Murphy writes on the dark side, releases thriller

Posted By By Pam Doyle

Posted 3 months ago

After a 10-year stretch of writing scripts for animated Disney movies, screenwriter Tab Murphy is proud to announce his first suspense thriller movie was released on DVD Oct. 6.

The Canmore resident, formerly from California, has been a screenwriter for 21 years. Fame found him early in his career, as Murphy was nominated for an Academy Award for writing the script for ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ when he was only 27.

“That was a big, giant leap,” Murphy said. “It put me on the map.”

Murphy attended University of Southern California, (USC) film school.

“My love of movies propelled me to want to tell stories,” Murphy said.

But the stories have been softer than usual for the past decade as Murphy was continuously offered work to write movies for Disney, including ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, ‘Tarzan’, ‘Brother Bear’, and ‘Atlantis, the Lost Empire’.

“I was kind of going nuts writing cutesy dialogue for cuddly creatures,” Murphy said. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved it and it was a good job.”

But there is another side of Murphy.

“There was a moment I wanted to write something dark,” Murphy said. “I sat down one weekend and wrote a short story. It just came gushing out. I threw it in a drawer.”

He let a few people read the story.

“They were effectively grossed out,” Murphy said.

He then showed it to a commercial director, who ended up showing the story to actor and director Thomas Jane in 2001.

Jane is the star of the HBO contemporary comedy series ‘Hung’. He was also the lead in the movie ‘The Punisher’ and he was a druggie in ‘Boogie Nights’.

After many long distance telephone calls to California, Murphy and Jane settled on a script, and, several years later, a movie was born. Jane stars in and directs Murphy’s movie, called ‘Dark Country’.

“The genesis of the movie is so outside the norm of how these things happen,” Murphy said. “The story is based on my experience during the time I was living in L.A. and writing. I’d travel through the deserts of California and Utah, to get to places where I went hunting in Montana and Wyoming. I’d find myself driving hundreds of miles through the desert at night. Your mind starts to wander, and the size of your world is reduced to what you can see in your headlights.”

While he was driving, Murphy developed the plot.

“A guy and gal meet quickly in L.A. and get married on impulse,” Murphy said. “They are driving across the desert at night to beat the heat. They get lost. They come around a corner, and low and behold, there is a body lying in the road.”

The couple stop and help the seriously injured man into their car and drive to find him medical help. But the man wakes up, and starts to act strange. He gets into a fight with the driver, and he accidentally gets killed. Now the couple has a problem. For more, be sure to watch the movie.

You can rent it on DVD from Avalanche video, Murphy said.

To view a trailer, go to www.rawstudios.com/darkcountry.

But make sure you aren’t alone…….