First Look Project winner Debbie Lollie has had her script optioned by NYC-based production company Property of a Gentleman, owned by writer/producer Bernard Urban.
Debbie’s script, The Ex-Man, won the Comedy category of the genre-specific First Look competition in 2014.
Grand Prize Winner
Silent Picture (Reality) by Kristian Berg
Finalists
History/Herstory (Reality/Kids) by Jeff York
Upon Awakening (Mystery/Thriller) by JS Huston
The Guardian Program (Crime/Thriller) by Stephanie Huang
Grand Prize Winner
The Adventures of Columbus Junior in the New New World (Animation) by Ishai Ravid
Finalists
The List (Comedy) by Mike Ross
Oliver Clark and the Future Unknown (Futuristic Adventure) by Nickolas Shepherd and Toni Wynne
The Long Way Home (Period Drama) by Sharon Baker
A somewhat slower month. . . . In true retro fashion, Dreamworks developing an animated Felix the Cat film. Even more retro: Medusa, another animated comedy coming from Sony Pictures. Wasting no time at all, as the news of his release broke less than a month ago, Bowe Bergdahl’s story will become a feature in America’s Last Prisoner of War. Fox Searchlight taking the helm. Will Smith set to star in the as-of-yet untitled NFL concussion project, bringing to light the injuries sustained by ex-football players. And Oliver Stone writing/directing a film about the notorious Edward Snowden.
Other script sales include:
– Featuring an all-female Delta Force, the action/thriller The Athena Project, based on the novel by Brad Thor. MMA fighter Ronda Rousey attached to star.
– A remake of the 1980s thriller War Games is back on track.
– Ken Jeong will star in the political road comedy (yes, that’s a genre now) International Incident.
– Marvel’s latest property to enter the development pipeline: Doctor Strange. Jon Spaihts (Prometheus) writing.
For the lavish, and often-times hopelessly brutal, HBO show Game of Thrones, the pilot is surprisingly rather timid–a word no fan would quickly associate with the most epic television series in recent memory.
The writing is direct and descriptive, lacking unnecessarily flourish, yet maintains a vivid sense of time and place without falling into the common trap of many period (or pseudo-period) pieces: overwritten narrative description and equally overwritten dialogue. Not the case here. It’s a script that’s accessible to the most casual of script readers, a remarkable achievement given what must have been a knee-jerk inclination to glean too much from the George R.R. Martin spectacle.
There are, of course, many ways to successfully pull off a script of this nature, stylistically speaking. But for such a sprawling fantasy/adventure, introducing us to Westeros in the most straightforward way possible without losing the unique energy of the plot is a testament to the series as a whole. Simple in form, complex in its function. Much like the story itself.
