Schoolmates and Friends Reconnect as Amazon Studios Finalists

Marlboro is a tiny college in Vermont, a place with just a few hundred students and a very liberal arts approach to education, meaning that students spend their last two years there working on a self-directed “Plan of Concentration” that distills all they’ve learned into a single project. And now Marlboro has a claim to Amazon Studios fame: Two alums have been chosen as finalists in the Amazon Studios January Best Script contest, and both have a shot at winning one of two $20,000 awards, to be announced Monday. Gina DeAngelis and Alex Greenfield both went to Marlboro in the ‘90s, and knew each other well. She majored in history and theater (class of ’94), he majored in history and media studies (class of ’97). Theater is what brought them together.

“I remember Gina and I hanging out a LOT during her senior/my freshman year,” said Alex. “There wasn’t much of a film program at that point. There was, however, some pretty righteous theater and that’s where we met. We spent many hours tilting back drinks and debating the Coen Brothers, approaches to historiography and yes … the Civil War.” (Alex came to Marlboro from Georgia, and though his sympathies run blue, he sometimes enjoys digging at Yankees. Gina came from Pennsylvania—about an hour’s drive from Gettysburg.)

Both of them now work in entertainment. Alex is a writer and producer currently working on a reality TV pilot about former UFC champion Frank Shamrock. Gina is an editor/writer at Colonial Williamsburg and a regional Emmy winner, for a script about the signers of the Declaration of Independence (from the British perspective). In the spirit of one of the lively student gatherings held at Gina’s place back in the day, here are some excerpts from our colorful email conversation:

What inspired your Finalist screenplay?

Gina: “Private Thompson’s Secret War is the true story of Emma Edmonds. This woman deserves to be famous and I am not giving up on making that happen. Also, I am sick of females in movies being nothing but sidekicks with t—s. Things are better now than they were 20 years ago – but not that much. This role of Emma – man, it could make someone’s career. And think of the work she’d do after it. How many friggin’ awesome movies would we get to watch her in?? A previous draft of this one was a Nicholl semifinalist, and an Austin semifinalist. I pitched it a few times (much earlier drafts, very different ones) at some amateur-hour conferences and stuff and learned a lot – namely, that I suck at pitching. Also, that as soon as you say “it’s historical,” they assume that means Merchant/Ivory (without, I suspect, ever having seen a Merchant/Ivory film), or if you say “it’s about a woman who…,” they assume it belongs on Lifetime or Hallmark – even if the female protagonist is a hard-drinking 19th-century cross-dresser who blows people’s heads off. (Cuz I see that on Hallmark all the time.)”

Alex: “I wrote Memory when I was working as a writer/producer for World Wrestling Entertainment. My work there was really a blast – there’s no more instant gratification than finishing a show script on a Thursday and hearing seventeen thousand fans screaming their response to it at a taping the subsequent Sunday. It’s pretty much one of the coolest things in the world. All of that said, the storytelling at WWE always follows pretty much the same lines and I was aching to do something a bit different. Driving home one day and I heard a piece on NPR about eidetic memory and a single question occurred to me: what if your memory was so good you couldn’t forget anything? That mushroomed by the time I hit my driveway: what if you couldn’t tell the present from the past? What if you were haunted by the living? What if every single moment of your life is now. Right now. The legal pad on my coffee table was filled up by the time my wife got home from work. I think I finished writing the script at a hotel right after the 2005 SummerSlam pay-per-view.”

What other screenplays have you written?

Gina: “First produced one was Yorktown, a Colonial Williamsburg production (premiered Oct. 2006) … I just finished another one for Colonial Williamsburg called The War of 1812. It’s about… hmm, how do I explain… the War of 1812. It’s in pre-production, premieres January 2012. (I managed to get no fewer than four U.S. presidents into that script. Top that.) I also occasionally get to write scripts for interactive Web games and so far, one RPG, called Betwixt Folly and Fate. It was really seriously fun. Other spec feature scripts sitting in the drawer are Kingmaker, about this awesome medieval dude, kind of the rock star of his time. Dark Matter, about a penetration tester (computers!! get your mind out of the gutter) who’s being hunted by the FBI but simultaneously trying to stop a terrorist hacker from melting down a nuclear plant close to New York City. The Triangle Fire, about … the Triangle Waist Co. fire of 1911 (I also wrote a book for kids on this subject), which is coming up on its 100th anniversary this March.”

Alex: “I’ve written about equally on specs and assignments. My original script, Childish Things, won the Screamfest LA Horror Film Fest’s prize for Best Screenplay in 2006 and LLP/RHI Entertainment bought it. The movies I’ve actually had produced (“To date,” he said with his fingers crossed) are Street Warrior (an action/MMA movie for Spike TV), Jack’s Family Adventure (a, well, family adventure starring Jonathan Silverman for Hallmark) and the 2009 NBC “event miniseries,” Meteor. It’s like Deep Impact/Armageddon except with Christopher Lloyd and Jason Alexander and about 1/20th the budget. As of now, my agent and manager – Jen Good at the Alpern Group and Dannie Festa respectively – are currently shopping my one-hour pilot, Open. The show’s a dramedy about a professional couple with teenage kids who try to balance their “real lives” with their activities as swingers. They’re also in the process of taking out two very different features I co-wrote with my writing partner (and another Marlboro grad), Ben Powell: a coming-of-age story about a man in his thirties who must journey back through the adventures he had as a boy with his quirky ghost-hunting father, The Seven Wonders of A. Henry Cohen is a fairly autobiographical script about my own somewhat odd childhood. On the other end of the emotional spectrum, My Father’s House is a supernatural thriller about a grieving architect who finds the door to the afterlife and must decide between the ancient poles of obedience or rebellion. We think it’s a really creepy piece that could be the foundation for a horror franchise. Of course, we’re biased.”

– Studios Steph