2023’s SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT FUND WINNERS

WE ARE THRILLED TO ANNOUNCE OUR WINNERS AND TOP 5 FINALISTS!

It has been an honor to read the creative and imaginative entries for this year’s Script Development Fund. The story ideas submitted were incredible in terms of the breadth and depth of concept and promise an amazing generation of new storytellers is on the cusp of entering the industry.

Our Script Development Fund doesn’t end with the competition. We are humbled and thrilled to now support our two Winners as they write their screenplays in the coming year.

This is only the beginning.

For full details of what happens next, check out our Script Development Fund post-contest timeline.

We will be supporting an even greater number of writers next year, by holding two seasons of the Fund in 2024. The new season opens on February 16th. Find out more about how the Script Development Fund can help you finish your screenplay.

FINISH WRITING YOUR OWN BEST SCREENPLAY WITH THE SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT FUND.

Don’t miss a deadline. Download our Contest Calendar!

OUR TOP 15 FINALISTS

(in alphabetical order)

	Adam Rodman	The Conspiracy	Very little is known about the details of the conspiracy resulting in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. In truth, there were three attempts on Lincoln’s life, not one. The “successful” attempt was actually the end product of a series of complicated and intricate machinations involving far more subterfuge than an outraged, crazy John Wilkes Booth shooting Lincoln and jumping onto the stage of Ford’s Theater. This is the story of how that terrible day came to be.
	Alberto Trujillo Alfonzo	The Black Queen	This tale of the madness of rage, resentment, and power, mixes the sensibilities of Blaxploitation films; corny, over-the-top, quirky, and sometimes trashy; and camp musicals such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Little Shop Of Horrors; 80’s gore and American and British rock and blues, to tell the story of a worldwide society of black vampires and their Black Queen, who is preparing a worldwide conquest while some of her closest subjects plot to overturn her and end her bloody empire.
	Cara Lawson & Lisa Wilkinson	The House Always Wins	A dark and offbeat look into the rise of the fertility world, as seen by a twenty-something who just left her first husband. Based on true events.
	Christy Smith-Sloman	To Be Young, Gifted & Black; The Lorraine Hansberry Story	Barrier-breaking playwright Lorraine Hansberry makes Broadway history while exploring her sexuality in bohemian 1960s Greenwich Village against a backdrop of repression, homophobia, and conventionality,
	Helen Meany	Don’t Bring Me Down	In July 1979, when a NASA space station crashes in Western Australia, a local teenager grappling with family secrets forms an unlikely alliance with an American journalist attempting to expose a covert CIA operation.
	Kari Mote & Michael Clifton	é MORTO!	In 1884, a wealthy and prominent Count is cursed and left for dead in cholera-ridden Naples. He emerges with revenge for all who betrayed him. Dramatic gothic fantasy & horror – think Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
	Kate Austin-Raffan	Flight	A teen carer invents a new brother, imagining an alternative reality for herself as a means of coping with her mother’s refusal to take her life-saving medication.
	Kim Taylor	Reset	Reset is a sci-fi thriller horror set in a seaside Refuge – a shelter for abused women. When Melanie finds a red button in the basement of the women’s refuge, she and the other women have to decide if to take back control of their lives or risk it all.
	Lynette Willoughby	Foule Blood	A feisty reporter risks her life to solve the ongoing disappearance of local indigenous children. To uncover the dark secret of Lizard Man she must reconnect to the blood-stained land of her grandmother’s people and make peace with the new-to-town local cop.
	Michael Clifton & Michael Endara	The Toy Collector	The heist of an antique toy museum turns perilous when a group of misfit teens get trapped inside with the owner and his peculiar daughter.
	Michelle Claase	Making Waves	Delving behind reality TV cameras, a cynical former contestant and his eclectic crew hijack a dating show for seniors set on a luxury cruise ship and uncover a hidden world of love, drama, and redemption.
	Nick Loritsch	Rage & Ruin	An ex-con, who suffers from blackouts, must befriend the victim of his crime to uncover the truth about the night that changed their lives forever.
	Ricardo Miranda	Blackstone Protocol	A security apparatus official, in a technologically advanced community, soon becomes conflicted between her desire to succeed her aging father, the man who founded the city, and her growing love for her father’s greatest adversary, a terrorist known as Specter.
	Tia Devlin	Unhirable	A recently widowed woman on the verge of turning fifty is being pushed out of the video production business by the new guard.
	Zoe Bullock	Miasma	In a world of poisoned air and monetized oxygen, a disillusioned healthcare worker is coerced into industrial espionage and must choose between saving her son’s life or saving the world.