- December 4, 2025
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Danette Carter recalled sitting in the living room of her Ocoee home with her husband, A. Wayne Carter, and her son, Justin Carter, watching “Dead Reckoning.”
After working on the screenplay and helping the film become a reality for at least three years, Wayne Carter finally saw his hard work as a screenwriter pay off with “Dead Reckoning” being available on demand in 2020.
Watching his work on the TV screen was a dream come true.
“That meant we made it in Hollywood,” Danette Carter said.
Due to his progressing Lou Gehrig’s disease, Wayne Carter couldn’t attend screenings for “Dead Reckoning,” which was the first and last of Wayne Carter’s screenplays the family saw on the big screen before he died in June 2021.
Danette Carter is honoring her husband’s legacy by taking over Timeless Flights Productions and working to have Wayne Carter’s screenplays turned into low-budget films.
Through Timeless Flights Productions, Danette Carter also wants to spread awareness for Lou Gehrig’s disease, aka Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS.
Ocoee’s Danette Carter and her husband, Wayne Carter, were partners in everything they did from the moment they met at Joe Allen, a restaurant in Hollywood. Danette Carter was 26 at the time, and Wayne Carter was 27. Danette Carter was a waitress and aspiring actress, while Wayne Carter was a screenwriter.
It was love at first sight.
Danette Carter’s roommate had invited Wayne Carter and his friends to their table. After chatting for a bit, the ladies went to the restroom where Danette Carter’s roommates asked which of the men she liked because they had boyfriends.
The answer was easy: Wayne Carter.
Before they left the restaurant, Wayne Carter had asked for Danette Carter’s phone number, and the next day, they were making plans for a first date.
“Everything clicked,” Danette Carter said. “He was everything I could dream of.”
The couple became a team.
They married in 1987 at the little Chapel on the Hill at Pepperdine University overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California.
But despite their Hollywood and movie dreams, the couple knew they didn’t want to start a family in Los Angeles, so they decided to cross the country and move to Cape Coral to be near family in 1991. After their son was born in 1996, they moved to Ocoee in 1997.
“We were so happy,” Danette Carter said. “He did many, many scripts on the side, and he was perfectly content. He could fly back to LA whenever he wanted and then come home to his family. That was our dream.”
No matter where they were in the country, the Carters always were working together to pursue their Hollywood dreams.
Wayne Carter had been pursuing writing since he was 8 years old after discovering his passion at just 5 years old.
“Growing up in Maryland, I was curious about how big, important things like rockets worked, and I wanted to be a scientist by the time I was 11,” Wayne Carter wrote in his book, “Hollywoodaholic, Confessions of a Screenwriter.” “I realized that scientists, when confronted with even the most basic questions about the mysteries of life, like where a thought comes from, did not have the answers. So I decided to become a writer and make them up.”
Danette Carter said she always was in awe watching her husband take an idea he had from something he heard or read and talk to her about “what if” something happened based on that idea.
Any time he had an idea, Wayne Carter went off to a cafe to write — the first step in his creative process. He loved the movement, ambience and energy of a cafe. But when he returned home with the treatment, a one-page summary of a film, he made sure his wife was the first to read it.
“I felt honored, and I was very aware of how sensitive he was, because the creative process is very personal and you really have to dig deep in yourself,” Danette Carter said. “I made sure to keep it playful, and we made sure to say, ‘What if?’ That was so important for a writer.”
One of Wayne Carter’s ideas sprouted from his experience in Venice, Italy, when he was there with his wife for the wedding of Danette Carter’s sister. He took all that he was experiencing and turned it into a screenplay, “Snap Out of It.”
“If he could make me laugh, that was it,” Danette Carter said. “If I laughed out loud reading his treatments or scripts, that was a win.”
There were three times the Carters were sitting in front of producers hoping a screenplay would be greenlit and made for the big screen. Each of those times, they were turned down.
“The most important thing is that we were in this together with the ups and downs, and we knew if we had each other to come home to, we could do it because it wasn’t always going to turn out like we wanted, and we understood that,” Danette Carter said. “Wayne was the eternal optimist. He always said, ‘Don’t worry, I have another script around the corner. I’ll write something. I’ll keep writing.’ He never stopped writing.”
Wayne Carter kept on writing no matter the circumstances.
But in 2015, the couple was blindsided.
Wayne Carter was playing tennis with a neighbor when he fell. He couldn’t feel his left foot.
Danette and Wayne Carter started calling doctors and making appointments. One doctor told him it was a pinched nerve, and he had X-rays taken that resulted in an outpatient laminectomy.
Yet, there was no relief.
Wayne Carter started to use a cane to walk more at ease as doctors continued to try to figure out what was wrong.
One night, Wayne Carter told Danette Carter he wasn’t feeling well. They went to the emergency room. A full-body MRI changed their lives forever.
Doctors found lesions on his spine, but because there weren’t any lesions on his brain or eyes, doctors diagnosed him with transverse myelitis. He didn’t have multiple sclerosis because there would have been at least three lesions.
By 2019, when the couple was watching Justin Carter graduate from UCF, Wayne Carter was in a wheelchair because the numbness went down both of his legs.
In 2020, as the world was turning upside-down outside, the Carters’ world was turning upside-down in a different way in their home. Doctors finally had diagnosed Wayne Carter with Lou Gehrig’s disease over a video appointment.
“They told us exactly what was going to happen and how quickly it was going to advance,” Danette Carter said, holding back tears.
In May 2021, doctors told Danette Carter it was time to call hospice. Wayne Carter would not accept a feeding tube. It was getting close to the end.
Wayne Carter’s last wish was to die in his home holding his wife’s and son’s hands. Although Danette Carter said she was unsure whether she could mentally and emotionally handle it, she knew she had to do it. They were partners until the end.
Wayne Carter died at 10:48 p.m. June 21, 2021, at 66 years old in their longtime Ocoee home, with his wife, son, his son’s fiancee and Danette Carter’s sister at his side.
“In our marriage, we kept our word for everything,” Danette Carter said. “What we said we did, and that doesn’t mean it came easily. … I kept my promise to him, and that, to me, is worth a billion dollars.”
After years of navigating her grief, Danette Carter is ready to jump back into the realm of movies and Hollywood. And she would do it in honor of her husband.
“There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing,” she said. “There’s nothing else I can do. I have my hobbies and interests, but this is the long-term journey for me.”
Not only will she be working on preserving Wayne Carter’s film legacy, but also she wants to spread awareness about ALS. She said her family was caught off-guard by the disease — she and her husband were active for their age. It took years to obtain a correct diagnosis.
“There should be awareness and education and some kind of clarity on how this happened to my husband and how this happens to anybody,” Danette Carter said. “I just want to know why, and I don’t know if I’ll ever know that answer.”
Danette Carter and her son are working to have Timeless Flights Productions, which Wayne Carter left to his wife after his passing, up and running.
She’s learning the ropes of a screenwriter, taking the lessons learned from her time at Wayne Carter’s side and applying them to having his screenplays purchased and made into low-budget movies.
She had become a member of Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, a labor union representing film, television, radio and new media professionals.
Wayne Carter’s “The Mysterious Wonderful” already has an option/purchase agreement with a producer, and Danette Carter is hopeful it will be turned into a movie. She knows it’s possible after seeing “Dead Reckoning” become a reality.
“Wayne and I had a vision of seeing some of his great works on a movie screen,” she said. “We shared that passion, and I want to make it happen.”
