Professional Screenwriters Share Their Journey

Big Apple Film Festival

Professional screenwriters share their career journey, and provide valuable advice to aspiring writers, at the Big Apple Film Festival Screenwriters Conference. Hosted by Big Apple Film Festival moderator, Craig Price.

JOSE RIVERA

José Rivera's screenplay The Motorcycle Diaries was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar— making him the first Puerto Rican writer ever nominated for an Academy Award—as well as a BAFTA and Writers Guild Award and received top screenwriting awards in Argentina and Spain. Other films include On the Road, Trade and The 33. Rivera co-created and produced Eerie, Indiana, (NBC) and was a consultant and staff writer on Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (Showtime). He has written 18 episodes of the Netflix series based on One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rivera wrote and directed the short films The Fall of a Sparrow and The Civet, both of which were official selections of the Big Apple Film Festival. His latest screenplay is A Song for the Recycled Orchestra. He has served on the boards of TCG and the Sundance Institute and was a Creative Advisor at Sundance Screenwriting Labs in Utah, Jordan and India. Jose is a recipient of two Obie Awards for Marisol and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, both produced by the Public Theater. Plays seen at the Goodman include Cloud Tectonics, Boleros for the Disenchanted, Massacre (Sing to Your Children), Another Word for Beauty, Sueño and The Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona, which appeared as part of New Stages.

JAMIE NASH

Jamie Nash optioned his first screenplay in 2004 to Haxan Films . That script then turned into his first produced film, the horror-feature Altered. distributed by Universal Home Entertainment and Rogue Pictures. It also started a decade-long collaboration with Eduardo Sanchez, co-director of famed found-footage flick The Blair Witch Project.