scandal, to be produced by Telltale Films. His spec script, Swingles, is currently in development at Paramount Studios.

His other screenplays include Honey Pot, Mother's Little Helper, Get Dirty, Whatsmatta U. and Bluff's End. Mother's Little Helper placed as a top ten finalist in the Emerson Awards and most recently at The Century City Film Festival . He has worked as a script doctor on over half a dozen different screenplays and is represented by Original Artists and Ragna Nervik. His sketches can be viewed on Funnyordie.com.

He has worked for various publications and newspapers from The Cambridge Chronicle and The Somerville Journal to Rolling Stone and the world wackiest tabloid, The Weekly World News. He's penned a children's book manuscript, Scraps Saves the Zoo, and an unpublished short story collection, The Anatomy of a Jackass. Most recently he was awarded a 2006 Residency with the Frontier Society on Maine's Norton Island.

Also, his work has appeared in Satire,The Beacon Street Review, Oxford Magazine, uber, Strawberry Press, Four Stories, Gayot Media, Facsimilation Magazine, Seismic, Ripcord, Stiffed, Politpunk, Wordriot, Opium, Nerve and never McSweeney's.

His first novel, an LA story about the film industry, eco-terrorism and karaoke titled Hacksville will be available to publishers starting in June. It is currently a semi-finalist for the The James Jones First Novel Fellowship.

Advance Praise for Hacksville:

"Birmingham’s Hollywood, so like the real thing, seizes his hero like a crack addiction – with its promises of fame, its endless hookups, its smorgasboard of low-rent celebrity parties, its tingly cult of the continuous present. His only cure may be to trade this drug for a not entirely wholesome obsession – over a millennial oracle stationed in the woods. Intensely contemporary and stunningly written, HACKSVILLE brims with racy pleasures, and it's tempered, refreshingly, in all the right places, by homeopathic doses of tenderness."

-- John Beckman, author of The Winter Zoo

"An embedded moralist in the everyday of Sodom and Gemorrah before the Big One, Birmingham spares nobody anything.  The satire of Nathaniel West comes to mind, along with the cultural alertness and lyricism of Douglas Coupland.  Birmingham's Hollywood has always been a country of the mind.  It is America, as we live it."

-- DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares, author of The Marriage of Annie May Potts

"The Hollywood novel has been redefined, for better or for worse. Probably for worse, since I wanted to write one myself and now there's no need."

-- Mark Lisanti, editor of Defamer.com

"Hacksville is both a bizarrely madcap satire and a painfully truthful take on how far some will go to simply arrive on the B-list in Hollywood. Duncan Birmingham has written a scathing, witty and wicked novel that just might show what made Sammy run in the first place."  

-- Tod Goldberg, author of Fake Liar Cheat, Living Dead Girl & Simplify

WRITING

PDF Samples:

The Pitch (or Chapter One of My LA novel) - PDF