By: Cara Latham
EAST WINDSOR Todd Parker knows more than anyone how important it is not to take "no" for an answer.
After more than a year of making calls, chasing down film producers, and sometimes being turned down, the 31-year-old township resident is finally getting the chance to see his work come to fruition.
Mr. Parker who works for a marketing company, The Hibbert Group, by day is looking forward to a private screening in Princeton early next month of a short murder mystery movie he wrote called "Claustrophobia."
In the film, four people enter an elevator, but only three make it out and the story is told in flashbacks as a detective is trying to solve the crime, he explained.
Finally being able to see a screenplay that he wrote turned into a film is a first big step for Mr. Parker, who has always been interested in theater and the film industry.
After majoring in English in college, Mr. Parker ended up pursuing a career in sales. It wasn’t until a little more than a year ago, while recovering from back surgery, that he found the time and inspiration to follow his dreams.
"I figured maybe I’d just give it a shot," he said. "If it failed, it failed."
He began writing the screenplay for a feature-length romantic comedy and making phone calls to film producers in Los Angeles, New York and Canada before finding one in Montreal who liked his script. That movie will be worked on this summer, he said.
After he wrote that screenplay, Mr. Parker saw a script request online for a short film screenplay by a producer in New York, and decided to jump at the opportunity.
After she rejected the first script he wrote for her, he got to work again.
Last Halloween night, Mr. Parker was sitting at home, "watching all the ghosts and goblins running up and down the street," while his sons, ages 7 and 3, were asleep and his wife, Pamela, was at work. That’s when he got the idea to write the murder mystery film, "Claustrophobia."
"What’s a very difficult location for a murder mystery? Somewhere where there’s not a lot of space and you’re confined," he said. "I haven’t heard of a lot of murder mysteries that are set in an elevator. (Setting a murder mystery there) could invoke some natural fears."
He said he wrote the screenplay in two hours and forwarded it to the producer, who liked the script, but told him it was missing critical elements of a good detective film. So, he actually contacted two detectives one from Plainsboro and another from Bordentown to help him rework the story.
"It was a lot of fun," he said. The hardest part was that they "were two very different detectives," he said, adding that one was very chatty and friendly and the other was more closed and reluctant.
After reworking the story, Mr. Parker didn’t hear back for several months from the original producer or another who had expressed interest in the film. Then one day last month both called and turned him down, saying the timing wasn’t right.
"It was actually not a very good day at all," he said. "Three days prior to that, I decided I was going to quit smoking."
While it was a setback, Mr. Parker said he learned from his background in sales "not to take no for an answer." But he also learned something else not to put all his eggs in one basket.
Mr. Parker said he avoided putting his films online on Web sites like YouTube.com or MySpace.com or submitting them to contests because "there’s a very high likelihood that it’s going to go places I don’t want it to go," and he would rather "take the extra time and put it in the hands of people I can control and know exactly where it’s going to end up."
However, he realized he may have limited himself too much by only sending it to two people. So he called all of the contacts he had in the film industry and eventually found a producer in Atlanta who loved the idea. Within two weeks, the 25-minute film was produced.
A private screening of the film will be held in Princeton next month for his family and friends.
In the meantime, the film is being submitted to film festivals like Tribeca and Sundance, and Mr. Parker said other opportunities, like sending it to a television network, might open up in the future.
While he continues his full-time marketing job, his dream job continues on the side as he is working on a screenplay for a "historical nonfiction" piece about the underground railroad with his brother-in-law and a film industry friend. The story follows slaves on their journey, and the obstacles and people they encounter along the way.
He says he’d ultimately like to write for a television series similar to "NYPD Blue" or "Law and Order."
Writing, he says, is his favorite way to be creative.
"I really like coming up with the ideas," he said. "When you’re an actor, you’re limited to the words that people give you you can say them in a variety of different ways, but you’re still limited to those words. (When writing), you can use whatever words you want."

