Elliott succeeds on his own terms, ticking all the boxes he lays out in his introduction: structure, scenes, immediacy, point of view, and genre. His prose demonstrates a sophisticated awareness of the differences between prose writing and screenwriting. And yet, a feeling of the mechanical, the uninspired, pervades these stories. They are missing something; something that might have arisen from the creative input of directors, actors, cinematographers, and film composers; something for which a few good word choices and nuances of narrative perspective fail to compensate. With the exception of ‘Random Malice’, which is genuinely gripping, it is easy to see why these screenplays remain unproduced.

Elliott tries his best to lower our expectations. ‘They are not even art films,’ he says of his stories. ‘They are entertainments.’ But if these movies-in-print fail to entertain, what do they have left? The page has an unfortunate way of exposing weaknesses that the screen smooths over. Structured writing looks formulaic, gags look cheap, and affectionately recycled cinematic tropes just look like clichés. Elliott’s mode is a kind of Australianised Hollywood, where the plots are still driven by guns, girls, and cash, but the big-budget gloss is patchy. As long as the real Hollywood is around, this kind of work will inevitably look like second best.