The BlueCat Competition: An Interview with Gordy Hoffman
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What inspired you to start BlueCat, what is it, four years ago now? Yes, actually our deadline for the fourth year is coming right up on March 1st. I had the idea to start a screenplay competition for a few years. I thought it would be a interesting venture. As a writer myself, I felt I could start a competition that would address some of the things that bothered me about and reflect what I wanted out of a competition. I've tried to remember that as the years have gone by and BlueCat's evolved. That's why I started out with a low entry fee ($20), and you get to enter up to two screenplays for that fee. I want to try and keep the fee there as long as I can. That's basically how I came up with the competition. Is that one of the things that bothered you about some of the smaller competitions, the pricetag? Well, writers are broke! We don't have any money, we're trying to write, we work stupid jobs to have the time to write, so yeah, that was part of it. When you're broke, $45 can be a lot of money and really prevent you from participating in a competition. Twenty bucks seems to be pretty mellow. That allows us to take care of our adjudication and award and maintenance of the website, things like that. Obviously, at twenty bucks pop this is not a money-making venture in any way shape or form! No, it's not. This is becoming almost a compulsory question because there are so many screenplay contests out there, and I think writers are getting to be more skeptical. Who does the judging? I screen readers in LA, and select them. I have very good readers. We provide feedback- it's not really coverage, coverage is something else, but we provide feedback to all our entrants. One of the problems we've had is not getting back to people quick enough, and that's one of the things we're looking at this year- how to get the feedback back to people on the phone, very quickly. So we're going to really try and troubleshoot that this year. We read all the scripts, which is one thing that I don't necessarily think all… well, I don't hold it against other competitions, I mean, if you read the first twenty pages of a script you can tell, whether or not it has a chance to win. After that, who knows, it might turn into Chinatown but the first twenty pages isn't Chinatown and this script isn't gong to be the winner. But we do read everything, so that we can give feedback. Last year (2000) our winner went on to take fourth place at Slamdance, and this past year (2001) our winner got attention from managers and agents and won another small competition with the same script, so obviously we're on the right track, we're picking strong script, and we want to continue to improve that. I think that's one of the reasons we keep continuing to grow and why we have a good reputation- we're open to our mistakes and recognizing things like we're not getting the feedback to the writers quick enough, it's taking forever and you're already into rewrites and not getting the benefit of the feedback. Right now we're not able to read every script more than once. I go through the feedback and the top marking scripts and from there I select the script that I choose as he winner and that I choose to support. I'd love to be able to have these scripts read twice because well, what if somebody gives really low marks and so it's a script I don't get to see. It'd be great to have two readers because that way you hope nothing's going to fall through the cracks. But where we charge twenty dollars, we're relying on one person's coverage right now and that's just how it is right now. As we get bigger, we should be able to start facilitating reading scripts twice. But I have great readers, I have a lot of faith in them. In our feedback, we always tell people what we like about the script and what we think needs work. That's what we give, that's the format. People want to know- that's why we started doing this- people want to know why they lost. You hear back from a competition and you're like, I didn't win? Well, why? My script's better than the winner, I know it is- even if they have read the winner, I know I felt that way when I was entering competitions. It is good to be able to have a sense of what worked in the script and what didn't, what things really hurt it. I wanted to ask, approximately how many entries did you receive last year? 387. Or 389. That doesn't necessarily reflect the number of scripts, though, because a lot of those entries sent two scripts. We've been getting roughly six hundred scripts. I like the fact that we've grown slowly because it's really allowed me to learn how to do this. We're tracking very high this year, the entries are coming in early and it looks like we're going to be well over that this year. For a small competition, you're nevertheless managing to put together a solid cash prize for the winner. Four thousand dollars, is it, this year? Well, it's five. Some people get a little weird, they get a little skeptical, but the deal is this. We cover our expenses. Our readers aren't getting rich, but… neither are the ones at William Morris! We're not losing any money. So tell me a bit about you. Well, I just won the Waldo Salt screenwiting award at Sundance, and the movie that I wrote up there, Love Liza, got bought by Sony Classics, and is going to be released at the end of the year. Hopefully that will make people more comfortable with sending me their entries. The irony of it is, though, now that my career continues to grow, if anything I'm about as pure about the competition as it's possible to be. I don't need any scripts to make movies, I'm not a producer, I'm not trying to make any money, I'm not ever going to make any money off the competition. You really came into this as a writer. I started this so long ago now that I don't even remember where my mind was when I started it, but I love it. I love it even more now that I have more time to do it. What sort of exposure are you putting together and getting for your winner? For the winner, we really hold their hands, work with them, work with the script. This last year I really used very general language for the finalists, you know, we'll help you, we'll send out query letters on your behalf to agents . And eventually I realized I really need to differentiate what I do directly with the winner versus the finalists. We've changed the language in our prize section. With the finalists, we send out an email and a press release when we announce the winner, and we have their presence on the website with contact information there. And if we choose to support them in other ways, with readings or whatever, then I'm going to do that, but I'm not going to put that down in writing. Because it's like, wait a minute, this isn't fair to the winner. The winner needs to be the winner. We will write letters on their behalf, and I have contacts in LA and I can put the script in front of a lot of people. That's what we do, we work with the writer directly, on rewrites and doing a reading. We really work to get them representation, if they don't have it- whatever they want. If they have an agent, then we'll try to put it in front of producers. The finalists this year, you know it's like I've really been working with the winner, and I rally wish I could do more for them. I think they were led to believe I was going to be doing more. I still owe them some attention and that attention will be paid. We will do initial press and we'll put your name on the website. The finalists get the accolade, and they can run with it on their own, they all got requests to read the scripts. That press release, we want to make that stronger every year. We have a great email list, to lit reps and producers and managers, so the finalists do get some run from it. But I realized- that's how this thing has gone from the very beginning, it's like you realize as you're doing it that this is the way to do this, it's not as effective and it's not fair, so okay, I've go to modify this. The winner is the one we really will get behind.
Sable Jak is a founding member of The Screenplayers. |
