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History
When Gordy Hoffman started a screenplay contest in 1998, he founded it through the eyes of an aspiring screenwriter. Naming the screenwriting contest after Blue, his late black Tomcat, the BlueCat Screenplay Competition began with a top cash prize of $2000, while setting its entry fee low ($20 for up to two scripts!). In addition, all finalists would appear in a full-page announcement in the Hollywood Reporter. We would go on to receive 596 scripts from 384 entrants, and when we announced our winner, we didn’t even think to let our entrants know who won! We did post it on our website, but failed to mail notification to our entrants. Shortly after we made our call for entries for our second year, we received a complaint about the lack of notification of contests results. We called the entrant on the phone and apologized. Subsequently, the entrant informed us they were re-entering. That interaction proved to be the inspiration to provide feedback, over the phone, to every person who entered BlueCat. (This concept of supporting entrants with script notes on their work would be adopted by many screenplay contests in subsequent years.) We raised the cash prize to $3000, along with announcement in the Hollywood Reporter.
As we were accepting submissions for our second year, we informally polled the screenwriters featured in the first Hollywood Reporter announcement and found that they got little or no response from the film industry. We decided to take the money we budgeted for the ad, approximately $3000, and divide it amongst the finalists. They weren't upset about that! We also began the process of providing script feedback by telephone. Some were happy, some were not, some were hard to reach, and often people requested a hard copy. On one level, we felt more supportive of our screenwriters, but the feedback often came too late, and in some instances, due to logistics or endless phone tag, not at all. Our third year, we raised the cash prize to $4000, and limited our finalists to five. When it came time to announce our finalists, we hadn't finished reading the script entries, and in lieu of meeting our deadline and compromising our adjudication process, we elected to postpone for a month. Our fourth year came, and our entry fee remained $20 for up to two scripts. We had writers actually suggest raising our entry fee. After some one entered eight screenplays (for $80) the year before, we decided we would raise our entry fee to the astronomical fee of $25. The grand prize was now $5000, and after two years of providing feedback by phone, we offered the option of receiving it via email. We figured some might prefer this format, but when nearly everyone elected to get their feedback by email, we were stunned. And after hearing vigorous complaints about postponing our announcements, we made our writing contest deadlines a priority, and have honored them ever since. In our fifth year, it was official: everyone would receive screenplay analysis via email. In 2004, our sixth year, after years of requests by our writers to enter online, we started accepting electronic entries. Subsequently, BlueCat had the largest increase in entries in our history. Heather Schor joined the BlueCat team and helped develop our partnership with the High Falls Film Festival, a festival dedicated to honoring women in film, by holding live readings of screenplays authored by women named BlueCat finalists. In 2005, we retired our original website and unveiled a new logo and online home, while looking forward to our second year at High Falls Film Festival. Our 2005 winner, GARY THE TENNIS COACH, was greenlit and slated for production in the fall of 2006, starring Seann William Scott. In 2006, we raised our prize money from $5000 to $16,000, with $1500 going to four finalists and the winner receiving $10,000. We received 1782 entries, an increase of nearly 80%, and we starting naming semi-finalists as a part of our adjudication process. Our winning script, HYUNG'S OVERTURE, was subsequently selected by the Korean Film Council (KOFIC) 2006 Filmmaker Development Lab, with the writer, Young Kim, traveling to the prestigious Pusan Film Festival to represent his winning script. BlueCat chose to stop accepting paper entries in 2007, out of respect for the environment, becoming the first competition to do so. We opened up entries for the BlueCat Lab, which accepted pitches and shorts along with feature screenplays, with a chance for three writers to come to Los Angeles and workshop their projects with local professionals and mentors. Our winner in 2007 for the Feature Competiton was the fifth woman to win the top prize, and currently Ana Lily Amirpour's THE STONES is being developed for production in summer 2008. For our 2008 competition, writers were now given the option to submit their script early, receive their analysis and resubmit before the deadline, supporting a more rapid development of the screenplays in our community. In February 2008, our 2005 winner, BALLS OUT: The Gary Houseman Story, was picked up for distribution by Sony and slated for a summer 2008 release. This is the start of the true fulfillment of our mission: to discover a screenplay and take it to the audience. This is our first, with many more to come. |