Zan Gillies – 2023 Pilot Winner

On The Skulls of Giants

In the wake of the Civil War, two social-climbing paleontologists develop a bitter rivalry in search of dinosaur bones, which drives them to the lawless frontier of the American Wild West.

I’ve been lightly obsessed with the rivalry between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh since I first heard about it in an undergrad paleontology class. Their history is simultaneously absurd and tragic – on the one hand a comedy of manners and on the other a Greek tragedy of two men trapped in complementary downward spirals of their own making. My goal with On The Skulls of Giants is to use their conflict as a lens to look at how we got to where we are today: the petty decisions made by a few powerful men nearly two hundred years ago that rippled out through history, and the collateral damage left in the wake of those ripples.

The powerful thing to me about the story of Cope and Marsh is the fact that it’s not just a story about the bitter personal history of two men, but the bitter history of the United States – and ultimately the bitter history of the entire Earth, stretching back more than 250 million years. On The Skulls of Giants is about the narratives that we as humans create to tell all those histories, however recent or long past.

Zan Gillies holds an MFA in Film and Media from American University. His thesis film, Last Strike, won an Audience Award at the Austin Film Festival, after which Zan was selected as one of AFF’s 15 “Screenwriters to Watch” in 2022. He currently produces the docu-series Life in the Heart Land for VPM PBS, which examines problems and solutions facing rural areas.