Interview with Zanna Cardash and Alex Hollister, Writers

|| Virtual Event Date: Saturday, March 12, 2022 ||

|| Speakers: Zanna Cardash and Alex Hollister || 

|| Start time: 1:00 pm PDT ||

In this interview, we will discuss a variety of topics, including: story, structure, character, creating a compelling premise, finding your voice, script development, writer’s vision, the importance of collaborating and more. See more details below.

**The deadline has passed and REGISTRATION is now CLOSED for this event. Please view our calendar for upcoming events.

More details:

Armed with a helpful BA in Theology and Philosophy, Zanna Cardash initially embarked on a career as an actor. While filming four episodes of Doctor Who, she chatted with Bonny Langford and drove Sylvester McCoy home, so that’s something. She’s also been a bluecoat and a belly dancer. Yes, really!

Years ago, she did a stint of playwriting workshops at the Tricycle Theatre, tutored by award-winning playwright Bonnie Greer; trained as a journalist at London’s City Lit; and devised, wrote and performed in plays and musicals for a touring theatre company in Wales. She’s been copywriting ads and feature-writing for mags for two decades, composes complex rhyming verse and has published a salacious novel about people she knows, under a pseudonym she can’t divulge. Obviously. There’s more at Zanna C. 

A Scriptwriting Master equipped Zanna with a profound understanding of story, structure, character and the importance of collaborating; hence her starting Scriptwriters & Co. It also allowed her to develop new work for stage and screen.  The first draft of her first full-length play, Caged Bird, reached the full reading stage of the BBC Writersroom and Papatango playwriting competitions and bagged her an agent, Joan Lane. Her 2019 screenplay, Voyeuse, won Best Pilot Screenwriting at the Olympus Film Festival in LA in 2019, Best TV Series Pilot Screenplay at the New Renaissance Film Festival in 2020, and was officially selected for five others festivals, while Honeylove, written in 2020, was a semi-finalist in the prestigious Emerging Screenwriters contest. She’s currently working with a musical director on the score for her second play, Sprouts, and polishing Seahorse, a SciFi Drama feature.  Written work includes: Caged Bird, Sprouts, Voyeuse, Honeylove, and Seahorse.

Zanna doesn’t just run, cast and host S&Co’s Scratch Nights, Workshops and Writing Retreats and Zoom Table Reads, but has a reputation for delivering incisive, non-nonsense script notes to playwrights as well as screenwriters. She shoots from the hip but gets on with most people and, given half a chance, performs at our Scratch Nights (so you can increase your odds of winning a laurel by writing a meaty role for her… just saying). And somehow, possibly via copious compliments, a vat of rum and tickets to see Liverpool at Anfield, she conned experienced screenwriter and script consultant Alex Hollister into joining her at S&Co.

Bristol-born screenwriter Alex Hollister was signed by Zero Gravity Management in LA, many years ago. That’s what happens when you place silver at the Page International Screenwriting Awards. Since then, he’s optioned and sold a number of screenplays, and worked with various Hollywood production companies on everything from adaptations of bestseller spy novels to high-budget comic book and Sci-Fi projects. This, he says, felt like some form of kismet, given his childhood love of crime novels, movies and comic books.

Inspired by ‘Toy Story’ in 1995, he bagged himself a BA (Hons) in Illustration and Animation, in a time when you had to remortgage your house to buy a computer that would actually render the frames. However, the process of writing scripts for animations – unshackled by the limitations of technology, permitting wild imagination – truly hooked him. From that point, he says, he became a screenwriter for life.

With a penchant for good stories, from crime to action adventure, Alex’s work leans towards the mainstream; he twists genres and executes high-concept ideas. After ten years in the industry, pitching and creating outlines, treatments and lookbooks, he feels he’s learned enough to pass on some of that knowledge. He joined the Scriptwriters & Co team from the onset, initially as part of the judging panel tasked with reading and grading entries for our monthly Scratch Nights. Now he co-hosts and provides invaluable feedback on screen (fact is, we can’t stop him). The good news is that Alex also offers expert personal script coverage, using experience and skills originally honed on Fiverr, where his reviews glowed so brightly that they dazzled.

Since S&Co‘s inception, Alex has garnered a reputation for highly critical, constructive and honest feedback that allows clients to polish their scripts with confidence. A self-proclaimed Simon Cowell figure (minus most of the sociopathic egomania, but with the same shock of dark hair and devious smile), he doesn’t sugarcoat his notes. Neither does he concentrate on what clients want to hear, but on what they need  to do to move their writing up a level, and carve out a living in this volatile, sometimes unforgiving industry. If you’re up for hearing the truth about your script, what have you got to lose?

Follow Zanna and Alex at:

> www.scriptwritersandco.com 
> http://scriptwritersandcofestival.com
> https://filmfreeway.com/ScriptwritersandCo
> LinkedIn 
> Twitter
> Instagram
> FaceBook

Meeting Timeframe:  1:00 pm PDT to approximately 3:00 pm PDT

Any questions, email us at [email protected]