Caswell Cooke, Jr. -- Executive Producer

TV Pilot to grace the shores of Rhode Island and Southeastern Connecticut

The Wreck Sets Sale

The Wreck” television series was initially the brainchild of Hollywood art director-turned-producer Wayne Holmes, who grew up in Connecticut and Rhode Island and returned to his roots after ten years of service in the motion picture industry. During his tenure in Hollywood, he grew steadily homesick for the people and places he had left behind, and wrote the first draft of the pilot while with the National Lampoon comedy troupe in Santa Monica. 

“The Wreck” series is a one-hour drama-comedy that tells the story of a little brackish bar by the sea on Misquamicut Beach, and the myriad of inhabitants that come and go or reside there and call it home. The dynamic of characters—fishermen, bathing beauties, sirens, surfers, senators, rich and poor—all converge in this carefully detailed little seaside watering hole. 

The beautiful Irish barmaid, Shannon Gurley, with her quick wit and flirtatious diplomacy, is truly the matriarch of The Wreck. She keeps her house in order, which is not easy, considering the bar owner, Robert Jordan, is a gambling, drinking, constantly complaining swamp Yankee who barely gets by as he chats up the tourists with his best pirate voice. 

Co-owner Carl Dittalini, the handsome and gentle-voiced Italian restaurateur from uptown, has divided his interests between this “clamshack,” as his domineering family calls it, and Dittalini’s Ristorante, a stereotypical Italian restaurant smothered in velvet and plastic Greco-Roman statues. Although his restaurant and ties to family are important to Carl, his love of The Wreck and the people in it give him peace and escape. 

Sitting at the bar is Manfred Wurlitzer, German physicist, renowned within his peers who is always seen with an open laptop tapping away at his latest writings on string theory. To his right is the always-present stein of beer. In the tradition of shows like “Northern Exposure”, “The Wreck” has a strong cerebral poetic; the character of Manfred finds The Wreck to be almost the center of the universe, an appropriate place in the cosmos where he feels he is most in tune to the mysteries of space and time… or perhaps he just likes working in a bar on the beach with a beer watching and laughing at the world around him. 

If you don’t look closely as you walk into The Wreck, you might miss perhaps the most intriguing character. The handyman and bar back is a mysterious little guy known only to everyone as Duncan, who on the surface just may seem strange and withdrawn, but who possesses a psychosis he keeps hidden from his coworkers and friends. Duncan sees spirits and manifestations that are not of this earth… or are they? 

Duncan seems in tune with a different realm of existence; however, because these nightmares or fantastic situations and manifestations haunt him unexpectedly, he keeps his world a secret, fearing on one level that nobody would understand. These manifestations may be only seen by Duncan, but they’re shared with the eavesdropping television audience. The gentle 22-year-old wants most of all to just be “normal.” To complicate things, Duncan is secretly smitten with Shannon Gurley. He is the object of fascination and mystery by Manfred, but according to his boss Jordan, he doesn’t work fast enough. 

Parking cars for The Wreck are Venus and Lelu, two bikini-clad beauties. Although they complete one another’s sentences and look stunning, constantly walking around in their minimal beach attire, they are the sirens that call the cars up to the parking lot for ten dollars a pop, and who are the center of the cast of younger people who inhabit the beach surrounding The Wreck. 

And the cast would not be complete without Bruno the lobster fisherman and his two shipmates. Bruno is a big loudmouth who casts his nonsolicited conjecture freely like an obnoxious net over anyone within earshot. His two cronies don’t say much, but there really isn’t much room to respond when Bruno is on a roll. He always reeks like fish and infuriates Shannon to the point of confrontation. 

As the storylines of “The Wreck” intertwine, things get complicated with the existence of the nemesis bar next door, The Bearded Clam, which is full of bikers and modern-day pirates that create the dichotomy of lifestyles that find themselves to be neighbors. Occasionally, from the upper crust of Watch Hill, the bluebloods find their way to The Wreck and add just a touch of class clash. 

“The Wreck” is a one-hour episodic comedy drama that’s full of love, the mysteries of the world, the conflicts of human society, and the opposing principles of everyday people. While entertaining, it helps define and explain to its audience the essence of humanity by showing, from week to week, how these characters find themselves and the meaning of life. 

The star of the show is this little strip of property called The Wreck, made with old wood timbers and filled with a hundred years of memories. It is the center of the universe, both beautiful and unforgiving, and the talent brought together to make “The Wreck” a reality have all converged for this reason. 

The Wreck” carries, within a primetime slot, a message to the people in our society, and with the entertainment value and countless belly laughs exploding throughout each episode; the show will be around for many years and placed in the pantheon of great literary works within the 21st-century medium of fine cinematic quality episodic television. 

For more information on "The Wreck", email Publicist Caswell Cooke at CaswellCookeJr@yahoo.com.

The Caswell Cooke Show

P.O. Box 272
Westerly, Rhode Island 02891
401-322-0356

caswellcookejr@yahoo.com