Anthony In the Desert

Anthony Anchor is the spoiled and wasted son of one of America's richest families. While serving as a gung-ho but careless pilot in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he is shot down and tortured in the desert of Iraq. Rather than become broken by his captivity, Anthony awakens to a strange odyssey of the spirit, one marked by visions and voices, and his life is changed forever.

After coming perilously close to death, Anthony is released from Iraq and brought by his father to work at the family's Manhattan bank. But the new Anthony would rather explore the world's mysticism and help the poor, and when it is discovered that he has not only given millions of the bank's money away to those in need, but also his entire trust of 50 million dollars, he is expelled from both his job and his family's palatial estate. Now homeless, dirty, and hungry on the streets, Anthony finds beauty in poverty and even takes perverse delight in being mugged. It is only after he forms a multiracial tribe of urban nomads, who take the names of cities from around the world while gathering the street people into a makeshift settlement on the piers of New York, that Anthony finds the meaningful existence and direction he craves.

Yet the war he cannot remember haunts him even as Anthony must now contend with the harassment of police and thugs alike. It's when the double-edged sword of fame strikes, and the world debates whether Anthony is a saint or insane that the torment weighing him down demands a turn of events that leads him back to Iraq and the climactic unfolding that awaits him during the 2003 American occupation.

Anthony in the Desert was originally a screenplay written and developed in 2000-2003, and which came near to being produced until the 2003 Iraq War made the story commercially unsalable.