Christian Elder, Screenwriter: Here’s a great test of writing something or anything for any writer and it’s a simple one.
Film Courage: I have a little bit of a writing challenge we can try and I’m hoping you can help me to make this small bit of information better. I’m going to read it to you so my story is about a young writer trying to break through (whatever breakthrough means). We’ll call him Joe and he’s a good guy from a small town. His parents were hippie artists, not a lot of money but they supported his move to Los Angeles. While writing during the day and very tired at night from these humbling like grunt jobs, Joe meets someone who decides to take him under his wing and it’s a producer who says “I like your work and it needs some polish but I’m going to help you,” and so the young writer Joe is just like “Wow, this is my dream come true.” He calls his parents and they say “We’re so proud of you! We always knew you’d succeed” After about a year, reality sets in for Joe. Joe starts to see that he’s being used and sometimes abused and this producer not only steals Joe’s ideas but he has Joe do a lot of his personal dirty work, like go spy on his tenants, go spy on his wife, pick up his dry cleaning and then he has him writes scathing reviews on a former nemesis and he takes those reviews and uses them as his own because he used to be in a literary world, so he has Joe review some of this other person’s work and then writes these reviews and then publishes them as his own. How can we clean this up? This is a story of a young writer who’s hungry to be in the business but he starts to see, wait a minute, I’m in a bad element right here. I’m in a bad way.
Christian: For those of you who have worked in the agency world, this is the story of an assistant…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Christian Elder is a screenwriter, playwright and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. He has been a finalist for Tribeca All Access, a semi-finalist for the International Thomas Wolfe Playwriting Award, a quarterfinalist for the ScreenCraft Play contest and a quarterfinalist for the Academy Awards Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. His work written for the stage has been recently developed at the Billie Holiday Theatre through the Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop and Urban Stages, both in New York. He has written and directed two short films and is the creator and executive producer of the new crime fiction anthology podcast Hell, California. Elder’s Hell, California, is a hardboiled crime fiction podcast anthology series (co-produced by Jeremy Foley). It takes place in a mysterious, mythical California border town called Hell. Each episode is an original standalone noir story, often about greed, lust and murder. In March 2020, Elder, Foley and a team of six writers formed an online TV writers’ room during the pandemic, resulting in this series.
CONNECT WITH CHRISTIAN ELDER
CONNECT WITH ‘HELL, CALIFORNIA – An Anthology Crime Show’
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