The Missing Scripts Of Gary DeVore: How A Podcast Helped Unearth Lost Work From Hollywood Screenwriter Who Disappeared

Peter White
·4 min read
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Gary DeVore, the screenwriter of movies including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Raw Deal and Back Roads, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Sally Field, went missing in June 1997, sparking a major manhunt.

DeVore’s mysterious disappearance has never been truly solved and there have been a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the subject including one that the CIA may have played a role in whatever happened to him.

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This story is the subject of Witnessed: Fade to Black, an eight-part podcast from Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, in association with Stowaway Entertainment, which premieres its season finale next week. There’s also been an interesting revelation since the show debuted; Gary’s wife Wendy DeVore recently discovered over 50 scripts and treatments, written by DeVore, and Wendy and Stowaway’s Jeff Singer are now working to see if there’s a second life for these scripts.

Titles include Hurricane Chaser, Deadlocked and Hard Rock, which is also known as Bloodshot (see photo above). There’s also a script called Betrayals, about a woman who tries to rescue her kidnapped fiance, who’s in the CIA, which is relevant to DeVore’s story.

While action movies may have gone out of fashion since DeVore’s disappearance, the entrance of Netflix, and other streamers, into the original movie space, has seen this reversed with titles such as Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction, The Gray Man starring Ryan Gosling and Ghosted starring Chris Evans and Ana de Armas.

DeVore went missing in the California desert, on his way home from a writing trip in New Mexico. After a mysterious last call home, in which he tells Wendy that he’s “pumping pure adrenaline”, she begins to suspect foul play.

But this is only the start of a strange story, one that saw Schwarzenegger and Jean Claude Van Damme get involved in the search.

The CIA is front and center of the story, from warnings from British director John Irvin, the man behind the BBC spy series based on John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and then the involvement of Chase Bradon, Tommy Lee Jones’ cousin who worked in the CIA’s Clandestine Service before becoming the agency’s official liaison to the entertainment industry and who consulted on films such as The Bourne Identity and series such as Alias.

Then, there’s the Panama connection; DeVore was writing a script, The Big Steal, set during the U.S. invasion of Panama that might have blown the doors open on what really happened.

Wendy DeVore, who was an actress and had a successful voice over career with films such as Ridley Scott-directed Black Rain, moved out of California after her husband’s disappearance, going between Hawaii and Florida, and put everything into storage before eventually having it shipped back to her, when she discovered the scripts.

She told Deadline, “I’d like to see some of Gary’s [scripts] get made. It’s a legacy for him.”

Singer, who initially worked with Wendy DeVore and brought the story to Campside, told Deadline, “Gary left behind a ton of scripts and Wendy [asked] me if I’d have any interest in trying to sell some of them so my ears perked up. There are definitely some contenders. They were written in the 1980s and 1990s, however, a kick in the face is a kick in the face, no matter what the era is. There’s some things in there that I can get interest in and I’ve already had a little bit of interest.”

Most of the scripts are in the action space, but Singer, who also exec produced Deep Cover: The Drug Wars podcast for Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries, said that there are others that are dramas and one is a western.

Witnessed: Fade to Black is hosted by Campside co-founder Josh Dean and was co-created and co-written by Evan Wright, who has adapted a number of podcasts to TV including Dirty John, Homecoming, and Dr. Death and is the author of Generation Kill, which was turned into a miniseries for HBO. It was also co-created with lead producer Megan Donis, who has produced podcasts including Stiffed and Class of 2020 as well as an an upcoming series about how the FBI’s Cointelpro program targeted the Black Panther Party.

“We do not know what happened to this man,” Wendy DeVore told Deadline. “I think there’s a movie, frankly, in his disappearance.”

Singer added, “Gary would get a kick out of a movie being made all these years later after his disappearance, and I would definitely expect him to find a way to sneak into the premiere.”

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