So who are the first Amazon Studios winners? One lives in Hollywood, one on the opposite end of the United States. Both studied film. Both are dads who adore their kids. Both appreciate the chance to share their stories with the world.

   Richard Stern, December 2010 Best Script winner for Villain

          So the Illinois guy with the Spielberg aspirations finds himself 10 years past his film studies, with a wife he adores, three gorgeous children, a dog, a house and a successful marketing career in Georgia. Setting the big-screen dreams aside doesn’t seem so bad – until Richard Stern finds himself laid off from his day job.

          “I was unemployed for the first time in my adult life,” Stern said. “You have this pause and you ask yourself these questions. … ‘How did I get here?’ …  ‘What do I do now?’” That was last September. Stern, 33, found himself scrambling to find work, then coming to the realization that he wasn’t going to find it quickly. “About two weeks into November I’m like, ‘This is terrible,’ and doing the white knuckling you do in this situation.” 

          And then a friend called about the launch of Amazon Studios. Stern thought it was too good to be true. But he uploaded a script called Villain anyway. It quickly became one of the most popular and best-reviewed projects on the site, and Stern became a pillar of the Amazon Studios community. “I got this tremendous response, this outpouring of support,” Stern said. “It hit me at a time when I really needed it.”

           Now Villain has brought him something else: time. Stern’s runway for finding a job just got $20,000 longer now that he has won one of the first Best Script prizes awarded by Amazon Studios. “The money is great and certainly needed and will get put to good use, but what I really want is for us to take this to studios together. I want this to be more than a check,” Stern said.

          Stern said he’s written about a dozen scripts since college – comedy, drama, action – and that half of them are the quality of Villain. “Everything I write, for good or bad, is that kind of bigger commercial movie,” he said.

          Villain became an action-comedy, but didn’t start out that way. Inspired by the duality of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, Stern said he wrote “a much darker, grimmer movie about a good guy gone bad and the bad guy who knows him best going after him. The action was good, other things were good, but I just didn’t believe the story.” As a comedy, he said “it all made sense.”

          He’s heard plenty of comparisons: “Your movie is like The Incredibles, like Austin Powers, like Megamind, like Despicable Me.”  He views this as a positive. “They’re all great movies, crowd pleasers. Doesn’t that mean good things for my movie?”

          In fact, he tends to view most things as a positive. He’s just that kind of guy. “I feel like I’m on a path to finally realizing a dream. And along the way, maybe I can play a part in helping 2,300 other people realize their dreams too. That’s the opportunity we have at Amazon and that’s where I want to put my energies.”

   Marty Weiss, December 2010 Best Script winner for The Alchemist Agenda

          For some directors, it would feel like a lot, maybe even enough: making award-winning ad campaigns, directing a couple of TV movies.

          But Marty Weiss knew he still wanted more. He still wanted to do what he’d set out to do back when he was getting his MFA in TV and Film at New York University. He wanted to make major motion pictures.

          “I did a couple of genre films,” Weiss said. “But the only way to make a better movie is to write it yourself. It’s so competitive and so hard, especially in today’s Hollywood. … Mid-level movies have totally gotten squashed. Everything is based on comic books or books, or really inexpensive but with no distribution.”

          So he started writing.

          “In film school, they don’t teach much about screenwriting,” he said. “I read the books, but the best lesson is just by doing it. And rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. The more I wrote, the easier things became.”

          One of the screenplays he came up with ended up winning him $20,000 in the first Amazon Studios script contest. It’s called The Alchemist Agenda, and it’s the story of a maritime adventurer who discovers a U-boat full of gold – and secrets. The story takes our hero and his ally, a female former Mossad agent turned professor, from Amsterdam to Prague to Venice.

          “The locations are places that I shot commercials,” Weiss said. “I did this campaign for Renault that was so much fun. It was a little story of a guy getting stood up at the altar, getting his friends and going from country to country chasing after the rock-star bride. … It was a great way to travel and see Europe.”

          Weiss said that when he showed The Alchemist Agenda to people, they liked it, said it was “such a big-budget studio movie” – like that’s a bad thing. Weiss thought he might help his chances by writing his story as a novel. “I know it sounds stupid because it’s hard to get a novel published,” he said. “I didn’t think I’d enjoy writing the novel as much as screenwriting, but you can go in the minds of your characters … describe the places … that’s great.”

          And in the year and half since his daughter was born, the 40ish dad has embraced his greatest production – he’s been home more, with more time to enjoy her, and to write. “I’m more sleep-deprived, but life is more delicious.”

          –  Studios Steph