2018 Winners and Finalists
The little Screenwriters Competition fosters innovative writing talent. Here we spotlight a few of our promising recipients.
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2018 Winners and Finalists Feature First Place Winner Code: Delete by Anthony Moore In a future where ID theft is big business, a talented young fugitive destined for execution by the feds or assassination by the mafia must build a criminal empire in order to change his fate. Feature Second Place Winner SOLE MATE by Syrie James When the commitment-phobic CEO of an online dating company tests her website, she falls for one of her subscribers, causing her to face her greatest fears. A heart-stopping new rom-com in the vein of TRAINWRECK meets YOU'VE GOT MAIL. Feature Third Place Winner Curse of Chastain by Rickie Castaneda and Megan Hocking A young married couple from New York opts for a fresh start in Louisiana after inheriting an old bayou estate. Paranormal activities haunt the wife and she discovers a dark family secret of a Voodoo Curse against her bloodline, which has plagued her family for over a century. |
Anthony Moore is an African-American screenwriter from Westchester, IL. He is also a veteran, having served in the US Air Force during Desert Storm. With minor success as a published author, he is looking to expand into the film industry. His portfolio includes several contest winning feature length screenplays.
https://www.stage32.com/AnthonyMoore https://filmfreeway.com/anthonymoore https://twitter.com/techrat_0 
SYRIE JAMES is the USA TODAY bestselling author of twelve critically acclaimed novels, and she has sold nearly two dozen scripts to film and television. Almost every one of her books and screenplays is a love story, because romance is her greatest passion. Syrie is also passionate about character development and story structure, which she believes are the foundations of all great films and novels. Syrie’s goal with every project is to create characters who are real-life human beings with goals and motivations, people we understand and sympathize with, and to set them in a storyline that challenges them as they succeed or fail en route to falling in love. Syrie has extensive experience adapting novels for the screen, including ONCE IN A LIFETIME which airs regularly on the Lifetime network. Syrie’s books have been translated into nineteen languages, hit many Best of the Year lists, won the Audie Romance Award, and been designated as Library Journal Editor’s Picks and the Women's National Book Association’s Great Group Read. Syrie lives in Los Angeles and has often written about whirlwind romances, having experienced that thrill herself. Learn more about Syrie at www.syriejames.com.
Rickie Castaneda is a passionate TV and film writer, hailing form the crazy state of Florida, with over ten fifteen produced projects. She graduated from Full Sail University with a degree in Film and TV. After graduation, she moved to LA to pursue screenwriting. In 2007 she produced her first feature, a low-budget horror film, “Bloodlines”, which received modest success on DVD. Look for a copy at your local truck shop. Shortly after, she took a staff writing position with Chesler/Perlmutter, writing primarily for the Hallmark Channel’s juggernaut Countdown for Christmas. Chances are your mom loves her movies. All of her films won the highest rated cable movies in their debut week. This year she and her writing partner, Megan Hocking, are already writing “Christmas in Vermont”, which will debut his holiday season. In addition to crafting holiday romance and magic, Rickie has developed and wrote several non-Hallmark type TV pilots and co-wrote the independent gritty features, Cherry Waves and Garrett Manor; both in pre production and featuring minorities and women as main characters. Rickie continues to expand diversity in entertainment with her continuous work with the WGA Diversity department.
Megan Hocking is a writer from the San Francisco Bay area. She first discovered her passion for writing while scribbling short stories and bad poetry in notebooks throughout her adolescence. She later attended college at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. While taking mostly English and psychology courses she continued to write slightly better short stories, tv pilots and more bad poetry. After graduation she moved to Burbank, CA where she wrote magazine articles and press releases for the Burbank YMCA. Knowing her heart belonged to TV, she took “work” (free food) holding lights, doing background work and writing copy for low budget/no budget projects where she met her writing partner Rickie Castañeda. Megan now writes Hallmark Christmas movies for Chesler/Perlmutter Productions and has “Garrett Manor,” an independent thriller in preproduction. Currently, along with her writing partner Rickie Castaneda she is working on Christmas in Vermont for Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas 2018.
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Finalists
The Drunk Girl by Jason Major
A young man escorts an inebriated woman safely home with some minor trouble along the way.
BAMF: Badass Militant Females by Davia Carter
As a relentless domestic terrorist group runs rampant through a violence-plagued United States, the last remaining members of the government are forced to turn to an unlikely ally: a band of anti-government, female militants.
Miss Princeton by Eve Weston
When Janet Dixon wins the Miss Georgia pageant in 1969, she uses her scholarship to attend Princeton in the first year it goes coed. While her black female roommate is convinced this husband-hunting pageant princess is determined to undermine the coeds' quest for equality, after following a handsome senior into an engineering class, Janet discovers that she actually loves engineering. Now she just has to prove to her classmates, her roommate, and herself that she has what it takes to make it as a Princeton engineer.
Between the Oars by Andrew Manardo
Being the black sheep of his family due to his physical disability, a young man finds strength and acceptance through his universities rowing team.
The Great Lampoozi by Lisa Petersen
A lawyer who is one case away from becoming partner at her prestigious law firm, thereby gaining acceptance into the blue-blooded society for which she’s always longed, gets stuck with a family of circus freaks who ask her to save their circus because they think she’s the long-lost daughter of The Great Lampoozi, a mediocre escape artist.
EmberClip by Jen Troy
When their once trendy dating app loses revenue, Tess and her team try to save their start up by dating their own users. Even though collectively, they don’t have much dating experience. At all.
The Drunk Girl by Jason Major
A young man escorts an inebriated woman safely home with some minor trouble along the way.
BAMF: Badass Militant Females by Davia Carter
As a relentless domestic terrorist group runs rampant through a violence-plagued United States, the last remaining members of the government are forced to turn to an unlikely ally: a band of anti-government, female militants.
Miss Princeton by Eve Weston
When Janet Dixon wins the Miss Georgia pageant in 1969, she uses her scholarship to attend Princeton in the first year it goes coed. While her black female roommate is convinced this husband-hunting pageant princess is determined to undermine the coeds' quest for equality, after following a handsome senior into an engineering class, Janet discovers that she actually loves engineering. Now she just has to prove to her classmates, her roommate, and herself that she has what it takes to make it as a Princeton engineer.
Between the Oars by Andrew Manardo
Being the black sheep of his family due to his physical disability, a young man finds strength and acceptance through his universities rowing team.
The Great Lampoozi by Lisa Petersen
A lawyer who is one case away from becoming partner at her prestigious law firm, thereby gaining acceptance into the blue-blooded society for which she’s always longed, gets stuck with a family of circus freaks who ask her to save their circus because they think she’s the long-lost daughter of The Great Lampoozi, a mediocre escape artist.
EmberClip by Jen Troy
When their once trendy dating app loses revenue, Tess and her team try to save their start up by dating their own users. Even though collectively, they don’t have much dating experience. At all.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Fleet by Ari Brown
The rise of Jim Crow as seen through the career and murder trial of major league baseball's first black player.
Stronghold by Julia Camara
A father and teenage daughter live isolated in the wilderness in a post-apocalyptic world. When an outsider shows up, he disrupts their family dynamic and threatens to end life as they know it.
Manifest Destiny by Deidre Berry
A rebellious teen comes of age in inner city Philadelphia, and resents her mother's return home after serving a lengthy prison sentence.
Numbers Game by Rachanee Kitchel
Extreme A-type but hopelessly single Audrey Yraula decides to jumpstart her love life by joining over 100 dating websites. When her "little black book" (aka spreadsheet) gets published in a national magazine, she must fight to win back her business and the man she loves.
CHRISTIAN OF THIS GALAXY by Pablo E. Aguila
Two teams of ETs visit Earth. While Trump dreams of nuking the good guys whom he takes for terrorists, the real negative Aliens arrive in Miami searching for The Second Scepter-- the key to a total galactic "desconflautation."
The Schlep by Annie Wood
A restless teenager, grieving the death of her mother, searches for answers to life’s ultimate questions from an eighty year old yoga teacher who convinces her to walk from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley to meet the love of her life. The Schlep is a coming of age road trip on foot in the vein of Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” trilogy and the Paul Weitz film, “Grandma.”
Past Due by Wallaine Sarao
A young girl finds out her mom has withdrawn 20 thousand dollars from credit cards to pretend it's her winnings from gambling.
A House Divided by Keith Adams
"New School verses Old School", as Christianity, as we know it, is put to the test; when the last State of the Union votes to pass the HB2 Bill, allowing transgenders the right to use the washroom of their sexual identity.
Shine Your Eyes by Clint Pearson
Betrayal took away her friend, deception took away her lover, and a video stole her dignity. Fighting back was all she had left.
Iron Maidens by John Smith
Mentored by a martial arts master from girlhood, a young woman ends up using her skills to help train a secret society of suffragette bodyguards, eventually becoming the head bodyguard to the movement’s leader. There will be blood.
TRAPPED by Martin Binder
Following a series of mysterious, highly eroticized San Francisco murders, Dr. Roberta Stevenson, a gifted but emotionally and sexually frozen “all business” forensic psychiatrist, court-ordered (under protest) to closely monitor a “person of interest,” comes to find his danger-seeking, hedonistic, beguiling, sexually-charged persona, lifestyle and charisma so irresistibly liberating that she is gradually seduced into first risking her principles, next her career, then her longstanding love relationship, and finally her life.
Fleet by Ari Brown
The rise of Jim Crow as seen through the career and murder trial of major league baseball's first black player.
Stronghold by Julia Camara
A father and teenage daughter live isolated in the wilderness in a post-apocalyptic world. When an outsider shows up, he disrupts their family dynamic and threatens to end life as they know it.
Manifest Destiny by Deidre Berry
A rebellious teen comes of age in inner city Philadelphia, and resents her mother's return home after serving a lengthy prison sentence.
Numbers Game by Rachanee Kitchel
Extreme A-type but hopelessly single Audrey Yraula decides to jumpstart her love life by joining over 100 dating websites. When her "little black book" (aka spreadsheet) gets published in a national magazine, she must fight to win back her business and the man she loves.
CHRISTIAN OF THIS GALAXY by Pablo E. Aguila
Two teams of ETs visit Earth. While Trump dreams of nuking the good guys whom he takes for terrorists, the real negative Aliens arrive in Miami searching for The Second Scepter-- the key to a total galactic "desconflautation."
The Schlep by Annie Wood
A restless teenager, grieving the death of her mother, searches for answers to life’s ultimate questions from an eighty year old yoga teacher who convinces her to walk from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley to meet the love of her life. The Schlep is a coming of age road trip on foot in the vein of Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” trilogy and the Paul Weitz film, “Grandma.”
Past Due by Wallaine Sarao
A young girl finds out her mom has withdrawn 20 thousand dollars from credit cards to pretend it's her winnings from gambling.
A House Divided by Keith Adams
"New School verses Old School", as Christianity, as we know it, is put to the test; when the last State of the Union votes to pass the HB2 Bill, allowing transgenders the right to use the washroom of their sexual identity.
Shine Your Eyes by Clint Pearson
Betrayal took away her friend, deception took away her lover, and a video stole her dignity. Fighting back was all she had left.
Iron Maidens by John Smith
Mentored by a martial arts master from girlhood, a young woman ends up using her skills to help train a secret society of suffragette bodyguards, eventually becoming the head bodyguard to the movement’s leader. There will be blood.
TRAPPED by Martin Binder
Following a series of mysterious, highly eroticized San Francisco murders, Dr. Roberta Stevenson, a gifted but emotionally and sexually frozen “all business” forensic psychiatrist, court-ordered (under protest) to closely monitor a “person of interest,” comes to find his danger-seeking, hedonistic, beguiling, sexually-charged persona, lifestyle and charisma so irresistibly liberating that she is gradually seduced into first risking her principles, next her career, then her longstanding love relationship, and finally her life.