Sarcastic Voyage - Radio Plays - Nick Bounty: A Brick Full of Bullets

Private detective Nick Bounty (star of Pinhead Games' popular point-and-click adventures) finds himself mixed up in a deadly game of identity theft!

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Nick Bounty was created by my old friend Mark Darin in the late 1980s. He was originally featured in a series of direct-to-VHS movies Mark wrote and directed at the time. (And by direct-to-VHS, I mean that they were recorded on a camcorder and edited on two VCRs. They were always in VHS format, from start to finish.) Ostensibly, Bounty is a parody of your classic noir detective. Mark eventually used the character in a couple of his extremely successful Pinhead Games point-and-click adventures, 2004's A Case of the Crabs (for which I performed a voice role) and 2005's The Goat in the Grey Fedora (which I actually co-wrote with Mark and Bounty performer/also very old friend, Jason Ellis). Following the success of the latter, I pitched an idea to Mark for a third game, written primarily by me (with input from him and Jason). Mark had since moved on to a more professional career in game-making, so the script got stuck away for awhile. When we began producing radio plays for Sarcastic Voyage in 2013, I thought it would be fun to take another crack at this with Mark co-writing and Jason reprising his role. And it was!
The title "A Brick Full of Bullets" was a joke originally made by Gregory Dickens (who made the fantastic cover art for this and several of our other radio plays), in a "talk like Frank Miller" thread on a comic book message board. It was stolen with his blessing.
Bounty swearing to only take normal cases from now on was a reference to the weirdly animal-centric nature of his previous caseload. Goats, crabs, etc.
Yes, the dame in this story is Miss Terry (mystery). I'm a great word man!
And that's Mark Darin as the cop. Stunt casting!
To be completely honest, I'm not 100% satisfied with my script for this project — largely in ways I'm not going to point out here because I don't feel like drawing you a map to all its flaws. But we did manage a lot of pretty great one-liners, and I can only take 1/3 credit for that. The rest came from Mark and Jason.
Jason Wallace is pretty obviously doing a Peter Lorre impression here, which is fantastic. Especially when he tries to mimic the Baltimore accent. I don't know if that would make anyone else in the world laugh. That one was for me.
In Mark's very first Bounty film, there was a fantastically nonsensical sequence that began with a mysterious call urging Bounty to go to the beekeeper's house. I tried to make this a largely original adventure, but I always loved that bit. I also thought it had real potential for audio comedy and I think we managed to pull that off here.
The whole "Terri looks like a different woman" thing was supposed to be a Vertigo riff, but I don't think I made that incredibly clear.
To this day, I have no idea why hypnotists are so fascinated with making people cluck like chickens. But literally every single one of them is.
Car chases do generally baffle me. What are you supposed to do if you catch the guy? He can just drive off again. He's in a car.
Amanda's doing her best Margaret Dumont here and I kinda want to use this character again someplace.
A lot of people don't really understand what "identity theft" is. This has been the basis for at least two radio plays that I've written now (the other being the Nick and Willikins serial, “Nick of Nick Hall.”)
I went back and re-recorded a few of these roles and remastered the entire thing for Sarcastic Voyage Theatre in 2018. I'm a lot happier with the final product (turns out I'd learned a lot about audio production in the ensuing five years), though I'm still not as happy with the script as I might have been.

Credits

Duncan Boszko - Valet

Mark Boszko - Bartender

Kristy Brannon - Terri

Mark Darin - Cop

Jason Ellis - Nick Bounty

Dave Fields - Citizen

Kara O'Connor - Secretary

Josef Ravenson - Danny

Amanda Smith - Mrs. MacGuffin

Jason Wallace - Hypnotist

Ron “AAlgar” Watt - Guard

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Written by Ron “AAlgar” Watt and Mark Darin, with Jason Ellis

Directed by Ron “AAlgar” Watt