ScreenPlayLab is more than 2,500 upbeat film and television creators helping each other succeed.
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ScreenPlayLab is more than 2,500 upbeat film and television creators helping each other succeed. | Home | Blog | Join | Calendar | Speakers | Theaters | Workshops | Press | Links | About | |
We hold a weekly live event hosted at various Hollywood theaters where we present an industry speaker. Past speakers include the president of WGA, the managing director of AFM, and executives from Nickelodeon, The Robert Evans Company, MTV Films, The Cartoon Network, and DreamWorks Animation. We invite all kinds of industry speakers: studio and production company execs, directors, writers, actors, agents, and more.
We look for speakers with experiences we can learn from to make better movies. We select speakers based not primarily on fame, but on who we find interesting. Some of our speakers are a lot more famous than others, and we're fine with that. An initial reaction from many speakers we ask is to say they don't know what they will say. But, ScreenplayLab is easy to speak at because it's a nurturing environment with an upbeat audience. Our audience loves our speakers. Speakers usually stay to chat with members of the audience in the lobby afterwards.
Our group's mission is to make the world a better place through comedy in motion pictures and television. Unlike other filmmakers groups in Hollywood, our focus is comedy and studio production, not dark indie content or film festivals. We're not trying to beat the Hollywood system. We embrace the system. We tell writers and actors they need an agent. And, more than two dozen have gotten an agent by being referred through ScreenplayLab.
Our audience invitation goes out to our member list of more than 1,300 screenwriters, actors, and filmmakers. The Hollywood Reporter and Backstage often list our events. From 20 to 120 people come to our event each week, with 35 being typical. Format is informal with lots of audience Q&A. We tell our speakers to have fun. There's no moderator, but we'll feed some questions from the audience if needed to keep it rolling. Speakers talk for about 90 minutes, typically from 4:15pm to 5:45pm on a Sunday afternoon. Speakers talk about their career, the people who helped them, who they've helped, give advice on how to get ahead in the biz, and describe what they're working on now.
There's a 1-hour workshop immediately preceding the speaker's talk (from 3pm-4pm typically). Working actors read fresh pages from a comedy or upbeat drama in front of a live audience. The actors are cast to the roles by our casting director who has her own database of hundreds of actors to choose from. At the reading the actors give a brief introduction that includes their latest claim to fame. In the feedback session after the reading, the actors and audience are asked two questions about the script. What would you keep? How would you improve it? Criticism, saying what you didn't like, is not permitted. Speakers are invited but not required to attend the workshop.
We been holding these events more or less weekly since we started in May of 2004. In February we're on hiatus due to all the awards shows.
Robin Rowe, co-founder
ScreenplayLab
Beverly Hills, California
310-278-4012