It's not everyday that you get an email from the Academy, but I did yesterday. This is what it said:
For any of you unaware what this is, it means our script HELD is doing AWESOME!!! This would be a grand event in itself if we hadn't just recieved word from another very prestigious screenwriting competition, PAGE Internationl Screening Awards, just the day before.
This is just unbelievable, It has made its way through nearly 8'000 scripts to make it to the quarter-finals of this one, too. Our "little script that could" has just beat out 16'000 other scripts to fight its way up this creative ladder. I couldn't be more excited and it makes me so happy, not because I am patting myself on the back, but out of all the movies I've written this is the one the world needs to see.
Here is the backstory to how it became a screenplay.
This script has a journey of it's own that started 15 years ago.
My writing partner on this project, Susannah, found the seed of this story on a tiny card on the wall of a Holocaust survivors museum 15 years ago. She wrote it down on the back of an envelope (which she eventually lost) but never forgot the story. She relayed it to me one evening in 2010, and I couldn't sleep that night I was so stirred by it. I called her the next day and said,
"We have to write this; this story needs to be out in the world."
We then sat down and outlined the whole thing, creating a bigger, more compelling story around that seed idea and wrote the whole thing in ONE week. I know people say this, but it is true, this story wrote itself. It is one of those stories that has a magic of its own, another worldliness, that makes you sit back and say, "I don't think we wrote that on our own."
I have written seven screenplays but this is the one that always tugs at my heartstrings.
And even though it has been on a five-year journey so far, we know, without a shadow of a doubt, IT WILL GET MADE ONE DAY because it needs to be in the world to inspire us. It is just a matter of time, when.
