Tony Cox Screenplay Competition Semi-Finalists and Jury Announced!
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Congratulations to our Semi-Finalist screenwriters in each category: Feature Film, Short Film, Episodic 60 Minute, and Episodic 30 Minute. Read more about their scripts below, as well as our esteemed jury who will be selecting our winners soon!
TV 30 SCREENPLAY SEMI-FINALISTS
GERTIE by David Crane and Nicole Evans
A half hour dramedy about an L.A. girl with a big dream, a complicated family and a little disability.
SLIGHTLY POWERFUL by Ethan Mermelstein
Back in college, four listless roommates were exposed to radioactive waste. Now they all have powers. Instead of fighting evil or helping others, they use their powers to make their lives slightly more convenient. Now in their mid-30s, they’re still roommates. And they’re still miserable.
DON’T F*%K WITH ESTELLE by Ruth Sinanian
Recently widowed, suddenly broke, ex-showgirl, Estelle Weissenstein, must deal prescription pills to make ends meet – while resurrecting her stage career before she meets her end.
UNCLE SAM AND SONS by Kevin Talley
Eager to prove herself, a naive fireworks stand manager contends with a rogue fire marshal, plummeting sales, and massive fireworks mishap on her first day.
EVERYTHING IS FINE by Alex Vance
Kaye, a 30-something year old sex addict, alcoholic millennial pansexual, who uses her vices to deal with (rather, not deal with) her trauma, wakes up one day to realize she can’t physically have sex.
CURVED by Sagar Vasishtha
Med School flunky Ranbir makes an unexpected alliance as he enters the ping-pong tournament of his life in one final pursuit of life.
TV 60 SCREENPLAY SEMI-FINALISTS
DANGER TO SOCIETY by Molly Clark
A self-doubting, rehab director, an unhinged celebrity chef, and a privileged, parentified twenty-something’s are forced to confront their demons at Canyon Peaks Women’s Rehab.
CREAM CITY by Matt W. Cody and Jeffrey James Keyes
In 1982 Milwaukee, a closeted priest defies his faith and family when he collides with the openly gay owner of a beloved neighborhood gay bar.
BLOTTER by HF Crum
A martial-arts-obsessed teenager finds a library book checked out by several missing students, and believes she’ll be next unless she can locate the boy she’s had a crush on since the third grade.
MURDER PODCAST by GG Hawkins
Investigating a cold case homicide, a reporter's aspirations for journalistic integrity are threatened by obsessive podcast listeners — true crime junkies with a thirst for vengeance.
MURDER-IN-MARSH by Elisabeth Hayward
Relive the 1990 Moreton Murders, as Detective Asher secretly opens her old case files after receiving a mysterious confession from the killer, thirty years later.
HARPOON by Ria Tobaccowala
A taxi-driving bootlegger over her head in a murder cover-up must decide whether to escape her small Alaskan town or find and expose the truth.
SHORT FILM SCREENPLAY SEMI-FINALISTS
DUTY DAY by Sara Albonesi
When 10-year-old Milo rebels against the strict confines imposed by his recluse mother, he discovers that she's been shielding him from a terrifying reality.
PRUNING by Lola Blanc and Jeremy Radin
When a right-wing commentator discovers that her name has been cited in a mass shooter's manifesto, she must contend with the part of herself that still has a conscience.
WHITE LATINO by Nico Casavecchia
A blond latino man attends his low wage job at a garment factory dressed in a business suit. What looks like a humorous personality quirk, turns to be a dark survival strategy when the police raids the factory to crack down on illegal migrants.
ROOM SERVICE by Nieves Garcia Perchin
A romantic engagement celebration in a luxurious and eerie hotel takes a disturbing turn when a terrified fiancée kills her husband-to-be.
PANCAKE SKANK by Sav Rodgers
A mythical anti-heroine and her meek sidekick wreak havoc on a small town when they decide to rob every breakfast joint in this surrealist fantasy.
MOVIE MAGIC WITH CINEMA JOE by Mike Swift
Cinema Joe and his thespian partner Corey Michael Michaels run a movie tour in deep Brooklyn where all the classic films were shot... allegedly.
FEATURE FILM SCREENPLAY SEMI-FINALISTS
HOLLY JOLLY by George Caine
While a mysterious arsonist endangers a sleepy New England town, four world-weary siblings reunite for one last family Christmas in their childhood home.
ELLA & MARILYN by Jon Davis
Ella Fitzgerald's stalled singing career is taken to sudden new heights when Marilyn Monroe campaigns for her to play a previously segregated jazz club, prompting both praise and backlash in pre-Civil Rights era America.
HANGING GARDENS OF THE SEA AND SKY by Zoë Greenbaum
A London therapist and his cosmetics executive wife, bound by their shared musical dreams, face their marriage’s greatest challenge: lies invading their private world.
TREADING THE BOARDS by Jordan Gustafson
An aging wannabe Broadway actor slowly descends into madness after accepting the role of a lifetime aboard a cruise ship.
BEYOND THE PALE by Brendan Hughes
When a successful academic discovers his wife is pregnant, he sneaks off to Ireland to win back the love of his long lost father, a legendary musician and a world class drunk.
SATURDAY NIGHT LESBIAN by Tracie Laymon
After excitedly committing to Mr. Right, a confused, conservative, closeted woman secretly spends Saturday Nights out at the gay bar in an attempt to have sex with a woman for the first time, aided by her new butch guru. But she must learn to speak her truth before she destroys multiple lives and loses the only love she's ever known.
THE RIFT by Michael Yuchen Lei
A smuggler and his estranged son, polarized by their political beliefs, are further divided by a mysterious force that is splintering the world into two competing realities: one where the sun never sets and the other eternally in the dark. To survive they must confront the differences that divide them before they are forever torn apart.
SPOILED ONES by Declan O’Connor
With her estranged mother in contention for a powerful executive position, a young woman's siblings arrive at her house to ensure she doesn't sabotage the family background check.
THE O'HAIRE FAMILY SHIT SHOW by Tim Plaehn
The loving and larger-than-life patriarch of an Irish American family summons all of his children and grandchildren to the Emerald Isle for a family reunion, but when his cynical and single daughter begins flirting with the local hurling star, he must prevent the romance and protect his thirty-three-year-old secret: that the handsome young man is his own bastard son!
NEON KITES by Alan Sim
A man, haunted by guilt and regret, wants to die, but finds it hard to do so as things never seem to go his way. His only son, a boy with an obsession for dead things, is not helping matters. Together, somehow, they will learn to live.
TONY COX SCREENPLAY COMPETITION JURY
CHRISTINA BAZDEKIS is an agent in the motion picture department at UTA, where her focus is on working with writers and directors in both film and television. Over the course of her career Ms. Bazdekis has been involved with bringing forward such work as: DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, PRECIOUS, I AM LOVE, TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER SPY, THE BUTLER, ANOTHER ROUND and THE NIGHT OF.
CONSTANZA and DOMÉNICA CASTRO are sister filmmakers from Mexico City and founders of 271 Films, a creative production company based in Los Angeles. Collectively, their work has garnered over 2 billion views and they’ve produced numerous award-winning films and commercial content that have been featured on The New Yorker Screening Room, Nylon, Vice, HBO, BET Networks, MTV, and Adweek as well as film festivals including Sundance, AFI Fest, and Tribeca Film Festival. They teamed up with Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad Productions and Indeed to produce 10 films by 10 BIPOC directors. The sisters were named the 2021 Nevada Women Filmmakers of the Year. They are drawn to stories that put a spotlight on marginalized communities, question the status quo, push boundaries and provoke, inspire and entertain the audience.
JOHN PATTON FORD earned an MFA from the American Film Institute (AFI). His thesis film, PATROL, premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, which led to an accidental career penning scripts for Disney, Universal, and Sony. His script ROTHCHILD topped the Hollywood Black List in 2014. EMILY THE CRIMINAL is his debut feature as writer/director.
TATIANA SIEGEL joined Rolling Stone earlier this year as a Senior Writer and has already made her mark with a news-breaking deep dive on the rise and fall of Jeff Zucker. Before that, she was the Executive Film Editor at The Hollywood Reporter, where she had covered the business of the entertainment industry since 2003. She has traveled the world on assignment, from small town Mississippi to the Cannes Film Festival.
COLIN WEST is an award-winning writer/director, his credits include LINOLEUM starring Jim Gaffigan, Rhea Seehorn, Michael Ian Black and Tony Shalhoub, which world premiered at SXSW Film Festival in 2022 and is closing NFF 2022, and DOUBLE WALKER co-written by and starring Sylvie Mix, which was released in 2021. He was an Annenberg Graduate MFA Fellow at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.
