Cynematik • Cyndi Greening

I couldn’t blog yesterday because I had to get my entry for the NYC MMM Screenwriting Contest sent. It had to be sent (postmarked) by July 30, 2005 and has to arrive on August 4, 2005 to be eligible for the competition. It had to conform to proper screenplay format. Those were the mechanical requirements.

Creatively, the screenplay had to be written within the assigned Genre and revolve around the assigned Subject. (In a previous blog I lamented my Genre and Topic: Romantic Comedy about Senior Citizen Dating! The points will be awarded for the STORY (75%) and the LOGLINE (25%). The level of intrigue is the only point of assessment on the logline. My logline: Judith Whitcomb reluctantly agrees to accompany her friends on a Senior Singles Cruise and gets much more than she bargained for.

The Originality, Character Development, Plot Development and Writing are evaluated in the story. Given what I had to work with, I think my screenplay turned out pretty well. If you’d like to give it a read, it’s entitled New Horizons.

I wrote a while back about how sad I was that Anne Bancroft had passed because I’d had a screenplay idea for her. It was called LATE BLOOMERS and it was about older women choosing relationships with other women because of the shortage of men. In my mind, Judith (in the script) is Anne Bancroft, Edie is Eva Marie Saint and Maggie is Mary Steenburgen. Since the goal of the exercise was to see if I could write quickly and conform to what someone else wanted, I’m pretty happy about the experience.