I started writing in the beginning of 2015. Originally I had moved to Los Angeles to do standup and acting. There were numerous fun things I was involved in like a Google commercial, I was in a Lifetime movie with Hamburger, and I got to do a lot of auditions; my least favorite being for Staples. The guy running the audition was a dick and very aggressive. I always found auditions to be a lot of fun, although I was always pretty nervous for some reason. I choked pretty hard during a Fruit of the Looms audition, but nothing was worse than doing the Staples audition; I almost walked out of it.
Anyways… I love acting. I’ve always enjoyed doing comedic roles whether it was in a short film, or something I wrote (Cooking with Chett was always my favorite) but I couldn’t stand the audition process, as I feel a lot of actors could agree with. Around this time SAG and AFTRA were merging and had started the “New Media Agreement” which in TL;DR terms meant that if you wrote, produced, directed, and acted in whatever project you had created and had approved by SAG-AFTRA you could potentially add yourself into the union.
To try to bypass years of being a background actor, I went this route with my first true script “Failure by Design” that followed a group of graphic designers in the music industry that let their personal relationships overlap with their work life. I had actors, a director, locations, a budget, and producer all involved. It happened all too quickly, but I felt that was a good sign. One thing after another the project was shut down after multiple issues. The best part of this whole experience was that I found to love writing more than I had ever loved acting or even standup (a fun couple years). What ultimately came from this experience was a slew of ideas from a space comedy about a zombie attack on mars, Saving Barbra, to a teen sitcom about working on a small town beach, Everything’s Swell, to what I’d say I’m most known for at this point, In Tents. I wrote comedy for years, switched to drama, horror, and finally onto the Family / Adventure genre. The Serpent and The Spellbreaker was born.
Logline: A shy young girl becomes the hero in her grandfather’s role-playing adventure game that leads them to a deep connection over their family’s past.
The story follows a young girl Cecylia and her grandfather Jozef spending time at the family’s cabin. The untimely death of Cecylia’s mother has brought them into this currently living situation of Jozef becoming the full guardian. Cecylia’s motives as a child is to avoid boredom, while Jozef is trying to connect with his daughter’s only child.
When Jozef suggests they play an old adventure board game he used to play with this late daughter, he finds himself connecting with Cecylia as he once had with her mother. The game plays much like Dungeons & Dragons where it’s based mostly off of imagination, and luckily enough Cecylia’s imagination is wild and vivid. Jozef tells her the story in the real world, and the audience is transported to what Cecylia is seeing in her imagination, the characters she meets, and the locations she visits.
The Serpent and The Spellbreaker is a feel-good family half-hour show about bonding and closeness while also teaching life lessons from someone with years under their belt the only way he knows how.
I spent a good portion of 2019 getting the script started, but recently revisited it early this year and rewrote for close to 60 days to wrap the final draft. Currently, TS&TS is ranked #5 on Coverfly.com (although the four writing contests it’s currently in should boost its rank) and is In Consideration with Slamdance. I hope to one day be able to share it with everyone!
Be safe.
