T-Minus 7 Days: Hollywood Part II

One more story.

I received a phone call from an Academy member about a month after I received my notification that I had placed in their competition.

He was a judge in the competition who had read my script in the closing round, an elderly man, and said that he had strongly urged the Academy to put my in the top 10. He said that he thought the script was "extremely impressive". He asked what I was doing, and we spoke a bit about the games industry. I thanked him for his kind comments, we said goodbye.

Later, I typed his name into the IMDB, only to find out that this guy had won Academy Awards. He'd worked with Brian De Palma. Sidney Lumet. Paddy Chayefsky.

I was absolutely floored.

You see, I had spent years toiling away on my own, putting one foot in front of the other, trying to climb what looked to be a very large mountain. I finished that script after a few years of on-again, off-again work, was just relieved to be finished, and then quietly dropped it in the mail to the Academy.

So after two years of film school, and a few years of writing, this was my first piece of external validation.

It felt pretty good.