MovieBytes Interview:
Screenwriter Roberta Pieczenik

An interview with screenwriter Roberta Pieczenik regarding the AAA Writing Competition.

A: The script is titled, "Without Consent." It's a VERY dramatic David and Goliath story, a small man fighting against the abuse of power by big government. It's the story of a progressive native American tribal leader in post-WW II America who battles the federal government when he discover that it plans to take his tribe's land to build a dam that will flood eight towns and hundreds of thousands of prime agriculture and grazing land, basically terminating his tribe. It's based on a true story.

A: I entered this contest because I knew it was an important one; the winning scripts are sent out to a list of producers and agents who routinely ask for them. I did enter a variety of other contests during the preceding year. In some of them I got into the quarter-finals. In others I got into the semi-finals. In others I got nowhere. But the AAA Contest received my best script. It was the script I completed after having lived on an Indian reservation for a month, interviewing tribal members who were around at the time of the struggle and the flood, and soaking up the feelings of being on the reservation. The script I wrote after I came back from the reservation (and subsequent revisions) really caught the essence I was missing initially, and I also restructured the story somewhat.

A: Very satisfied. Creative Screenwriting Magazine was great. The director of the contest, Pasha McKenley, and the editor, Bill Donovan, made me feel like I was part of the company's extended family. I went to the Screenwriters Expo in Los Angeles a week ago and received a lot of prizes, and more are on their way. It has been a fantastic experience.

A: I spent about two years, on and off, writing and rewriting and rewriting and! I started with a treatment, that was more like a "scriptment;" a tangle of fully developed scenes and poorly developed paragraphs for scenes. I was following an outline. But during the course of writing about 12 versions of the story I wanted to tell, it was redoing the structure of the script that made the biggest difference. During my last revisions I was constantly reviewing structure. Now when I start to tell a story, nothing gets written for months; not until I think the structure of the tale is correct.

A: I started on Word and tried to copy the format of Final Draft (I was too cheap to buy it, and figured I didn't need it). But my daughter, Sharon Pieczenik, who is a documentary filmmaker, convinced me that it would look unprofessional to send the script to a professional if it wasn't in Final Draft. Soooooo...I bought Final Draft, tried to import Word into it, and spent a good amount of time actually melding the two formats. I'll never do that again!

A: When I was writing the screenplay I'd work on it for weeks at a time, 15 hours a day, never wanting to eat or sleep. I was totally pumped up with adrenalin for the project, and wanted to do nothing else but write and research. After a few weeks of that, and ending at a place I wanted to get to in the script, I'd go back to my normal life for a week, or to go on a vacation. The hardest part was coming back to the script and having to spend hours, if not days, reviewing and rewriting, just to get to where I had initially ended, and be able to go on with the story. Every time I came back to the script I'd start reading it from the beginning, and seeing things that needed to change, and stopping to do it at that point.

A: I never really get writer's block. If I don't hear the words, or see the visuals, it's time to do more research. So I'm always in an activity related to the script. When I do need to physically move, I'll walk around my house, snack too much, stick my head out of the window for some fresh air, but sit down again within a 1/2 hour.

A: This is my first script. I am a sociologist/criminologist and have written books and monographs in my field. My husband, Steve Pieczenik, is a best-selling international novelist of psycho-political thrillers and I have edited his novels. So working with words is not new to me. However, working with visuals, and learning the format of a screenplay, was a formidable task. I read a lot of books, did a lot of revising, and learned to respect the art of screenwriting. Now I can't see a movie without critiquing the script.

A: I live in the Washington, DC area. The script was written all over the country, however, wherever I found private time (from Miami Beach, Florida to Bozeman, Montana). I have no plans to move from DC.

A: I am currently working on a new script, an adaptation of one of my husband's novels. But I suspect that even that will take second place to trying to figure out how to either get my script sold to a producer, or how to produce it myself! It's a great, true story, one of those that needs to been made into a film and seen on the big screen. I felt that way ever since reading about the focal incident of the screenplay in Paul VanDevelder's non-fiction book Coyote Warrior, and feel the same way today. I just hope that having now become a screenplay writer in order to tell this story, I don't also have to become a producer!

Posted Wednesday, October 28, 2009