#NSNC16 – Los Angeles
By Suzette Martinez Standring
NSNC Conference Committee
Do you have a book, column, or concept that could go Hollywood? Take a chance and pitch your film/TV idea to a Hollywood producer!
Open only to 2016 NSNC conference registrants, at least three lucky winners each will have a private meeting to give a 5-10 minute verbal “pitch” to a TV/film producer. They will get feedback on how to refine their pitches and tips on making the project more commercial.
Wouldn’t it be great to know the viability of your project before you invested hours into writing a proposal?
Raffle tickets are $20 each, and attendees may buy as many as they want. The annual conference is June 24-26 in Los Angeles. All proceeds fund the NSNC Education Foundation‘s Jeff Zaslow College Columnist Award competition.
The drawing will be held on Saturday, June 25, 2016, at 3 p.m., right after the program “Pitching a Column as a Television Show or Movie,” moderated by W. Bruce Cameron, screenwriter, producer, and New York Times best-selling author. His own column led to the successful TV series, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter. A Paramount movie, A Dog’s Purpose, based on his book, will be coming out soon.
The pitch sessions with a Hollywood producer take place immediately with several of the following participating panelists. (Bios were gathered from promotional materials.) [Update: Speakers below are current as of 5/13/16.]
Aaron Mendelsohn
Aaron Mendelsohn is a long-time screenwriter, producer and director who is best known for co-creating and co-writing the Air Bud family film franchise, which to date has 11 sequels. Aaron has served on the board of the Writers’ Guild of America West for many years, and recently was elected secretary-treasurer. He is also a professor of screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Aaron’s current writing project is the drama pilot Bad Medicine for Spike Network, and over the years has written many film and television projects for Warner Brothers, Sony, Fox, New Line, Showtime, Paramount, New Regency and others. Aaron has a screenwriting degree from UCLA.
Gary Goldstein
Gary Goldstein is an award-winning writer for film, television and stage, best known for numerous Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries films, including The Wish List, Hitched for the Holidays, Along Came a Nanny and the adaptation Mum’s the Word, the first of the Flower Shop Mystery series released in January 2016 and starring Brooke Shields. Gary has taught screenwriting extensively throughout Los Angeles at the Writer’s Bootcamp, the Learning Curve and UCLA, and is also a freelance film reviewer for the Los Angeles Times. Gary has a degree in film and journalism from Boston University.
Tony Cane-Honeysett “is a writer and producer, known for The Royal Academy (2004), Mistreated (2012) and Surprising Edna (2010),” according to IMDb.com.
Laurice E. Molinari
Laurice Elehwany Molinari, a veteran film and TV writer in Hollywood for over two decades, has penned over thirty scripts for various studios and networks. Her very first feature script, written while a fellow at the American Film Institute, became Columbia Picture’s critically acclaimed children’s classic My Girl. She went on to pen The Brady Bunch Movie and The Amazing Panda Adventure. Laurice lives with her husband and two children in Los Angeles (City of Angels). Her lifelong love for our heavenly guardians inspired her middle-grade fiction books The Ether Series, in which Vero Leland, a fledgling guardian angel, trains to battle demons who try influence humans on Earth.
The most recent book in the series, Dragon’s Descent, was released January 2016. Laurice is a sister-in-law of NSNC Vice President Lisa Smith Molinari.
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This piece first was published in the April 2016 issue of The Columnist, the monthly membership newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
