Screenwriter Katie Golden has made it through to the final five in the Screenwriting Comedy Feature Film Script category at the prestigious Austin Film Festival, which begins on Wednesday October 25th.
Katie, who is originally from Ohio but currently lives in Los Angeles, graduated from the LFS Screenwriting program this summer. She entered her feature film script Walking on The Moon - a comedy about a group of out-of-work actors who are hired to fake the moon landings - which she wrote as part of her MA at LFS.
“I applied sometime in the last semester,” she says, “and I tend to just apply to those festivals and then immediately forget about it so that I don’t have to feel rejected. But I was in New York and I got a phone call from my mom saying someone had called from the Austin Film Festival. So, I called him and he told me I was a semi-finalist in two categories. It was so cool and such a surprise.”
Katie’s script originally made it to the semi-finals in both the comedy feature category and the Enderby Entertainment Award, which is given by a production company which sponsors the festival, ‘for feature scripts in all genres with an original concept and distinctive voice that can be produced for under $10 million.’ Katie was subsequently told that she had made it through to the final five in the comedy category, an outstanding achievement given the fact that last year AFF received over 9000 script submissions across all its categories.
“I’d entered a couple of other festivals and competitions” Katie says, “but like I said, I always try to forget because you never hear back. My LFS film was the first that ever got through this far, and I feel like I really owe it to Jane Wittekind and to Lucy and Theo and René (her tutor and feature development group) especially. You know that scene in Mean Girls when she wins the crown and she breaks it into pieces and tosses it to everyone? I feel like I need to do that if I win the bronze typewriter!”
The festival begins this Wednesday, with the winners announced on Sunday. “I’m going down to Austin from Oct 25th-29th. There’ll be all these panels and they’re setting up meetings for me with Sony Animation and Telltale Games, which is really, really amazing. Then there’s an awards lunch on Sunday when we find out who won. The prize is $2000, I think, and a bronze typewriter. The goal really for me though would just be exposure to management potential and agents. It’s so exciting and it’s all because of LFS. I wouldn’t have written this script probably, and it certainly wouldn’t have been as good as it was if it wasn’t for the school.”
Katie is also about to release Superlosers, the webseries that she wrote and directed before coming to London. “I wrote this script about these dead-end twenty somethings living in LA, it’s very autobiographical! But they wake up with super powers and it changes their lives. I took it to two of my friends who are producers and they were very business savvy. We did it with almost no budget and we shot it only on the weekends because everyone had day jobs. So, it was four weekends in a row and it was amazing, I called in every favour I had and it’s finally ready. I’m very excited. It comes out November 3rd on Youtube and we’re going to drop the whole season.”
You can subscribe to the series at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAxX-0Sok-b9Xcmp2F38aWQ and keep up with its progress at https://en-gb.facebook.com/superlosersthewebseries/
Best of luck to Katie at the Austin Film Festival, and fingers crossed for that bronze typewriter!