Upcoming Podcast with BlueCat Honcho Gordy Hoffman!

Along with our friends Tom and Ygal at In The Can Podcast, ScreenCraft recently landed an exclusive interview with BlueCat Screenplay Competition founder Gordy Hoffman, who launched the preeminent contest back in 1998. BlueCat was one of the first games in town for discovering and supporting talented new writers and their reputation remains stellar. I dare you to troll the Internet looking for anything written about them that is less than complementary.

We share the same mandate that BlueCat does of supporting talented screenwriters at all levels and it was great to sit down with Gordy and hear his thoughts and compare notes. After so many years of running this contest, you'll hear in the podcast that Gordy is more passionate than ever about great storytelling and great writers. This guy is a true advocate and he also walks the walk: Gordy is an accomplished writer and filmmaker whose filmography includes Love Liza, which starred his brother Philip Seymour Hoffman (maybe you've heard of him?) and A Coat of Snow, and he has many other projects in the works, including shorts and features.

In our podcast interview, Gordy talks about screenwriting as the populist art form and how it's a screenwriter's job to tell the truth about what we know regardless of genre or context. We have to show up and provide emotional resonance, that's what it's ultimately all about, and it's important to stay connected to the core idea or impulse that made you want to tell your story in your first place. Holding on to that point of connection is what will keep you grounded in all of your subsequent drafts and rewrites and it will help you filter and apply every note that your receive.

Check out more of Gordy's tips here, and if you haven't submitted to BlueCat yet, you really should. Their regular deadline is October 15th, and with your entry you'll receive two written analyses from their stable of trained readers. And their readers are good, as someone who comes from that world, I absolutely vouch for them. Having qualified readers with real expertise and credentials is what separates the legitimate screenwriting competitions from the cash grabs.

Stay tuned for the release of the full podcast. If you're an aspiring screenwriter, you owe it to yourself to hear the information therein.