2010 Gimme Credit Screenplay Competition Winner

I am the first place winner in the 2010 Gimme Credit Screenwriting Competition. While winning a competition like this is not an end goal, in that it does not directly result in the script being made into a film, it is still very nice to have external validation that one’s ideas and writing style are considered worthy by someone other than friends and family.

The particular script that won, “Let The Games Begin”, is a family story about nerdy video game entrepreneur Dave whose perfect geek world has become unbalanced by his teenage daughter Star, whose love of sports is seen by her parents as mere teenage rebellion. Dave, feeling his youth slipping, his family unraveling, and his company stagnating deals with this midlife crisis by attempting to regain his teen status as a video game champion. Star,feeling distanced from her family, and her chance for sports success slipping away, deals with this teen crisis by joining the boys’ football team. Dave’s quest to show the world that “old me” can still be great video gamers parallels Star’s attempts to prove herself in the male-dominated world of sports, and father and daughter must learn that in the end what really matters is family, fun and self respect.

I wrote it because my wife and I have been discussing having kids, and I am trying to imagine myself as a father. And I keep seeing fellow geeks and nerds I work with becoming parents, and buying their kids video games and Legos and Star Wars everything and trying to imagine how they’re going to rebel.

It’s the ultimate horror for nerd and geek families that one of their kids might turn out to be jocks. But since I’m also a baseball fan (the sport of statisticians), and my wife’s brother is a hardcore sports nerd through and through, I know that the distance between one sort of geekery and another isn’t as great a chasm as many would like to think. (The Onion article “Walking Sports Database Scorns Walking Sci-Fi Database” really sums that up.) So I decided that this idea would make a fun, unique family film. I’m glad the Wildcard readers agreed.

It’s done well in a few other competitions as well, including being selected as a winner of the juried portion of WildSound, and I’m just happy that family stories are something people still consider worthwhile (because there are so few being made right now). I truly am a fan of genre pictures, action packed fight sequences, epic special effects, and adult themes as much as the next guy, but I think the family story definitely has a place in the medium and would love to see it come back.

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