Screenwriter eager for success
P.E.I. writer submits work to competition
A Montrose resident is one-third of the way through a three-month wait to learn what readers think of his screenplays.
Levi Gaudet submitted two screenplays, “Touch of Fear” and “Precedent of Time” to an all-genre screenplay competition in March and learned last month both have been published for the competition, which started April 5.
Screenplay sales, both in soft cover and eBook formats, as well as reviews by readers will help determine competition standings.
Los Angeles-based Dizzy Emu Publishing is conducting the competition. A big marketing package goes to the winning submission.
To help improve his chances, Gaudet is approaching bookstores locally, hoping they will order copies of his screenplays. He will have copies for sale at Sara Lee’s Art Studio in Alberton and will be holding a booksigning there on June 10.
Gaudet, 27, is hoping the competition will be his big break as a screenplay writer.
“It might gain recognition and maybe somebody would buy it from me and make it,” he said but added he is considering filming “Touch of Fear” on his own locally if a buyer doesn’t come knocking.
“I know I can make it; I know what kind of budget I need,” he said.
“I wrote it with the intentions of doing it myself but I also know if I was to allow somebody else to buy the rights and make it, then with the money I’d get off of it and also to have my foot in the door, I’d be able to make the next one.”
Gaudet has been doing screenplays since his junior high days, but they’ve been getting bigger and bigger in recent years. He wrote the first draft of “Precedent of Time” in 2013 and started “Touch of Fear” in 2015. In between, he spent a year at Vancouver Film School.
He’s passionate about what he does.
“I just want to get my foot in the door of filmmaking, whether it’s as the writer, the producer or the director,” he confides.
He’s “tinkering” with other screenplays, too, including one on the 1758 fall of Louisbourg and one that he hopes to have made into a TV series.