Script Competition Highlight: “ScreamCraft” Screenplay Contest

Enjoy screenwriting?  Writing a marketable horror film?  If you’re writing a horror or thriller screenplay, check out this new script competition hosted by our friends at ScreenCraft.org.

1st Annual ScreamCraft Screenplay Competition – only $20 entry for early submissions before end of April.

Judgest panel includes development executives at Lionsgate, Paramount and Sony.  Finalists will be considered for representation by CAA, WME, UTA, Bender Spink, Mosaic, Energy Entertainment, Anonymous Content and many more.

• First place prize is $1,000 cash, in addition to a phone call with a top literary manager and a producer.
• Runner-Up will receive $100 cash and a phone call with a literary manager.
• Top 10 finalists will receive a page of development notes from one of the studio judges.
• Early submission fee is only $20.  After April 30, the submission is $50.  Multiple script entries are welcome.  Final submission deadline is 12pm PST on June 1st 2013.

You can check out more info and enter the contest here.
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”  – Eleanor Roosevelt

Film-making vs. Architecture

The ephemeral art of film, the projected light that illumines stories and ideas, is a tricky art. According to some disgruntled purists, it’s blasted through with egotism, institutions and petty bean-counters. It’s constrained by talk of foreign pre-sales, marketing hooks and investment waterfalls. But ultimately all the intricacies of film-financing and distribution are still at the service of the final human experience of the on-screen magic.  It struck me today that making a film is much like constructing a building.

Just as the pure art of architecture draws us into the wonder of a physical space, a film draws us into the wonder of a human journey.  And as architecture is at the service of some organization, also a film is at the service of some organization – either to advance a cause, make a statement, or to make money.  And just as many bricks, cement, glass, steel and sweaty effort goes into making an architectural wonder, so is the process of making a movie.  It’s an enterprise that encompasses much more than writing and physical production.  The business of financing, marketing and distribution are becoming the real key to getting a film “released” – now that cheaper and better digital cameras have made the means of production so democratized and accessible.  I wonder what the world would look like if the means to making buildings were so accessible and cheap.  Would be have a proliferation of cheap structures and monuments everywhere, but nowhere to put them?

Ozymandias

by Percy Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

In anticipation of AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS

Looking forward to David Lowery’s feature film at Sundance 2013: Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.

A very short film of David’s from 2008:

Wet Dream (DVF 2008) from David Lowery on Vimeo.