2017 First 10 Pages Showcase (formerly First 10 Pages Script Competition)
2017 WINNERS
FLESH AND BLOOD
by Jeffrey Nieves and Emily Eslami
Genre: Science Fiction
Logline: A teenager struggles to hide that he has developed the ability to shape-shift into any person he desires.
From the Writers: “Practice secretly, working within, like a fool, like an idiot.” Few first dates open with Buddhist poetry, but that’s exactly how ours began. For Emily, it was a declaration, “I’m a zen-sitting, poetry-sharing, fearless romantic. Take it or leave it.” She was casting a rather small net, but fortunately, Jeff was smitten by the first stanza. He had his own Buddhist practice, often meditating ten hours a day at secluded monasteries.
Jeff soon discovered Emily was also a TV nerd. She too was obsessed with Seinfeld and Brooklyn 99. As we shared our passion for TV, we realized something else. While we both loved it, we felt it had a problem. Many people, like us, had grown up without seeing faces and perspectives they related to on screen. We wanted to help change that.
As a Puerto Rican, Jeff felt that diverse characters were too often defined solely by their backgrounds. Latinas were saucy vixens. Asian men were nerds. Where were the Latino doctors, like Jeff’s cousin David? The Asian artists like his friend Ava? Jeff wanted to write diverse characters who weren’t defined solely by their backgrounds.
Emily noticed a similar pattern with women. The definition of a “strong female character,” had come to mean a women made of cardboard. She kicked butt without smudging her lipstick. She was never insecure or angry. In fact, she wasn’t a person at all. She was a misguided attempt to apologize for the years women have spent being written off the screen. Emily wanted to create women who could be noble one minute, and petty the next. Real women.
Ultimately, we both believe that characters should be seen as human first. That they shouldn’t be defined by what separates them. We all fall in love. We all fall apart. Perhaps a half-Persian girl and a Puerto-Rican guy would be rarely depicted as TV nerds or Buddhists. But that’s real life. As writing partners, we seek to illuminate the things we share because that’s what brings us together, whether it’s Buddhist poetry or Gilmore Girls, or something far greater.
Contact: vince@chapalamgmt.com
GALAXXON: PEACE OF THE PLANET
by Paul Mahoney
Genre: Animation | Family | Comedy
Logline: In a distant galaxy, ZEEBO and his friend BLOBBY, are drafted. They flee to a strange little blue planet called Earth. Maybe it has the answer for everlasting peace?
Bio: Winner of the 2016 Euroscript Screenwriting Competition in London for the Romantic Comedy – Elvis Town. (Option offer currently under consideration). Finalist of the 2014 Euroscript Screenwriting Competition in London for the Coming of Age Comedy – I can turn men. (Option offer received). Top 100 – for the 2016 Emerging Screenwriters Award (over 1,400 entries) for the Comedy Horror Script – Holiday from Hell. Attended the 2016 London Screenwriters Conference & also 2016 Australian Screenwriters Conference.
Writer Statement: I like to write scripts that make people laugh, cry and most importantly think.
Contact: pmahoney@westnet.com.au
GRANDMA’S COMING TO STAY
by Paul Mahoney
Genre: Comedy | Drama
Logline: Doug’s plans for financial security backfire when his demented mother-in-law Ruby accidentally burns her house down and is forced to live with him and his family.
Bio: Winner of the 2016 Euroscript Screenwriting Competition in London for the Romantic Comedy – Elvis Town. (Option offer currently under consideration). Finalist of the 2014 Euroscript Screenwriting Competition in London for the Coming of Age Comedy – I can turn men. (Option offer received). Top 100 – for the 2016 Emerging Screenwriters Award (over 1,400 entries) for the Comedy Horror Script – Holiday from Hell. Attended the 2016 London Screenwriters Conference & also 2016 Australian Screenwriters Conference.
Writer Statement: I like to write scripts that make people, laugh, cry and most importantly think.
Contact: pmahoney@westnet.com.au
MOTEL
by Jerry Jenae Sampson
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A woman with a violent past tries escaping her demons by hiding out in a motel on a coastal town, but she soon faces disturbing sounds on the other side of the wall that may or may not exist only in her mind.
Writer Statement: I tend to visualize life in script format. I hear the possibility of character dialogue in stranger’s conversations, and I close my eyes and can paint scenes that correspond to the soundtrack of music in the background. Always an avid movie buff, I picked up my first screenplay, Baz Lurhmann’s “Romeo & Juliet”, when I was 12 years old and became obsessed with the ability to see a movie come to life on the page. When I was 18 I took a road trip to Southern California, just me and my typewriter, and wrote my first screenplay. Though it was a decidedly horrible script, I remember little else if not the feeling of completing my own original screenplay. My script “Motel” is based off of a particularly terrifying experience that I had on that solo road trip so long ago, and I am more proud of it’s completion than anything else I’ve done thus far.
Contact: howlnightcrow@gmail.com
THE FOURTH COURIER
by Timothy Jay Smith
Genre: Thriller
Logline: An FBI Agent assigned to Poland helps the new Solidarity government solve a series of grisly murders that lead him into an underworld of drugs and nuclear smuggling.
Bio: Raised crisscrossing America pulling a small green trailer behind the family car, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that saw him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through war zones and Occupied Territories, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.
Tim brings the same energy to his writing that he brought to a distinguished career, and as a result, he has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. He won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the Paris Literary Prize) for his novel, A Vision of Angels. Kirkus Reviews called a second novel, Cooper’s Promise, “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012. Fire on the Island was short-listed for the 2015 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize for unpublished novels. His stage play, How High the Moon, won the prestigious Stanley Drama Award; and his screenplays have won competitions sponsored by the American Screenwriters Association, WriteMovies, Houston WorldFest, Rhode Island International Film Festival, Fresh Voices, StoryPros, and the Hollywood Screenwriting Institute.
Website: http://www.TimothyJaySmith.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TimothyJaySmith
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TimothyJaySmith
VIRGIN KILLERS
by Tannaz Hazemi
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Three teenage brothers from a wealthy pharmaceutical family in LA are killing virgins to create a potent substance. Until middle brother Peter falls in love with one of their victims.
Bio: Tannaz Hazemi was born in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution — and via Sweden, Chicago, Milan and Paris, she made it to Brooklyn in one piece. At 19, she published a book on contemporary music with MTV Italy, then worked as a freelance journalist, and later as on-camera talent for Tele+ and VH1. For five years in France she wrote fiction while closely observing the cultural patterns of diehard Europeans during a financial crisis. Today she writes screenplays and directs shorts.
Hazemi’s most recent short BEFORE THE BOMB was awarded ‘Best Short Film’ by the Young People’s Jury at TIFF Kids / Toronto International Film Festival. It took her to the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at Cannes Film Festival, and it has won 22 awards, including Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress. For the movie she produced an original cover song with singer SoKo. Her scripts have won several screenplay contests, including in 2016: The World Series of Screenwriting, the Genii Awards, and The American Film Award.
She is currently developing a short film series with VICE.
Contact: hazemitannaz@gmail.com
