THE UNIVERSE: Six screenplays. One American story

The Foundation

In the 1880s, the Bibo brothers, Nathan and Solomon, were Jewish merchants in New Mexico Territory. Solomon Bibo married Acoma Pueblo leader Juana Valle and became governor of Acoma. Nathan ran the trading post. They built something in the desert that their descendants are still building.

Six screenplays. Each stands completely alone. Together they form a multigenerational American epic rooted in the communities that built Southern California, Jewish immigrants, Korean refugees, Black families in South Central, Cahuilla people in the Coachella Valley, Mexican migrants in the High Desert.

The Architecture

Two family lines run through all six films.

The Bernstein line carries the mission. Eli teaches Pueblo children in New Mexico in 1883. His descendants build businesses, open community centers, tutor students, and eventually build houses. The mission mutates across generations but never stops. It ends, for now, with Chelsea Bernstein pouring concrete in Yucca Valley, the great-great-granddaughter of a man who taught arithmetic to children in a territorial trading post.

The Christensen line carries the wound. Bud Christensen rescues a Korean refugee named Eun from a POW camp, brings her home, kills a man to protect his brother, and goes to prison silent. His son Jed spends thirty years teaching Shakespeare to kids who don't want to hear it, burning out slowly, until someone hands him a courthouse address and forces the reckoning his father never had.

The two lines intersect through Robyn Bernstein, Nate's wife, who appears in two films as the quiet moral hinge between the families. Young in Get Along, dying in Keepers, she is the thread that connects the Bernstein mission to the Christensen wound.

Chuy Panza recurs across three films and two decades, Carmen's brother, raised in South Central, who becomes a gang leader in the Coachella Valley and eventually exports his gravity to the High Desert. He is the force that keeps pulling fathers away from their children.

The Screenplays

GET ALONG (Drama) Los Angeles, 1992. The Rodney King verdict. Nate Bernstein runs his grandfather Irving's barbecue business in South Central while trying to open a community tutoring center. As the city burns, Nate must choose between safety and mission, and meets the woman who will become his wife. Flashbacks trace the Bernstein family from Prussia in 1882 through New Mexico to Hyde Park, Los Angeles. The origin story of the universe.

KEEPERS (Drama) San Pedro, 2010s. Burned-out English teacher Jed Christensen, Eun's son and Bud's grandson, takes in his troubled grandson Juan while his dying colleague Robyn Bernstein pushes him toward a courthouse where his father's murder trial transcript has sat for fifty years. A man confronting the silence that shaped him.

REVISION (Psychological Thriller) Santa Barbara, 2010s. Jack Williams, a community college English professor with a damaged voice and no memory of his violent episodes, is quietly investigated for a series of disappearances. His only consistent witness is an elderly Korean woman named Eun Kim, who is writing an unusual love story for his class. Set in the same era as Keepers, two men undone by the same wound, being pulled back by the same kind of grace. The darkest entry point into the universe's central question.

OTHER DUTIES AS ASSIGNED (Drama/Comedy) Inland Empire, present day. Vice Principal Edward Lehrer navigates grief, institutional chaos, and an unexpected relationship with his principal in the year after losing his wife and daughter. The universe's most accessible entry point.

MARIGOLD (Drama) Yucca Valley, present day. Overachieving Chelsea Bernstein, Nate and Robyn's daughter, and Mari, a contractor and teacher whose undocumented student Memo needs a home, join forces to build that home together. Mari isn't the one being saved. She's the one who knows how to build, and Chelsea has to learn that legacy isn't something you inherit, it's something you earn by showing up and doing the work. Chuy's shadow reaches even here, into the High Desert. The culmination of the Bernstein mission across 140 years.

CONCH (Dark Ensemble Comedy) Coachella Valley, present day. Running simultaneously with Marigold, this is the other side of Mari's story, her ex-husband Paul Poule, the reluctant crime boss known as the Conch, losing everything he built when Chuy Panza arrives from Los Angeles to take it. A Cahuilla pool cleaner named Gus, Paul's children, a poker-playing mayor, and a Samoan convenience store owner collide in the low desert as the valley's underground economy implodes. The universe's most kinetic entry, and its most politically urgent voice.

Why Now

Regional American identity is overdue for prestige drama. The High Desert, the Coachella Valley, South Central, San Pedro, these communities have rarely been centered in serious film. This universe does exactly that, across six films, with the connective tissue of a family saga rooted in actual American history, the Bibo brothers of New Mexico Territory, whose descendants are still building something in the desert.

Each film is a standalone greenlight. Together they are something rarer, a coherent American epic from a single authorial vision, built over years, ready to produce.

The Writer

KC Bibo is a Desert-based screenwriter and educator. CONCH won Best Script at the Yucca Valley Film Festival. Marigold is currently in submission on the Black List. All six screenplays are complete.