The Hamptons International Film Festival opens

The Hamptons International Film Festival will host its 6th annual Screenwriters Lab cosponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation this April 20th-23rd in East Hampton. Over the course of one long weekend, emerging screenwriters will benefit from the expert tutelage of seasoned mentors who will advise them on how best to revise their scripts in preparation for production.

During the lab in the Hamptons, our emerging screenwriters will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one each day with established screenwriting mentors who will advise them on how to develop their scripts. Within this intimate environment, our screenwriters are encouraged to take risks and discover new possibilities for their projects. Participants also attend group discussions over meals, while evening events bring them together with board members, sponsors, the local artistic community, and other friends of the Festival.

Following the lab, The Hamptons will assist writers in making contact with friends of the Festival, including industry producers, agents, and development executives, and continue to support the writers as they revise their scripts. We will hold screenplay readings and eventually invite films developed at the Screenwriters' Lab to screen at the Hamptons Film Festival. This process allows the Lab in conjunction with the Festival to establish a community and ongoing support structure that develops and promotes diverse voices, artistic ambitions, and the audiences that rejoice in both.

2006 Screenwriters’ Lab Mentors Are:

1) WARREN LEIGHT (screenwriter/director/playwright) In the early 1980s, Warren was creative director of a highly regarded quartet of female comics known as the "High Heeled Women," which included actress Arleen Sorkin. Warren wrote and directed the 1993 film THE NIGHT WE NEVER MET starring Mathew Broderick, which was nominated for a Critics' Award at the Deauville Film Festival. His 1999 play SIDE MAN was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Tony Award for Best Play that same year. For the last three years, Warren has been a writer and producer on "Law and Order: Criminal Intent.”



2) WHIT STILLMAN (writer/director/producer) Whit Stillman is a former journalist and fiction writer who in the 90s came out with three films on “doomed” bourgeois youth – METROPOLITAN, BARCELONA and THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO. Taking the characters from the latter and extending their story, he wrote the S.F. Chronicle bestselling novel “The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards” (Farrar, Straus), winner of the first and last “Nightlife Literature Award.” Since 1998 he’s lived in Europe writing the scripts for a cycle of films on foreign subjects.



3) CHARLES RANDOLPH (writer/producer) is the writer of such high-profile films as Alan Parker's THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE starring Kate Winslet and Sydney Pollack's THE INTERPRETER starring Nicole Kidman.



4) ALISON MACLEAN (writer/director) moved to New York from New Zealand in 1992. Her short film, KITCHEN SINK and her first feature CRUSH both played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Alison went on to direct JESUS’ SON starring Billy Crudup and a documentary called PERSONS OF INTEREST about Arab/Muslim detainees held in New York after September 11th. Her next film, NOT IRIS, is a brilliant thriller to be produced by This is that film company.



Our 2006 Lab Participants, Screenplays and Project Descriptions:



1) TWELVE by Jordan Melamed (based on the novel by Nick McDonnell)

TWELVE explores the emptiness of material desire and excess among privileged teens on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.



2) THE STEINS by David Wain, Heidi Neurauter and Amy Rice

THE STEINS tells the satirical story of four couples involved in the cut-throat competition to get their children into Manhattan’s most prestigious pre-schools.



3) BRILLIANT PEBBLES by Jeffrey Altshuler (based on the novel by Joseph R. Egan)

BRILLIANT PEBBLES is a techno-thriller set at MIT that tells the story of Lexy Hadrian who, angry and depressed over the mysterious death of his revered grandfather, discovers a perverse plan to detonate a dirty bomb over Boston. In the final analysis, Lexy and a group of MIT’s top hackers are the only ones who can save the city.



4) FACE VALUE by Gretchen Somerfeld (story by David Baxter and Gretchen Somerfeld)

FACE VALUE is the story of screen siren Hedy Lamarr, who shot to stardom in the early 1940s and at the same time, with composer George Antheil, created and patented her invention for frequency hopping in an effort to stop the Nazis in World War II. This visionary concept would supply the U.S. Navy with a secure remote-control guidance system for torpedoes, and become the forerunner of revolutionary wireless communications (“Wi-Fi”) used globally by millions today.