In Development
MILLINOCKET
A Television Series by Sternman Productions.
A disgraced police lieutenant from an old Maine political family reports to the dead end post of Chief of Police in Millinocket to tend to the security concerns of the new tech start up Heuristica Technology and slowly discovers a city full of spies and the far flung outpost of a corporation dedicated to predicting and controlling the future.
The Heuristica Algorithm was first developed in 1869 by mathematicians working for the Bank of New York. It evolved over time, and a version of it was further developed by the RAND Corporation in the 1960’s. MIT then took over one of the many permutations, and it was sold to the multinational corporation NANDOR in the 1980’s.
The Heuristica Algorithm was pioneered in an effort to predict stock market trends. It was successful in a limited fashion, but had many deficits. Early efforts at NANDOR increased the efficiency, but the game changer was the advent of social media. The research became increasingly classified and the algorithm feed began to include factors from search engines and personal profiles, and as it did, the need for secrecy became paramount, and the executives associated with acquiring it for NANDOR began to disappear.
There are five locations in the United States with the surplus power to run the supercomputers that host the algorithm in its final form. Millinocket, which once had the largest paper mill in North America, is one of them. All five of these sites have deep cover operatives who have been in place for years, ever since the first NANDOR executives began to vanish. Millinocket was deemed the least probable of these five locations, so the operatives in place are all B list. Governments and rival corporations all fear the same thing, that the final version of the Heuristica Algorithm not only works, but works so well that it can be used not only to predict consumer trends but direct them. This means the operators of the technology will be able to write the future. It is precisely this drama that plays out in Millinocket.
STERNMAN
A Sternman Productions original series.
A young lobster fisherman returns from four years in prison to find his old way of life in peril from a collusion between big industry and organized crime and must use his new education as a grifter to save his struggling community.
Jimmy Calloway comes from a long line of lobstermen. Families have traditional areas that are handed down generation after generation, and the community is tightly interwoven. Jimmy was the first of his generation to confront the outside forces that threaten their way of life, and was convicted of destruction of property after sinking two corporate vessels and sentenced to four years in prison. He also burned a fuel depot on the same night, and while the charge was dismissed on a technicality, it earned him the wrath of the locals, who viewed it as both rash and dangerous.
He returns to find the battle to preserve their way of life all but lost. Big industry has no regard for traditional boundaries, and their fleets harvest with no concessions to sustainability or the future.A Russian distributor has taken over packaging, shipping and sales, and elements of their organization are corrupt. Crime, vice, and corporate greed have altered everything, and a way of life virtually unchanged for more than a century is on its last legs.
Jimmy is greeted with suspicion on his return, shunned by some, mocked by others. Once, he was the only man brave and reckless enough to take a stand. Now he’s the only man with the criminal know how to turn the tables.
Sternman charts Jimmy Calloway’s calculated rise to power as a criminal mastermind and savior of one of America’s last great traditions, and illustrates the lengths people will go to when their last remaining hope is hope itself.
Lincoln Park
A Television Series by Sternman Productions.
An accomplished New York City police detective relocates to Portland, Maine looking for a quieter life and becomes a rogue operator in a hauntingly beautiful and eccentric city full of old money secrets, timeless passions, and restless skeletons.
The body of a young woman is found in a Portland, Maine scrapyard by a local eccentric at dawn, and on the same day another woman disappears. Police Sergeant David Hill and his partner Detective Margret Savage investigate, and the FBI immediately takes over. Hill is a black homicide detective from New York, a fish out of water, brought to Portland by the politically ambitious Chief of Police. His position as the head of the Crimes Against People Unit, originally sold as after his turbulent time on the NYPD, becomes anything but.
The FBI is after a serial killer, looking to close a case years in the making. The Chief of Police is trying to use the mediapathic terror of the case to close the deal on his bid for the Mayor’s office. Hill stands at a crossroads, with his career on one side, and on the other a missing woman with one week to live.
His choice to oppose everyone and hunt for the missing woman puts him at odds with everyone. His partner resents being left out of the chase, resents being left out of the loop, and in the end resents being used by Hill as a spy on the PPD. Hill’s girlfriend, Kyra, is angry that he’s willing to jeopardize his job and his reason for living in Portland, thus their relationship, and the Chief of Police wants him gone more than ever. He cashes in every favor he has in an effort to uphold his sense of justice, and in the end makes an unexpected ally; the eccentric who found the body in the first place, Adrian Reed, who knows more about Portland than anyone should.
LUNE
A Television Series by Sternman Productions.
The man known as Gelson Verber is 1⁄8th werewolf and has been preying on wealthy criminals for more than a century when he’s detected and blackmailed by a corporation running sophisticated criminology software.
Born somewhere in Missouri more than a century ago and raised in a Pentecostal orphanage, the creature now calling himself Gelson Verber has changed his name countless times. He’s part-werewolf, and makes his living hunting certain kinds of bad men — criminals, rapists, thugs — in an often grotesque parody of the natural order. Verber is clearly suffering from the kinds of things a werewolf would be uniquely vulnerable to in the modern world: the horror of war, drug abuse, and isolation in the rain-drenched environment of Portland, Oregon. He has PTSD, but in a unique way, often flashing back to his time with a regiment in World War II.
His smooth life as a serial killer takes a turn when he falls into the crosshairs of Salt Street, a development corporation running pirated criminology software and Big Data sieves to identify werewolf hybrids, who are then forced into servitude. As he falls deeper and deeper into the trap that has been set for him, his introduction to its evil architect triggers within Verber a string of recollections, conversations with the late werewolf-hybrid, John Jack Bridger. The trap Salt Street has devised for Verber is masterful, but it does have one terrible flaw: you cannot cage someone — or some thing — like Gelson Verber.
Lune is a totally fresh look at noir, at the animal-in-the-man narrative, told through a unique mongrel of antihero/cursed iconoclast, who relishes the role of predator in a system so desperately deserving of one.
Based on the 2016 novel Everything Under The Moon, by JeffJohnson
“A briskly paced, splatter-filled crime novel to delight fans of directors Tarantino and Rodriguez.” —Kirkus