UCLA Festival 2009: New Creative Work

Screenwriters Showcase

Ralph Freud Playhouse at 7:30 PM on Wednesday, June 10, 2009

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Distinguished Achievement in Screenwriting Award: Dustin Lance Black ’96

The UCLA Graduate Screenwriters Association welcomes you to the 15th Annual Screenwriters Showcase. Tonight we celebrate the work of UCLA's Graduate Screenwriting students past and present. It is also our great privilege to honor Dustin Lance Black with our Distinguished Achievement in Screenwriting Award. Black won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for “Milk.”

Portions of seven scripts will be previewed in seven-minute staged excerpts. These scripts were selected by a panel of industry judges in a contest that began in March.

Click here for a complete list of all scripts submitted to Showcase!

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Joseph Hartstone
(928) 699-7775, jchartstone@yahoo.com

Joseph is originally from Flagstaff, Arizona. He received his undergraduate degree from Brandeis University where he majored in Politics. In 2007, he completed UCLA’s Professional Program and was a winner in its screenwriting contest with his script “The Gentleman From Arizona.” That same script was also a finalist in the One-In-Ten Screenplay Contest the following year. Joseph specializes in feature-length political and legal dramas.

Feature Winner: NEW DOGS (drama)
A young Republican political operative switches parties, and gathers a group of old friends to run an unknown Democratic candidate against the most powerful Republican congressman in Washington.

Barbara Curry
(626)793-1469, bacurry@mac.com

Barbara Curry is a third year MFA Screenwriting student. She holds a law degree from Northwestern University School of Law and worked as an Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles prosecuting major violent crimes. She has won many screenwriting awards, including the Diane Thomas Award and previous UCLA Screenwriting Showcases.

Feature Winner: TALK OF THE TOWN (romantic comedy)
A cutthroat tabloid reporter goes undercover as a nanny in order to get the scoop on the impending marriage of a famous Hollywood couple, but ends up falling for the guy and his motherless children.

Ed Goodman
323-481-2214, egoodness@gmail.com

Ed Goodman is a 2nd year screenwriter. Believe it.

Feature Winner: LIMBO LARRY VS. DEATH ET AL (comedy)
Larry Stickler (29) is an uptight accountant who, after dying in a car crash, accidentally eludes Death and becomes a rogue spirit. Larry just wants to return to the land of the living and marry the woman he loves. The only things standing in his way are the Bureaucracy of Heaven, the Laws of The Universe and one pissed off Grim Reaper .

Meg Gifford
(213)924-0858, meggifford@gmail.com

Meg Gifford is a second year MFA screenwriting student having 10 scripts and 4 television specs. A co-written piece was recently contracted with American Trademark pictures and is slated to shoot this fall. A paid rewrite project is underway. When not writing, Meg is teaching chemistry (and wishing she were writing).

Feature Winner: PAINT IT BLACK (black comedy)
Four siblings are being raised to fulfill their parents’ own desires of success, until a hippie neighbor moves in and introduces them to a world their parents never wanted them to see.

Nils Lyew
(310) 210-3816, nils.lyew@gmail.com

Nils Lyew is finishing his third year as an MFA screenwriter. In 2004, he was a winner of the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award for his screenplay Black Box Arithmetic. Born in Costa Rica, he now lives in Los Angeles, and is currently working on his second novel.

Feature Winner: LUTINS (thriller)
With bombs sewn to their chests, two desperate brothers set out to rob a bank. When the heist turns unexpectedly violent, one brother is forced to stop his out-of-control sibling from killing people - delving them deeper into the madness of their childhood trauma as the last minutes of their lives frantically tick away.

Kit Steinkellner
Agent: APA, Melissa Orton (Television)
(805)451-6367, kitbruin@ucla.edu

Steinkellner got her start as a playwright, and in recent years has been produced nationally, with productions Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego as well as several theaters in Los Angeles. Her work has garnered rave reviews from the New York Times, LA Times (“Critic’s Choice”) and LA WEEKLY (“GO!”). Recent writing awards include the 2007 Tim Robbins Award for Playwriting, the Kennedy Center's 2008 National Student Playwriting Award, and a 2008 Sundance Theater Lab Playwriting Grantee Fellowship.

Feature Finalist: BILLY AND THE BOYFRIEND (comic-drama)
The Plumbs, an evangelical Christian family, are shaken to the core when their eldest son Billy is outed. However, it is when matriarch Marion makes the surprising decision to find Billy a boyfriend that the Plumbs’ world really comes unhinged.

Steve Cuden
818-343-4488, sqrlhilpix@usa.net
http://www.stevecuden.com

Steve Cuden co-created the Broadway and international musical hit, Jekyll & Hyde, with noted composer, Frank Wildhorn. He directed the horror-comedy feature, Lucky, for which he won the award for Best Director at the Nodance Film Festival. Lucky also won Best Feature awards at The New York City Horror Film Festival, AKA Shriekfest in L.A., and MicroCineFest in Baltimore. He has written nearly ninety teleplays for TV series such as: X-Men, The Batman, Xiaolin Showdown, Loonatics Unleashed, The Mask, Goof Troop, Bonkers, Quack Pack, Beetlejuice, Iron Man, Savage Dragon, Pink Panther, RoboCop, Extreme Ghostbusters, ExoSquad, and many others.

Feature Finalist: THE MEMORY TOUR (drama)
When the estranged son of a wealthy woman with Alzheimer’s learns he was cut from her will, he takes her on a trip hoping to be restored to the family estate. Instead, he rediscovers the mother he long ago thought he'd lost.

Maureen Johnson
(310) 475-4049, maureenjohnson@verizon.net

Maureen Johnson is a third year screenwriting MFA candidate whose heart will always be at UCLA. She’s a two-time Showcase winner, in 2007 for The Boy From Settignano and in 2008 for Life’s A Drag. She’s earned other awards and contest placements including co-winning this year’s UCLA Sloan Screenwriting Competition and receiving a top 10% notification in the 2008 Nicholl’s Competition. She’s double-tracked in tv writing. A spec script of Two and a Hal Men landed in the top 5% of the 2007 Warners Bros. Workshop Competition. Prior to joining the MFA Program, Maureen was an attorney and law professor. She once made a living delivering balloons.

Feature Finalist: THE WEDDING BELLES (Romantic Comedy)
On the first weekend that same-sex marriages are legalized in California, an uptight father-of-the-bride army colonel learns a lesson in love when he’s forced to share the wedding facilities at San Francisco’s famed Presidio with his gay next-door neighbors.

Ben Taylor
310-266-6955, bentaylor@ucla.edu

Ben Taylor is a graduating UCLA MFA screenwriting student and a professional program graduate. Prior to entering graduate school Ben worked as an Editor at the Hollywood Creative Directory, as a production assistant on a Fox Searchlight short and Animal Planet's Pet Star, and in assistant positions at American Zoetrope and Red Hour Productions. In addition to scripting two television pilots and five screenplays Ben was a popular humor columnist, penning columns on sex and pop culture respectively for the alternative newsweekly, Nashville Scene. Ben earned his Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Tennessee.

TV Winner: LIFERS (TV Pilot)
Recovering alcoholic and head counselor Bob Cooley can’t decide who’s going to drive him back to the sauce more quickly: the steady stream of in-denial patients, or the neurotic reformed junkies he’s got counseling them. Well, mostly reformed.

Doc Pedrolie
310.869.6686, docpedrolie@gmail.com

A former Chicagoan, Screenwriter Doc Pedrolie is in his second year at UCLA's graduate screenwriting program. Doc was the recipient of the 2008 Jack Nicholson Award in Screenwriting and was a finalist for the 2009 Zaki Gordon Fellowship. He is a sometime film critic, published poet, retired mixologist, and avid amateur chef who loves baseball, rock n' roll, true crime novels and american literature equally. He writes for both film and television, mostly thrillers and one-hour dramas.

TV Winner: BOSS (TV Pilot)
A prodigal son, and deep-cover FBI Agent, returns home for the funeral of his murdered best friend, only to learn that his iconic father - the corrupt, long-time mayor of Chicago - ordered the hit, which spurs him to go undercover in his own family to take his father down.

Charlemagne Rafols
(310)714-0864, magnestay@ucla.edu

As a kid, Charlemagne wanted to be a DJ, a rock star, or tall. He delved into radio, mainly as copywriter/soft rock music director, where he evaded the dangers of playing Mariah and Celine back-to-back, but still feels like he’s being followed by Hall and Oates. Years after penning a piano ballad for an 8th-grade crush who loomed almost a foot higher – he performs original tunes at local venues. Now part of UCLA’s TV Showrunner track, Charlemagne – a USC and Act One alum – is on a mission to scribe entertaining works that provoke and inspire, get on a ½ hour staff, and figure out a way to pronounce his name in one syllable.

TV Finalist: OUR GUY SHINY (TV Pilot)
Fulfilling a promise to his wife that he’d finish college, a forty-year-old widower and former fraternity rabble-rouser returns to his alma mater - unbeknownst to his freshman daughter already enrolled there.

Kelly Fullerton
Robyn Meisinger Madhouse Entertainment(310) 587-2200
(714) 333-7970, kfullerton@ucla.edu

Kelly Fullerton is a second year MFA screenwriter. She has her bachelor’s degree in theatre arts with a dual emphasis in acting and directing from UC San Diego. A native of Southern California, she currently works for The Orange County Performing Arts Center. She’s received The Sidney Sheldon Award for her screenplay ALWAYS A BRIDESMAID as well as The Zaki Gordon Award for her script CLARITY.

TV Finalist: MAUDLIN (TV Pilot)
A one-hour supernatural drama about a sarcastic teenager who becomes the world’s youngest fairy godmother. Each week she grants a wish and has to deal with consequences that give new meaning to the phrase: “be careful what you wish for.”