Although well known throughout the county for being a maverick as a freeholder, Jersey City’s Bill O’Dea has also led a not-so-secret life as a screenplay writer.
Since the 1980s, O’Dea has put his pen to paper in an effort to make his name as a screenwriter.
Now, after nearly 20 years of creative writing, O’Dea can boast of two projects being brought before the public, One is a DVD and video called A Clown in Babylon, and the other is a television sitcom adapted for the stage called Therapy.
Born in Jersey City’s St. Joseph’s Parish, a few blocks from the County Annex Building where the Freeholder Board meets four times a month, O’Dea moved to the West Side of Jersey City while still a young boy. There he attended St. Aloysius elementary school and later St. Peter’s Prep High School.
While attending St. John’s University, O’Dea took a creative writing course. “I took the course for fun and never thought anything would come of it,” he said.
His career path led him to economics and eventually into redevelopment. His political career had a strong influence on his first screenplay, called Haguesville. Known as a community activist before he became a Jersey City councilman at age 25, this early work dealt with a reformer struggling to take on the political machine. This work was not the minutes of a council or freeholder meeting, but still contained characters O’Dea admitted were modeled after some of the people he saw in everyday life. Haguesville‘s congressman, for instance, bears a strong resemblance to one-time Jersey City Mayor Gerry McCann, and its mayor resembled former Jersey City Mayor Thomas Smith.
“I’ve always been inspired by the people I deal with and that I meet,” O’Dea admitted during an interview this week. “Reality is always more interesting than any fiction.”
Not all of his efforts deal with life as a politician. In the late 1980s, O’Dea wrote a screenplay called Heath Nuts, loosely based upon his experiences in joining a health club in Secaucus where he discovered many lonely people seeking to find “Mister or Miss Right.”
In some ways, his play Therapy combines characters he explored in earlier works, reflecting the oddities he found in life’s theater. Therapy is a sitcom takes a light-hearted look at a dysfunctional group of six people who are trying to find their way into recovery from a variety of compulsive behaviors/addictions. These include a recovering alcoholic, a compulsive shopper, a compulsive gambler, an overeater, a nymphomaniac, and the doctor.
Although O’Dea staged an earlier version of Therapyback in the early 1990s, he then put the work aside until a sitcom class he took last year revived it. When presenting the idea, O’Dea found the instructor a bit skeptical about how long a TV audience would put up with the work.
“He said he thought it would only last one or two episodes,” O’Dea said. “I took that as a challenge.”
“My New Year’s resolution was to write seven episodes,” O’Dea said. “I already wrote ten, and that was in the middle of a campaign.”
O’Dea served as co-campaign manager for Democratic Assembly Candidate Louis Manzo.
O’Dea is looking to write three more episodes and then shop the idea around to the networks.
“The only difficult thing is finding time to sit down and write them,” he said. “I already have the next three outlined. It takes me three full days to write a script and I’m trying to free up time. I’m either going to take a vacation or do them over a couple of long weekends.”
The play Therapy is a combination of the first two-and-a-half episodes of the sitcom, O’Dea said.
Rick Scott, of Bayonne, the play’s producer, and the play’s director, Nick Taylor, originally proposed doing this as a video project as a pilot, then shop it around to HBO, FOX or Spike networks.
Scott came up with the idea of staging Therapy as a way to off-set the costs of shooting the pilot and also to provide a live venue for the networks. O’Dea is hoping to get Bill Cosby or someone in Cosby’s organization to view the play.
The same crew produced the video A Clown in Babylon, which is about a clown/private detective named Frank, who is haunted by the murder of his father, Jingles, and obsessed with seeking revenge on the perpetrators. Jingles was murdered before the eyes of his son, after having an affair with a sexy midget tightrope walker who belonged to a pair of evil clowns. Along with his one-armed, alcoholic juggler compatriot Bob, Frank infiltrates the clown underworld where he finds secret societies, strung-out entertainers and broken lives.
A Clown in Babylon can be purchased at a variety of venues or through the Harvest Moon Films’ web site: http://www.killerclown.com.
Therapy, the play, will be performed on July 23, July 30, and August 6 at 7 p.m. at the Show Nightclub, located at 135 West 41st St. in Manhattan. Tickets can be purchased at the club or locally at Gary’s Sweet Shop, 444 Westside Ave., Jersey City. To reserve seating at the premiere as a VIP, call (347) 752-0039.