Scared of Scorpions: My Year of Hell in the Holy Land

With his Vegas-made music video Palestine, My Heart playing on the radio in Tunisia, songwriter Chauncey Roberts tours Syria for the first time when his movie camera is stolen in February 2010. After numerous meetings with Damascus police--even writing a song as tribute for the chief's young wife--Roberts is advised by the US Embassy to get out of the country at once. And yet the camera theft has triggered a downward spiral when, tumbling over the brink of disaster, Roberts pushes onward to co-produce the Palestine, My Heart Concert in Bethlehem on June 5, 2010. Then comes the Gaza Flotilla Tragedy, bringing the concert to a halt less than a week before show-time.
Exhausted, Roberts next creates from a Hebron hospital (before scandal hits) a unique TV sitcom, Princess of Palestine, based on a divinely gifted teenage pianist from Bethlehem. "Don't worry about the money!" exclaims his young German co-producer, who suddenly exits during the Arab Spring. Overstaying his Israeli visa by nine months Roberts is inspired by Palestinian children and a scout troop to commence writing a suspense screenplay, Camp Evil, in which Jewish settlers terrorize a Palestinian Boy and Girl Scout camp.
Paranoid. Delusional. Committed to the truth. Meeting Palestinian psychos and talent, Israeli bogies real and imagined, the risky, beer-drinking vagabondish farmboy from West Virginia keeps penning songs and scenes, breaking rules and escaping from landlords until his final escape from the Holy Land...and Israel which says he can never return.

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