Winners

I was drawn to this competition because as an east coast inhabitant, I cringe whenever people say that all the best screenplays come from LA. What does Louisiana have over the rest of us? This is an outstanding contest that does not focus specifically on New York subject matter. Just good writing.

Friendly, positive and fantastic at feedback - I would recommend these guys to everyone.

The staff I have interacted with at NY Metro Screenwriting Competition has been fantastic. They are respectful and encouraging. They are truly supporting screenwriters. I would recommend this competition!

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2019 Winners

Grand Prize Winner!

She's Unexpecting By Angela Vaut

Finalists

Perigee Heart by Robert Languedoc

Sideshow Bandit by Marie Wilson

Semi Finalists

Beauty Possessed by Ben Lokey

Nice Trick by Justin Jackson

Katharine to Tesla, Faithfully Yours Written by Natalie Paige Bentley

Honour by Richard Sloggett

Exposed by Sheri Davenport and Lois Norman

The O’Malley by John F. Sarno

Connecting by Tristan McIntosh

The Bliss Killer by LeLe Park

WWJD by Samuel Garza Bernstein

Committed by T.N.D.

Richer than a White Man  by Christine Stevens DeLorenzo

At the Mercy of Faith  by Samuel Lee Taylor

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The following is from an interview with the talented Robert Languedoc, a previous finalist.   

1. What's your background? How long have you been writing?  And what made you choose and or transition into screenwriting?

Formally educated in Engineering and Computer Science, I’ve written technical papers for conferences and symposia for decades. When our first was born, I temporarily left industry to be a stay at home dad. A consummate consumer of movies, I always wanted to write a screenplay. Coupled with the free time I had while on sabbatical from the workforce, I decided to see if I had what it takes. In college I wrote a syndicated humor column, but I hadn’t attempted anything so ambitious as a screenplay. Spurned on by youthful optimism, I wrote my first screenplay after reading an article that detailed the shortage of scripts in Hollywood for aging actors.

2. What screenwriting training have you received? And what were some of your biggest breakthroughs?

I printed out a fifteen page article off the internet explaining the major points of script formatting, then I starting writing my first screenplay. I think formal education in the arts can make you better but can never make you great. I learned this from watching my son play the trumpet. He’s an accomplished horn player who arranges as easily as he plays music. My musical education consisted of learning how to recognize notes on a staff and translate that data to an instrument. I was pretty bad at the guitar until I got worse. My son learned to recognize notes by their sound, and his perfect pitch gives him a very unfair musical advantage. Like other arts, writing screenplays requires something intangible to be effective, and those that have it never seem to experience writer’s block. For them, there’s not enough time in the day to get everything in their head down onto paper.

3. What else have you written? What writing habits work for you?  Do you write in short bursts or long shifts, in the morning or late at night, do you write at coffee shops, at home, or at the office when no one else is looking?

I’ve written three screenplays because that is the limit of entries on many contests. I wrote a family film, a drama and a sci-fi. I recommend writing different genres to demonstrate a breadth of writing ability even though an industry professional once recommended that I perfect a single genre. I disagree. A good veratile writer can make the phonebook compelling. I write in year long bursts when I’m penning a film. It takes about three weeks to produce a first draft with the remaining time being spent listening to others and endlessly tending to the devil’s details. I don’t write everyday even though most authors like to say that they do so “to hone their craft.” I think about what I’m going to write every moment of every day so by the time I sit down with quill and ink, it goes pretty readily. Once I went into my local coffee shop to write because I felt that’s what all good writers do, but they kicked me out after two hours saying that the “free” wifi was not worth a $3.99 cup of joe. I guess I shouldn’t have worn an ascot.

4. What's the title of the script you entered, and what's it about?

Perigee Heart is a sci-fi about the International Space Station being repurposed as a luxury retirement home for Americans as medical research points to the health benefits of low gravity living until a pilot and his uncle begin to question the operation of the facility. It’s a story that couples the future evolution of surveliance technology with an unhealthy dose of paranoia for large corporate operations.

5. Where do you look for inspiration and what inspired you to write this script?

I wrote Perigee Heart one day after I was thinking about the staggering debt the country is in and musing what the future holds for a government too big to fail. In this world of extensive and sometimes flawed data, there seems like an endless amount of inspiration for conflict.

6. Describe your process? Do you outline your story first? Do you use notecards or a beat sheet? Or do you simply sit down and let it flow?

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m going to write. Luckily, my wife is a consummate reader so she acts as my editor. She’s great at evaluating ideas and has come up with key facets in much of my work.

7. What was your experience with our festival? Are you happy with your involvement? What did you like most about your experience? And what could we improve on?

The New York Metropolotian Screenwriting Competition heralded a milestone in my writing career. Selecting my third script as a finalist in the contest allowed me to say that all three of my screenplays had garnished this status. Joseph also provided me with invaluable guidance for the next steps in my literary education by advising me to step back from the contests and to focus more on other things like making pitches. So many industry professionals give such vague advice like saying you need to be “more organically emotionally connected to your work.” Joseph said you need to be involved with this or that which I heeded much to my enlightenment.

8. What are you writing now and what do you plan on writing in the near future?

Currently I’m working on a comedy, the hardest genre by far. I hate when a trailer contains all the big gags in a film. I know advertisements are designed to get people to see a film, but there should be more than five funny scenes to choose from. I want to write a film that is so humorous that the viewing audience collective soil themselves. It’s my dream for theaters to reject my movie on the basis of the mess alone. Recognizing that I didn’t have the skill set to make people laugh for ninety minutes, I embarked on a humor blog posting twice a week for a year. I wanted to work under deadlines while producing a humorous product. I completed the year of blog then continued posting now only on Tuesdays. Blog of One has nearly eighty thousand page views and hundreds of subscribers. The task made me funny on demand and in general has been wonderfully educational. It gave me ample opportunity to write about celebrities, current events, medical procedures and politics.

9. Any advice for those about to dive into their first feature-length screenplay?

First off, listen to as much advice as you can get, but don’t heed nobodies like me who actually haven’t made it. If you have taken a class in screenwriting at a local college and you got an A on your final project which your professor wrote on the title page, “Great Job! You should enter this into a contest,” don’t bother. If that’s the only reason why you have a screenplay, then you’ll probably hate working as a professional screenwriter.

10. Last, but not least, what have been your biggest victories since entering our festival? Any more awards, any representation, any options, connections, new opportunities, and or plans to  move to New York or LA?

Over the past eight years, I’ve racked up eighteen placements in seven different contests with three different scripts. Recently, producer, film business consultant and author, Paula Landry recommended my family film to a production company for which she was conducting a script search. In 2018, Academy member, producer, actor and author Jimmy Hawkins read one of my scripts as a judge for the semifinal round of the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. He referred to the script as having a “good story” with “strong characters” and a “pleasure” to read. Being able to bounce ideas around with an industry professional who worked with Jimmy Stewart  in It’s a Wonderful Life when he was four years old was an unforgettable career moment.