MovieBytes Interview:
Screenwriter Sean McElhiney

An interview with screenwriter Sean McElhiney regarding the Scriptapalooza Writing Competition.

A: Old news, my win here in the first annual Scriptapalooza back in 1999, but I still think about it and the changes it made in my life quite often. If nothing else, the win was confirmation that I don't suck as much as I sometimes think I do. It gives me balance and has allowed me to keep trying.

I entered a script called "Soul to Keep," about a cryonically suspended (frozen) man who comes back to life to find that his soul has reincarnated and now occupies the body of an 8-year-old girl. It was about science and spirituality and how seemingly contradictory beliefs can co-exist.

A: I entered "Soul to Keep" in the Nicholl Fellowship contest that year and another contest, Writers Network if memory serves me correctly, as well. I didn't show up in either one. I entered Scriptapalooza on a whim. I heard about it from a friend who later said I must have been mistaken and that I must have heard about it from someone else.

I entered at the deadline.

Serendipity.

A: The folks at Scriptapalooza were awesome: My only complaint is that I never got to meet them.

They hustled my script for a year exactly as they said they would and I had great conversations with a number of people I would never have had the opportunity to speak with otherwise.

I still use the software I won.

A: No feedback directly from Scriptapalooza but I did get a ton of feedback from a representative at UTA and from a number of production companies who liked my script: some positive, some negative. Then there were those who liked it and promised, in their way, to like it more if I would send them some money. C'est la Vie.

A: Again, Scriptapalooza was quite active in marketing my script for a full year after my win. I did a re-write under the guidance of a gentleman at UTA. We worked on some major changes, but it never sparked quite enough there. More than once I heard "great first effort, do you have anything else?"

A: I've done a lot of different things in my life, many arts-related and many just to tread water in down phases. I'm a radio announcer now, living in the southwestern corner of New Hampshire: this incarnation falls somewhere between artsy-fartsy and place-holding. At the time of my win, I was working at a dot-com in Pasadena fresh off a stint as the non-psychic host of the Psychic Friends Radio Network. I've written one other script called "What Meets The Eye." That one placed in the top 1000, the peer review phase, of Project Greenlight and I have recently sent a copy off to the Hollywood Screenplay Awards. This one's about a homely, anonymously-famous radio announcer who saves a baby's life and then has to deal with the consequences of being "outed" as a hero.

A: I moved away from LA in 2001 so my wife and I could afford to buy property. Just a fact of life. I'll move back when I sell a script. I actually find I write better away from the city, though. All the cliches about everyone in LA having a script are exagerrated, but they're true to a great extent. True enough to be intimidating and, for me at least, a bit strangulating. I met more people who wrote in the three years I worked at the aforementioned dot-com than I had in the previous three decades of my life. The atmosphere can sometimes be exhilarating, but until someone expresses the desire to produce my work, I see more value in writing in my own voice in the comfort of the country.

A: Project Next is a comedy about a televangelist who predicts the return of Christ and the homeless mute who shows up at the predicted time and place. It's in the early stages.

Posted Friday, April 15, 2005