This is a transcript of SYS Podcast Episode 376: With Screenwriter G.O. Parsons .
Ashley: Welcome to Episode #376 of the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. I’m Ashley Scott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger over at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today, I am interviewing GO Parsons who wrote the new Nicholas cage film, Willy’s Wonderland. He’s very candid about how and why he wrote this script. He’s very pragmatic in his approach and he describes how he went about writing it, and then ultimately how he got this film produced. So stay tuned for that interview. SYS’s Six-Figure Screenplay contest is open for submissions, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/contest. The regular deadline is May 31st, after that, it goes up by $10. So if your script is ready, definitely submit now before the final deadline.
We’re looking for low budget shorts and features. I’m defining low-budget as less than six figures, in other words, the less than USD 1 million. We’ve got lots of industry judges reading the scripts in the later rounds. We’re giving away thousands in cash and prizes. I’m going to have last year’s contest winner, Richard Pearce, who wrote a screenplay called Friend Request on the podcast in a couple of weeks. One of our industry judges, Ted Campbell, who is actually returning this year as an industry judge, he found the script through the contest last year. He really liked Richard’s scripts, took it to his contest. The script was optioned earlier this year and they actually just wrapped principal photography. So they’re now in post-production. So the film actually did get produced. So it’s a really great success story obviously for the contest, but more importantly for Richard, as last year’s winner, getting the script produced is really exactly what we’re looking for with this contest. So we’re going to have him on in a couple of weeks, as I said to come on and really just tell his story and how everything went down.
So stay tuned for that episode here in a couple of weeks about the contest. Once again, if you would like to enter the contest or perhaps just to learn more about it, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/contest. Again, the regular deadline is May 31st and then our final deadline will be July 31st. If you find this episode valuable, please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leaving me a comment on YouTube or re-tweeting the podcast on Twitter or liking or sharing it on Facebook. These social media shares really do help spread word about the podcast. So they’re very much appreciated. Any websites or links that I mention in the podcast can be found on my blog in the show notes.
I also publish a transcript with every episode in case you’d rather read the show or look at something later on. You can find all the podcast show notes at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/podcast, and then just look for Episode Number #376. If you want my free guide, How to Sell a Screenplay In Five Weeks, you can pick that up by going to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide.
It’s completely free, you just put in your email address and I’ll send you a new lesson once per week for five weeks, along with a bunch of bonus lessons. I teach the whole process of how to sell a screenplay in that guide. I’ll teach you how to write a professional logline and query letter, and how to find agents, managers and producers who are looking for material. Really it’s everything you need to know to sell your screenplay. Again, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide. So now let’s get into the main segment today. I am interviewing writer G O Parsons. Here is the interview.
Ashley: Welcome GO to the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the show with me today.
Speaker 2: No, thank you so much for having me.
Ashley: So to start out, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and how did you get interested in the entertainment business?
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I grew up at lake Tahoe, California, and so I went to high school there. In high school I’d always been making little short movies with a camcorder. This was before final cut pro and stuff like that. So I was always just shooting my own stuff and trying to make movies myself. And then when I graduated high school, I moved down to Los Angeles and was going to UCLA. I was not pursuing film at school, but I was doing it outside of school. I was performing, doing acting and writing. I got into acting in commercials. Using some of the money that I made from commercials, I started doing my own plays. And then from doing my own plays, is how I eventually started writing screenplays.
Speaker 1: Got you. And I’m curious, what kind of, do you think got you interested in the entertainment business? What was the attraction for you? You’re the kid running around making those little home movies. Did you have parents that were in the arts, you just have a love of movies? What was it that sort of attracted you to this?
Speaker 2: Yeah. I just, I did have a love of movies. I think the first movie I went and saw in theaters with my dad was Willow back in the ‘80s, and I had always kind of been the person that wanted to do that. You know, it was kind of, you kind of see other people putting their imaginations on screen and that’s kinda what I always wanted to do. Perfect.
Speaker 1: Okay, perfect. Okay. So talk a little bit about that. Breaking in as an actor in commercials, what did you do when you first got to LA? Did you already have some connections? Did you know some people here? Did you just roll into town cold and start trying to make connections? Maybe talk about that. I know there’s a lot of other screenwriters, probably actors, but just, you’re sort of coming from another area, landing in LA and getting established. I think well, lots of screenwriters would be very interested to kind of hear the technical the logistics of something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I had absolutely no connections and I didn’t know anybody. When I was going to UCLA, I was living in the laundry room of my uncle’s home to save money. I graduated from school and didn’t have any, like at the time when I graduated, I was just flat broke and I was just looking for a job. And a friend of mine was going to Europe for a little while and he asked me to cover for him at the casting studio. And I had, yeah, of course I went in and I kind of yeah, because he wanted to go away for the month and then not lose his job. So he just had me as the fill-in. So I was able to kind of just take over his job and people on camera and put people on tape for auditions.
And the more I saw people do it, I was like, “I could do this. They are making thousands of dollars doing these commercials. I’ll just hit record and run in front of the camera.” So I used to do that all the time. And the casting director got upset with me that I was doing that. She was like, “If you’re gonna do that, let’s just get you a commercial agent.” So she was the person I was working for. She was nice enough to call up and get me my first commercial agent. That commercial agent said that they would take me on, but the prerequisite was I had to get into an acting class. And that was actually a great thing that happened to me because that’s where I started to build connections with actors.
That’s where I was able to start honing my writing is because I was doing scenes in acting class. I was putting up, I traded the acting coach for a free class if I found the scenes for everybody. So I was reading screenplays all the time, and I was reading plays all the time and I was assigning the scenes in class. It was a great school for how to write and how to create stories because I had to find so much different material for the 60 people in the class. And so I was putting up scenes and I just kind of got this feeling like I had talked about earlier, I always wanted to put my imagination on screen. I could do it in this class. I could write up a story and I could put a different title on it. So nobody knew that they’re just doing one of my scenes.
I saw actors taking that work that I would write and then elevating it and making it better. And then from that, just to kind of skip ahead, I started doing plays to try and get noticed, because I’m saying this to everybody out there listening, I could not get an agent. I could not get a manager. I couldn’t get anybody to pay attention to me. I was emailing people, I was just trying everything I could, doing showcases. And I just felt like I had to showcase myself specifically. So that’s why I started doing those plays. And I would invite agents and managers and just anyone to come see it. But when I first started doing it, nobody would show up. It would be like one person in the audience or two people in the audience, and it was an absolute disaster.
Speaker 1: Were these original plays, and you were like renting the theater and just putting on your production?
Speaker 2: That’s exactly what it was. Just like Lala Land, where you see her, she puts up the plane. There’s like two people, and you know, that was my experience in total. But I changed it. What I started to do was make it more of an event like everybody had to come out one night every three months and see the new play. In doing that, I could get people into the theater. And I found that the more people that were there, the better experience that they had and the more likely people were able to pay attention to the work that I had done. And so building connections, that’s the way I did it. Through the acting class and then through putting up plays and trying to invite as many people as I could to meet them in person.
Speaker 1: Got you. I’m curious. Just a real quick question. You said you were working for this casting director stepping in front of the camera. Did you ever get cast? Did that actually work? So you got some gigs that way?
Speaker 2: Gosh, I got gigs that way. I got a match.com commercial, I got a KFC commercial and I got a Best Buy commercial, just putting myself on tape for it. Yeah. So, hey, if somebody, if I say this to people who wanna get into acting and writing. If you can take a job in the industry that’s not going to be soul crushing, that’s just gonna be able to float you while you pursue your dreams, that’s a good one. Because the more people you meet, the more friends you get and the more opportunities you can gain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Sound advice. So let’s dig into your new film, Willy’s Wonderland, starring Nicholas cage. Maybe to start out, you can give us a quick picture or a logline. What is that film all about?
Speaker 2: Right. It was a quiet drifter is tricked into cleaning up a defunct, Chucky cheese, and he finds himself in a fight for survival against wave after wave of demonic animatronics. I think that was the logline I first used when pitching the movie.
Speaker 1: So where did this idea come from? What was the Genesis of this story?
Speaker 2: The Genesis where the story was, I was doing those plays and after one of the plays, a friend came up to me in the parking lot and he was like, “Hey, the more you do these, it’s good, but it only lasts as long as the play does. If you want to further your career, you’re going to have to make a movie.” So that’s where the Genesis started. Right then and there, I was like, okay, I got to write a screenplay, but I don’t have that many contacts. I don’t have a lot of money. I don’t have any way to get this to Nicholas Cage at the time. So I thought I’ll just write it like I do the plays, keep it all low budget, keep it in one location, with minimal characters and make it a horror movie because horror movies are forgiving for lower budgets.
The audience is. Like you can make a low budget horror movie and people will watch it because they’re just into that kind of trope. So that’s where I came up with minimal characters. So it’s just like this one guy basically, one location, Willy’s Wonderland. And then every great movie has like a hero and a villain. So I thought, “Oh, the janitor could be our hero,” and then Willie, this like creature that is like, it’s giant animatronic, which I’ll get to what kind of inspired that in a second. That could be the villain. But I wanted a twist on it to make it original, and the twist was, the villains picked on the wrong person. So that was the idea there.
Speaker 1: Got you. So let’s dig into your actual writing process a little bit. Where do you typically write and when do you typically write? Do you have the home office, do you go to Starbucks? Do you need that ambient noise? You write in the morning at night? What does your sort of writing schedule look like when you really get writing on something?
Speaker 2: Usually I do it from home. However, I also go to libraries. I play in some adult basketball leagues or I did pre the pandemic and I will post the pandemic. A lot of times, I’ll go out to libraries early before the games and just to avoid traffic. I go there, I’ll sit down and I’ll put headphones on and I’ll start writing. I always write with music. I think 99 percent of the time, I always have my headphones in. I’m always listening to music. As far as the timing goes, again pre pandemic, my wife taught exercise classes. She was out of the house around 5:36 AM every day. And so I would be up, I would write 6:00 AM to 11, then I would go work out, go for a run or go to the gym from 11:00 to 12:30. And then I would write again from 12:30, till about five o’clock or dinner time. That was always kind of my routine as far as getting into headphones in the entire time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Got you. I’m curious, how much time do you spend preparing the script, in terms of just outlining index cards and then how much time do you spend actually in something like final draft writing out script pages?
Speaker 2: A lot of the times, what I will do, is I will write a script in a notes on my phone or in text edit on my computer. Like I don’t go into final draft right away. I will write down scenes and I will write down things in just different sorts of formats whenever it comes to me. That could be like, hey, if I’m driving, if my wife’s driving us someplace and I have like an idea, I can just kind of start writing it up in the phone. I will occasionally for some screenplays do an outline just for myself where I know where I’m going, but other times, like Willy’s Wonderland. Willy’s Wonderland was kind of me just being desperate, like trying to figure out a way to further my career. So I didn’t storyboard that thing at all. I didn’t do any sort of notes or any kind of outline. I just wrote it. So I’d say 50 percent just write it, and then another 50 percent come up with a storyline and an idea and really get into detail who the characters are and write it that way.
Speaker 1: So, it sounds like you had something very specific in mind, a contained horror movie. How did you approach some of the genre requirements in terms of the tropes? What other movies did you watch? There’s always the thing we wanna make. You want to sort of play on some of the history of cinema, but also, do some new novel things and sort of give it your own spin. Maybe talk about that a little bit. How do you give something like some tried and true sort of genre like this? How do you give it a fresh, unique, original spin?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the… so I had, to answer the first part of your question, I love B movies and I love B horror movies, and I’ve probably watched thousands of them from the time that I was 10 years old until now. So I had a good repertoire of knowing like what to write about and what the trope should be. The fresh spin I wanted to put on, it was that Nicholas Cage, janitor character, who is the wrong person to mess with. The tropes that I put in there that are just kind of straight out of B movies is keeping it, not one location Willy’s Wonderland, putting these iconic horror villains and the animatronics, and then having teens be the fodder for the animatronics to show how powerful they were. And then also kind of having a town have a dark secret. That was another truck that I put in there. And the third or the final trip was the teams that decide to go have sex in the, in the, in the evil room, which always seems to happen in these movies. But I played it up as like a, you know, that was just a definite homage to the whole thing. So all of those horror tropes were put in and then you put the twist on it, which is this guy doesn’t care. He’s just going to beat everybody up. Gotcha.
Speaker 1:
Gotcha. What is your development process look like once you had like a first draft of this who do you show it to? Do you have an agent, a manager? Do you have some trusted actor, friends, writer, friends who are those people in your life that you get notes from and start to do some development? Sure.
Speaker 2:
You know, I do have, I do have a close circle of friends that I always go out to first. This is pre, this is before manager agent or anything like that. I always go out to those friends first. And the, these are people that are either family members or I call them family in that they’ve been doing plays and they’ve been doing artistic things with me for years. So I trust their opinion and I know that they’re going to sell it, just send it to me straight. Like, Hey, this is good. This is bad. This works, this doesn’t those are the first people I go to. Then I will get the manager advice, definitely my manager. Peter’s fantastic. He always gives me good notes and, and says, Hey, expand on this, expand on that. And then finally, before it goes out to anybody professionally, I have a my wife has pointing at me right now going like she should guide. I get the first draft. Yes, she gets it first. There you go, everybody. And then and then I always go to my editor, Janice and make sure that it is professional because I am not like the best speller. I can’t spell my name. That’s why it’s just G period opiod. But I go to her before it goes out to anyone professionally. So it just looks crisp and looks professional and there’s no typos in it and it is to formula
Speaker 1:
It. Gotcha. I’m curious. You know, you mentioned sending it to some trusted friends and getting back notes. How do you deal with notes when there’s a contradiction? You know, you give it to, let’s say four people and two people think, you know this, and two people think that how do you, how do you figure out which way to lean or how do you start to parse through some of these notes that maybe sometimes feel contradictory?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that happens all the time. Literally that happens all the time. One person will say, Hey, this thing should be blue. And the other person will be, nah, it’s gotta be red. And it’s like, okay. Then I think what I always do is just, okay, I’m the arbiter of the decision. I’ll make the final call take in what everybody gives you, but don’t be so malleable with your own art that you have to listen to what that person says. I think it’s great to get advice from all sorts of different sources and then you make the final call. So if it were two versus two, I would I would just make the final call on it. Now, if it’s I have done this before, I had a script that I had a couple of different titles for. And so I went on Instagram and I went to my trusted friends. There’s like, you know, like 50 or whatever in there. And I, and I said, please select the title that you liked the most. And the title that I liked the most was number one, and then three others that that I had on there. Well, my title got one pick and the one that below it got 30. So when I, when it was one versus 30, I realized, nah, maybe I’m not right on this one. And I’ll go with the majority. Yeah,
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Sound advice for sure. Okay. So once you finish the script, you had a script that you were pretty happy with. What were those next steps you gave it to your manager? Did he get it out? Did you have some contacts at producers? What was those next steps to actually getting this thing optioned and produced? Sure.
Speaker 2:
The, the, the the, this was before, so everyone should know about what was wondering this is before I had any help, as far as managers, agents, any of that kind of stuff. So was Wonderland. I was unrepresented. I had nobody helping me out like that. So what do you do in that situation and that situation, you try everything you can to get noticed. So I would send the script out to as many people as I could just, or not the script, but I’d send that log line out. Hey, I have a great idea. Would you like to read it? And I was doing it like a telemarketer would do just finding agents that I thought, or, or producers that I thought worked in that space and sent them I sent them two things, actually the long line. And then I had made a short film that I raised a little bit of money for.
Speaker 2:
And I thought that was a great idea because people could just click instead of like reading the stuff, they could just click a button and they could see me beating up a bear for 30 seconds. And that could like hopefully intrigue them. Well, I sent that out to as many people in the spaces I could probably hundreds. One lady got back to me. Her name was marsh. And she runs a, the blood list, which is like best unproduced horror scripts. And she really liked the idea and she, or the, the video. So she had me send her the script. She read the script, really liked it, put it on her website as a fresh blood select. And then I started sending that out, just a link to our website because it gave the script a little credence that it didn’t have before. And what happened was a casting director, friend of mine that I had met through acting again.
Speaker 2:
She saw that I put it up and she requested me to send her the script. Her name is Venus Konani. She read the script and she was like, Hey I think you could really have something special here. If you’ve got a lead actor attached, somebody have some sort of, sort of consequence. And I said, well, who do you think? And she’s like, Nick was cage would be great. I know his manager I’ll reach out. So this was a relationship with Venus that I had developed over years. So she, you know, number, it wasn’t just a stranger. I mentioned, she trusted me. She knew, you know, she trusted me enough and saw how hard, hard I was working, that she was willing to stick our neck out for me. So she’s the one that gave it to Mike nylon. Who’s Nicholas Cage’s manager. He’s the one that it saw the promise in it and gave it to Nicholas cage. Like he read it on a Friday, give it to Nicholas cage, Friday night, Nicholas cage got back and said he wanted to do the movie on Monday morning. That’s awesome.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that is fantastic. To have that, and then what did, what was it like once you got him attached? What sort of doors did that open and what were those next steps then getting the producer on and that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:
Yes. So I, yeah, we had, we had we, that when we had Nico’s cage and we had a producer and we had a director on board the producer I had met through friends that I knew in my acting class. So this is another thing that I’m saying. I met the producer of always wonder land through a lady that I knew in my acting class. Like she knew that, like I was putting this project together. So she recommended her husband and her husband knew the director, Kevin through a project that they had done like 18 years ago. And so it is this connections thing of people that, you know, when you meet and we talked about this earlier in the podcast, it’s like, it’s amazing how those connections come in handy. And so then it was a matter of finding financing for the film, because just because you have Nicholas cage attached doesn’t necessarily mean your movie is going to get made automatically.
Speaker 2:
You still have to find people that are willing to finance the movie. So we had to go to a bunch of different sales agents and try and find somebody that would sell the different territories overseas. And what I’ll say is in that process, it was, it’s very trying, you know, there, there are people that are gonna read your script, even with Nicholas cage board and say like, oh, this doesn’t work. You have to change this or this doesn’t work. You have to change that. And he was a guardian of the script as a producer. He was very much a guardian of it. And I think that I was very lucky in that he was able to protect me as a first-time screenwriter and say, Hey, this is the way it’s written. This is the way I want to do it. If you guys don’t want to do it that way, I understand, but we’re going to find somebody who wants to do it our way.
Speaker 2:
That was fantastic. And so, yeah, w what we were able to do is find a sales agency that was going to work, find a distributor that was going to work, and this took some time, but we were able to do it. And then what we did was we sold the rights to different places overseas to sell the movie, get, to get enough financing. We also had a chicken soup for the soul. Their division screen media came in to distribute the movie and landmark entertainment to to, to produce the movie and, you know, put this budget together to be able to shoot it. And it was it was very much a whirlwind. And we could talk about it for an hour on your podcast, but the thing that I learned from it the most, and I think that, that, that screenwriters can take this away. The most important thing I’ll say is, realistically, if you can find a movie and keep it at a low budget, you know, something between two and $5 million that has a movie star role, a role that that is a, is somebody that’s instantly recognizable in not just in America, but all over the world in different territories. Then that’s a good way to get your made small budget, small locations, big movie stars, sell it to the different territories to raise money, to shoot the film. That’s what happened. Yeah. And
Speaker 1:
Just to be clear, did you have Nicholas cage attached before you got the director and producer, or did you have the director and producer before you got Nicholas cage?
Speaker 2:
Right? At the same, like the, the, the producer and the director were with me when we went to Nicholas cage. Yeah. We had them, I had them before wonder,
Speaker 1:
Cause I get a lot of emails from people saying, well, how can I get this actor attached? And it’s, it’s you hear these sorts of stories that you’re describing and you hear them a lot more than I think that they actually take place. And I think people have this impression that all you got to do is get your scripts, Nicholas cage and he’ll sign onto it. And I wonder how much of that relationship did the producer? Did the, did Nicholas cage, did his team know your producer and how much of a relationship did they have with the casting director? I just wonder how much some of these other factors may have played into his being willing to sign on,
Speaker 2:
You know what, I think that, well here, what I’ll say to, yeah. I’ll, I’ll answer this in two questions. No, he did not know me or the director or the producer at all before reading the script. What he, who he did know was Venus because you can’t just, again, it’s, it’s, I can’t say I’m not going to say you can’t, but it’s going to be very difficult for you to PR to, for you as an unrepped screenwriter, to just knock on somebody’s door of his stature and say, Hey, read my script. Venus was the person that was able to act as that messenger, who had worked with Mike for years and years and years, it probably had a relationship going back 15, 20 years. So she was the person who was able to who was able to be, be that person that got us beyond the gate and get into that to, to get it to them.
Speaker 2:
Now, what I would say to people like, oh, I want to get my, my screenplay to a certain star here, here’s what you should eat. Here’s, here’s an avenue that you could pursue is having money to attach the star to your film. That’s P that’s, this, this is a gamble is a little bit of reward. It is. It’s like you get a K you can hire a casting director. Or if you’re like myself, if you have somebody that, you know, that can get you into that room, that person can approach the movie star and say, Hey, we will pay you X amount of money for this film to hold you against this amount of money. If it, you know, if you’ll say you’re going to be in it, but it’s a pay or play type of thing, it could be like $10,000 against a hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2:
But if that $10,000 hold your movie star, then you can go sell those rights and you can get your movie made. However, it is a, it is a gamble because should, you know, should things fall through, you could lose that money, but everything’s a gamble. You know what I mean? And not necessarily that it has to be $10,000. It could be $5,000. It could be a certain amount depending on your budget, but just, if you are an unrepped rider, if you want to make things happen with your life, you’re going to have to take some chances, take some risks. I, I locked down a million times when Nick was Cajun that he wanted to come, come aboard and produce film. So that helped out times a billion. But if I, if I were to pursue it again, I think that is a smart way. Get a casting director, have a little money to hold a star and then try and sell those rights to different territories to fund your film.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So just a couple ending questions and then we’ll we’ll wrap up. What advice do you have for screenwriters trying to break in? It sounds like you’re very much a sort of a do it yourself, where you get out there, you’re hustling doing plays and all that sort of stuff. With this, this wealth of experience now, what do you recommend when someone rolls into Hollywood and says, I want to be a screenwriter, what would you tell them?
Speaker 2:
You have to write one page every day. No matter what, like you have to write, you have to have a lot of material. You know what I mean? It’s like one script ain’t going to cut it. You’re going to have to have three or four scripts. You know, I wouldn’t even reach out to anybody until I had like two or three scripts or at least some kind of treasure trove of writing. Because if they say, well, actually I liked this, but we’re not doing any romantic comedies right now. We’re straight scifi. Do you have anything like that? And you say no. Then you’ve lost an opportunity because who knows if that person’s, that door is going to be open again. So write one page a day, have a, have a a quiver that’s full of scripts, and then you can not be timid.
Speaker 2:
That’s the, that’s the main thing nobody’s ever going to find. You, you have to get yourself in front of people. I’m not saying to do crazy stuff in an opposite, never be disrespectful to anybody or their time. But if you you know, if, if, if you send a polite query letter, you should send a few you know, if you’re looking for an agent or manager or just your producer, there’s there’s, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sending two query letters a day out, just trying to get somebody’s attention as long as they’re polite. And they may never write you back, but at least it’s an opportunity and you can do these different plays to try and showcase yourself or your writing. You know, be able to create sort of an event where people can come and see your artwork. You know, it give everybody the opportunity to see you. If you just sit in your room and you just continue to write and, and build up the scripts, that’s good. But at some point you’re gonna have to be a salesperson and you’re going to have to sell yourself and your writing. So you have to do
Speaker 1:
That. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Excellent advice. What’s next for you? What are you working on now?
Speaker 2:
I just finished a book, so that’s one of the things that I always wanted to try and write. I had written, like I told, like I just said, I had read on tons of screenplays and then I came up with an idea and I wasn’t sure how to do it as a a TV show or a movie. It just seemed like it would be 500 pages long, you know, like I’m not, I’m not at a point where I can do that, but I I’d like to try and write a novel. So I, I had written a a book and so I just wrote a book and I just, I’ve been talking to a couple of book agents about trying to get it published. So that’s kind of the next thing I want to do on top of that. I do have some other screenplays that are very much kind of in that fun vein that, that, that the last movie was, and just continue to push forward and take my own advice if continuing to write one page a day and continue to pastor people politely to get them to try and make some movies.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. What have
Speaker 1:
You seen recently that you thought was really great? Something maybe even specific to screenwriters anything on Netflix, Hulu, HBO. Is there anything out that kind of stuck out that maybe is a little under the radar? What
Speaker 2:
I see that was under the radar recently? I, I what am I supposed to call my wife?
Speaker 3:
Which movies did we see recently though? We loved
Speaker 4:
While we watch Crawley Y
Speaker 2:
Oh, yeah. We watched crawl. That was a great one. We did. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and I’m only saying hurricane heist. So those are two that thank you. If we have to, if you have to edit it. I apologize. So the two movies that I recently saw hurricane heist that was kind of fun and crawl. Those are both crawl. I liked because it took that formula. I just talked about, although it was a little bit bigger budget, but that movie was able to contain the entire movie, basically just to one house with one monster. So it goes from the crawl space to the first level, to the second level, to the roof, you know, and it all takes place in that one location. It’s a little bit bigger of a budget because there’s a hurricane and stuff like that. But as a first-time screenwriter, that’s a good one to watch because it’s able to contain this fun story in one location. And that’s something that I, I did with with my movie. And I think that they did extremely well, although with a much bigger budget with that movie. Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1:
And so on crawl, where is it playing Netflix or,
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you can find that one on Hulu. That’s where I watch it. It’s on who it’s about. A girl and her father would have to fight a dangerous alligators that infest their home during a hurricane.
Speaker 1:
Right. Gotcha. Well, it sounds like an excellent choice. Yeah. how can people see Willy’s Wonderland? Do you know what the release schedule is going to be like?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So it should be, it should be on VOD now, so everybody can co go and see it. The blue rays coming out in three weeks on Amazon on, on April 13th. So if you’re listening to this now and you haven’t seen it yet, you could catch the Blu-ray. It’s also a VOD everywhere. So those are all the major ones. Amazon iTunes, Fandango it’s also in select theaters, although, you know, I’m not, I’m not encouraging anybody to go out if you don’t feel safe or are vaccinated yet, but it is in select theaters
Speaker 1:
As well. Gotcha. And what’s the best way for people to just keep up with what you’re doing? Are you on Twitter, Facebook, you have a blog, anything you’re comfortable sharing? I will put in the show.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely. You can, you can find me at go Parsons at go Parsons, geo P a R S O N S. That’s on Twitter and on Instagram and I try and reply back. People have questions. Obviously. If riders have questions, I’m more than happy to answer. Perfect.
Speaker 1:
Perfect. Well, geo I really appreciate you coming on and talking with me. Good luck with this film and good luck with all your feature films as well. I would thank you so much. Thank you. We’ll talk to
Speaker 5:
I just wanna talk quickly about SYS Select. It’s a service for screenwriters to help them sell their screenplays and get writing assignments. The first part of the service is the SYS Select screenplay database. Screenwriters upload their screenplays along with a logline, synopsis and other pertinent information like budget and genre, and then producers search for and hopefully find screenplays they wanna produce. Dozens of producers are in the system looking for screenplays right now. There have been a number of success stories come out of this service, you can find out about all the SYS Select successes by going to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/success. Also on SYS podcast Episode #222, I talk with Steve Deering who was the first official success story to come out of the SYS Select database.
When you join SYS Select you get access to the screenplay database along with all the other services that we’re providing to SYS Select members. These services include the newsletter, the monthly newsletter goes out to a list of over 400 producers who are actively seeking writers and screenplays. Each SYS Select member can pitch one screenplay in this monthly newsletter. We also provide screenwriting leads, we have partnered with one of the premiere paid screenwriting leads services, so I can syndicate their leads to SYS Select members. There are lots of great paid leads coming in each week from our partner, recently we’ve been getting five to 10 high quality paid leads per week. These leads run the gamut.
There’s producers looking for a specific type of spec script to producers looking to hire a screenwriter to write up one of their ideas or properties. They are looking for shorts, features, TV and web series, pilots, all types of projects. If you sign up for SYS Select, you’ll get these leads emailed directly to you several times per week. Also, you get access to the SYS Select forum where we will help you with your logline and query letter and answer any screenwriting related questions that you might have. We also have a number of screenwriting classes that are recorded and available in the SYS Select forum. These are all the classes that I’ve done over the years, so you’ll have access to those whenever you want once you join.
The classes cover every part of writing your screenplay from concept to outlining, to the first act, second act, third act as well as other topics like writing short films and pitching your projects in person. Once again, if this sounds like something you’d like to learn more about, please go to www.sellingyourscreenplayselect.com.
On the next episode of the podcast, I’m going to be interviewing indie independent producer, Shakira Berenson, who just wrote and produced a film called dolphin island, which is a nice family-friendly film. He’s got a lot of experience as an independent producer. So we really get into the details about how he was able to put this project together, coming up with the idea, writing the script, getting funded, and really the whole process of getting this script turned into a movie. So keep an eye out for that episode next week. That’s our show. Thank you for listening.