Complete IQ Archives
Taylor Hopkins was the Grand Prize Winner of the 2019
Creative World Awards for his screenplay, Stagecoach Mary, a true story about a hard-drinking, cigar smoking black woman in Montana in 1885, who uses her six shooter and tough as nails attitude to defend a convent of nuns from the perils of the Wild West. (Posted: 11/14/2019)
CineStory Co-Executive Director Carlo Martinelli catches up with the 2018 CineStory Fellowship second place winner, Avishai Weinberger. (Posted: 03/05/2019)
Davia Carter was named a 2018 ScreenCraft Fellowship Winner on the basis of her TV pilot Double Time Dames, a one-hour drama set in the jazz age that tells the story of a brilliant female trumpeter who sheds her life of abusive men and attempts to start an all-female band as an Italian mob tries to stake their claim in her town. (Posted: 11/13/2018)
Georgina Love was named a 2018 ScreenCraft Fellowship Winner for her sci-fi feature Pig, which follows an experimental scientist as he raises a sentient pig as a mirror image of his terminally ill son. When the pig learns his "father's" plans have a sinister bent, he fights to resist the inevitable. (Posted: 11/05/2018)
Brock Newell was named a 2018 ScreenCraft Fellowship Winner for his feature screenplay Ravenous, a fresh take on the cabin in the woods horror genre, about a man who invites his new girlfriend on a camping trip with his friends, only to realize that she's a cannibal who intends to kill them all. Brock graduated from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana with a degree in Creative Writing, and has been living in LA for 10 years by way of Chicago. (Posted: 10/23/2018)
Ever since graduating from film school in 2010, Sean Collins-Smith has wanted to move to Los Angeles to pursue a TV writing career. His goal seemed unobtainable, though, until he won an ISA Fast Track Fellowship on the basis of his pilots End of Life and Lifers Anonymous. As part of his ISA prize package, he scored a week of industry meetings and wound up signing with manager Jewerl Ross of Silent R Management. He'll be moving to Los Angeles in September. (Posted: 06/10/2018)
Troy Anthony Miller shares some thoughts about what it takes to win the Austin Film Festival Script Competition ... twice! (Posted: 05/11/2018)
Are there actually writers out there who enter screenplay competitions thinking they might win? Because I am mostly certainly not that kind of writer. (Posted: 05/07/2018)
Scriptapalooza is one of the longest-running contests on MovieBytes. We caught up with contest founder Mark Andrushko on the occasion of their 20th Anniversary.
(Posted: 11/10/2017)
Check out Heather Hughes inside scoop on how to get the most out of the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Conference. (Posted: 10/19/2017)
Screenwriter Mark Grisar scored a big 2016 contest win when his script Cleaning House was selected as the winner of the London edition of the Table Read My Screenplay Contest. The script has been optioned for production and is scheduled to shoot this spring with Nick Quested attached to direct. (Posted: 03/18/2017)
Colin Dalvit & Andrew Lahmann won the 2016 ScreenCraft Action & Thriller Screenplay Contest with their script The Timbermen, an action-horror hybrid about a desperate father and son who join a group of rough lumberjacks on a dangerous mission in the Washington Territory in 1878, and must then fight to survive ferocious monsters deep in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. (Posted: 02/24/2017)
Mike Thai studied filmmaking at USC, focusing primarily on production, but has now turned to screenwriting, as well. His sci-fi detective thriller 10G was the recent winner of the TrackingB Screenplay Contest. (Posted: 02/11/2017)
Lillian Wang was recently named the Feature Screenplay Winner of the 2016 Diverse Voices Screenplay Competition for her script P.O. Box 1142, a story inspired by true, historical events about a Jewish interrogator stationed in a U.S. Nazi POW camp who learns that she must extract information from the high-ranking Nazi responsible for the death of her parents. (Posted: 01/26/2017)
Craig Peters studied theatre at Stanford and UC Riverside, then moved to Los Angeles and slowly made the transition from acting to writing. His horror screenplay The 49th Day was selected for the prestigious "BloodList", an annual list highlighting the top 13 most well-liked, unproduced horror scripts of the year. The 49th Day was also named the 2016 winner of the ScreenCraft Horror Screenwriting Competition. (Posted: 11/29/2016)
Friends and writing partners Colette Freedman and Brooke Purdy scored an important breakthrough earlier this month when they were named the Grand Prize Winners of the 2016 Creative World Awards for their post-apocalyptic screenplay, The Last Book Store. We caught up with the two prolific writers to ask about their partnership, their process, and their future. (Posted: 09/27/2016)
Jared Iacino is the Vice President of Film and Television Development at Panay Films, a film and television production company whose credits include Wedding Crashers (2005), starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, Van Wilder (2002) starring Ryan Reynolds, and Serendipity (2001), starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale. (Posted: 06/07/2016)
Dear MovieBytes:
A master scene in an action movie may have many quick twists and turns. Example: A car chase. You have a car, a driver, and a road. But if your headings bounce from INT to EXT to CAR, to Road a dozen times in one page, the spec script looks discombobulated. Can you use EXT. / INT. to cover both the external movement of the car and the internal movement of the driver? (Posted: 03/14/2016)
Meet Eric Buchman. By day, he's the script coordinator for the hit NBC show Blindspot, starring Jaimie Alexander and Sullivan Stapleton. By night however, Buckman is the writer of his own show called 45 Wall and dreams of one day hiring his own script coordinator. (Posted: 03/01/2016)
49-year-old David Baugnon grew up in New Orleans, and graduated from Loyola University there as a Communications major. He spent 4 years teaching in Kobe and Osaka, Japan, after college and then moved to New York in 1997. where he makes his living writing, mentoring and teaching screenwriting. He was recently named an International Screenwriters Association Fast Track Fellow for his script, The Messiah Project. (Posted: 02/23/2016)
Last year I submitted my script to the Cinestory Foundation's 2015 Screenwriting Contest at the last minute, on the last day of their Extended Late Deadline. A friend/mentor of mine gave me just the nudge I needed. After reading up on CineStory I did a quick polish of my script and sent it off. A few months later I found out that I had won. (Posted: 02/16/2016)
Stage 32 Happy Writers has partnered with the Writers Assistant Network and over a dozen agencies and management companies to announce an intriguing new three month Fellowship for ten aspiring TV writers. (Posted: 02/01/2016)
Scriptaplooza President Mark Andrushko has a list of do's and don'ts for entering Scriptapalooza Features & Shorts, and other contests, too. (Posted: 01/31/2016)
M.T. wants to know if screenwriting consultants are worth the money. (Posted: 01/26/2016)
Judd Payne has produced or executive produced over fifteen film and television projects including 2012’s hit comedy Bernie, among many others. He also came up with the logline for the latest iteration of the Industry Insider Screenwriting Contest.
(Posted: 01/19/2016)
Matt Misetich started as a freelance reader at Script Pipeline in 2006, and gradually assumed more managerial duties until he eventually became the contest's full-time Director of Development. Prior to joining Script Pipeline, Matt worked at the film distribution company, Alpha Media. (Posted: 01/12/2016)
Months of pain and hard work. Maybe years. That's what it takes to craft a script you're proud of. You know there's something brilliant there. In fact, you're sure of it, so you submit your script to a contest.
And then you don't win. (Posted: 01/05/2016)
For 27-year-old Mark Stasenko, 2015 has been a very good year. First he was named the Grand Prize Winner of the American Zoetrope Screenwriting Competition for his screenplay Continuum, then he won a coveted ScreenCraft Fellowship for his script Losing Touch. We caught up with Mark to discuss his writing and the impact of these contest wins on his fledgling career. (Posted: 12/28/2015)
R.C. wants to know if he should give away his first script for free in order to win attention for his other screenplays. (Posted: 12/26/2015)
It seems like more and more screenwriters are breaking into the industry by being discovered from a contest. From securing managers, getting hired, selling scripts to movies and TV pilots being produced, placing high in a reputable contest could lead to recognition that could jump-start your career. (Posted: 12/15/2015)
After meeting initially at Open Road Films, John Rhodes and Cameron Cubbison founded ScreenCraft in 2012. We caught up with Cameron to discuss ScreenCraft and their 3rd Annual Screenwriting Fellowship, which has a final deadline coming up on January 15th. (Posted: 12/01/2015)
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