Sundance-Winning Screenwriter & BlueCat Founder Gordy Hoffman

nsavides — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 00:47:14 +0000

Gordy Hoffman’s first produced feature screenplay, Love Liza, won the prestigious Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award when it premiered at Sundance. The film also featured a memorable performance from his brother, Philip Seymour Hoffman, his first starring role in a film.

Dog Bowl, a short film that Gordy wrote and directed, also premiered at Sundance, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. Gordy has also taught writing at prominent film institutions around the country including USC and UCLA. His background as an accomplished working writer gives his BlueCat Screenplay Competition some credibility, as does BlueCat’s 20 year history of discovering and developing writers who gone on to find success in Hollywood.

Some of the things we discuss include

Why good feedback is important but difficult to give and receive
How the BlueCat Screenplay Competition can help writers develop
What it was like working with Philip Seymour Hoffman to bring Love Liza, a script about a man addicted to sniffing gasoline, to life
Gordy’s rant about one of Alamo Drafthouse’s policies
Where Gordy looks for inspiration

I had a number of takeaways from the conversation and things I wanted to expand upon, so I recorded my commentary as a separate track, which you can hear below or next in the podcast feed.

If you’d like to hear another thoughtful conservation about screenwriting and story development, you might appreciate this interview with Golden Globe-winning producer Lindsay Doran, who helped develop icon films This Is Spinal Tap, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Ghost.

Sponsor for this Episode

Screenwriters Down South – We’re a screenwriting group in Baton Rouge. Some of our writers have written scripts that have been made into films with movie stars, written award-winning shorts, and worked at production companies or on film sets around the world.

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