2009 Expo Screenplay Competition

For information or to enter, click here.




Suzanne’s Prize: Why This Prize; Why Enter This Contest


Suzanne’s Prize is a special jury prize – meaning that it is judged by a special committee, including the publisher of Creative Screenwriting Magazine. It carries a $2,000 prize. No separate entry is needed to win the prize called Suzanne’s Prize. The contest judges will nominate scripts and pass them on to the special jury that decides on this prize.



From the Publisher of Creative Screenwriting Magazine...

Why this prize?


I can’t speak for the other members of the prize jury, but what I am looking for is a script (or scripts) with a love story at its core that really moves me -- and which seems to be a marketable, makeable movie. I’m looking for a script (or scripts) about which I can go around saying, “This is one that should be made.”

Yes, this prize carries the name of my deceased wife. But please–enough with the condolences. This prize is not a tombstone.

It’s a quest for great love stories.

It starts with the name of my deceased wife because Suzanne’s own life was, in its own quiet, out-of-the-public-eye way, a great love story. It is also named for her because she was a movie lover, and the stories she loved most were, at their core, love stories. She loved stories and lines such as...

“Of all the gin joints in the world...” “Play it, Sam...” “Here’s looking at you, kid...” “We’ll always have Paris...” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” – all from Casablanca, of course.

“I will find you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you.” Has any man ever a greater promise to a a woman than Daniel-Day Lewis’ Hawkeye to Cora in Last of the Mohicans?

“You had me at ‘Hello.’” – Renee Zellwegger’s Dorothy in Jerry McGuire. Yes, the line that preceded it, “You complete me,” was so lame I wanted to throw up, but what a recovery for a writer and a scene.

If you write comedy, think Notting Hill. Or Howard’s End, A Room With A View, Four Weddings And a Funeral, Mystic Pizza, Monsoon Wedding, Sense And Sensibility, Chocolat, Working Girl, Sleepless in Seattle, Moonstruck, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Princess Bride, of course.

If drama is your strength, your guidepost might be –

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” – Gone With the Wind.

Or The English Patient. Bonnie and Clyde. Sid and Nancy.

Slumdog Millionaire would have been near the top of her list –a love story so powerful that Mother Theresa’s words fit it nicely as a theme:

“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.”

Also, this movie illustrates the power you have as a screenwriter, In the book “Q&A,” on which it was based, the goal of the character Jamal is to win the 20 million rupees. Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy changed Jamal’s goal – to use the publicity from his nation-riveting pursuit of the 20 million rupees to find Lakita, the girl he has loved all his live and has lost in the vastness of India – a small change that meant everything to the appeal of the story.

Suzanne wasn’t ordinarily thrilled by science fiction. However, District 9 might have made her list of favorites. You go in thinking it’s a sci-fi movie, but at its core, this is a story about a man who will do anything, and accept any humiliation, to keep his wife – including selling his very soul to her awful father. And when that doesn’t work, he becomes a man by ... Well, I don’t want to spoil the story if you haven’t seen it. But it illustrates this point: a love story can be at the center of any genre.

And I have my own list:

"Oh, no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast." It may not have been a love story for the rest of us, but it sure was for King Kong, poor guy.

Even an outright war picture: Platoon, for example, is at its core a love story – that of two sergeants vying for the heart and soul of a recruit. One of them – played by Willem Dafoe in my favorite of all his roles – embodies the theme, “Greater love than this no man hath than to lay down his life for his friends.”

But you don’t have to take love so seriously to win. You could win by convincing us that—


Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.
--W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1949
Or
It's so easy to fall in love but hard to find someone who will catch you.
--Author Unknown
Or
Love isn't blind, it's retarded.
--Don Foster and Susan Beavers, Two and a Half Men
Or
Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.
--Miguel de Unamuno
Or
Falling in love is so hard on the knees –
Aerosmith

A winning script could be a grand and heroic epic, or a three-hankie weepie. It can be about disillusionment. The lovers can die, Romeo-and-Juliet style, if that’s your creative urge. Probably the only kind of story you couldn’t win this prize with is a slasher movie.

But wait ... Come to think of it...Psycho. What was Psycho, after all, but the sickest love story that ever made it to the screen?

So if you’ve written a love story, and you think it’s good, please submit it to the Expo Screenplay Competition. I hope to find a winner and maybe a couple other scripts that I will enthusiastically want to see made. If and when I see scripts that truly move me, I will brag about them all over town to anyone who will listen. I will give them extra attention, in addition to the exposure and distribution we do for all contest winners.

Suzanne’s Prize is not about “Oh, the poor guy lost his wife.” So please don’t send me more condolences. Send me a movie she’d want to see.

Bill Donovan
Editor and Publisher, Creative Screenwriting Magazine