PROFILE |
WINNER OF THE FIRST FIFTEEN MINUTES SCREENPLAY COMPETITION FOR MARCH
Nicole Quinn's screenplay Racing Daylight has been selected as the winner of The First Fifteen Minutes Screenplay Competition for March. Tanglewood Films would like to congratulate Nicole and recognize the superior craftsmanship in her work. She will be showcased here, receive free coverage on her script, receive a free copy of Scenewriter Software and have her work forwarded to production companies actively seeking new scripts.
Nicole Quinn has written for HBO, Showtime, the networks and Jodie Foster's Egg Pictures. Her screenplay Pretty Bird was a finalist at the WINFEMME Film Festival. It was chosen for the first Hamptons International Film Festival Writer's Conference and became an Equinoxe Screenwriting fellowship project in Bordeaux, France. Quinn has recently completed a memoir about integrating a Catholic girls' boarding school in 1964 where she would live from the age of 8-17, titled Habit Forming.
SCREENPLAYS:
Devil's Garden.....Egg Pictures (1995-96)
Pretty Bird....WINFEMME Films Festival, Finalist, 2001. Hapmton's International Film Festival Writer's Conference, 2001. EQUINOXE Screenwriter's Fellowship, 1997.
TELEPLAYS:
Stormy Weather: The Lena Horne Story, Showtime 1998-99
Volunteer Slavery, Showtime 1996-97
Divas (series pilot), Fox 1994
All or Nothing, ABC 1993
Fired Up! The Bertha Gilkey Story, NBC 1993
Black, White and Blue, HBO 1993
STAGE PLAYS:
The Spirit Is Willing, Actors & Writers 1994-present
The Torment, BACA Downtown 1994
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For the past ten years I have been a screenwriter. Before that time, I considered myself an actor, spending months on the road doing Shakespeare and the Greeks in regional theatres across the country, or playing stock minority characters on daytime television and in film. As a woman of color, I found contemporary roles lacking in resonance, out of sync with the world in which I was formed. The industry told me that I wasn't black enough. Where was my accent? Where were all of the other trademarks of my race? They repeatedly told me that I was not a black woman, at least not by the yardstick the visual medium used to judge such approbation, but I was not white either. Who was I? A query which led me to the broad and not so spectacular realization that we, most of us, do not fit well in shoes cobbled by others.
So, I began to write. I wrote stories culled from history and from my everyday which were not representative of the minority people I saw stereotyped daily in the media. So, for ten years I wrote for Hollywood;about race, about gender, without much success at getting these projects made, as the audience appeal was too limited, too narrow, too blame filled. So, now I write about humanity, that which is common to all of us; love, loss, hope; and you know, it's far more interesting.
NICOLE'S HOTSHEET
available screenplays
Pretty Bird is an interracial love story set in the 19th century in Jamaica. It is a tragic tale which examines Colonial imperialsim and its relationship to race and class, while looking at the chronically rigid parameters of women and madness. Although set in another time, Bird's journey is not unlike that of the modern day woman torn between societal strictures and loyalty to herself. A showcase for the stark and extreme consequences which companion not fitting in. There's a little bit of Bird in all of us.
Bird, a defiant woman of mixed racial heritage, is dowered into marriage with a white man, Edwin Manchester. Edwin's fealty to the social mores of his time force him to choose between his growing love for Bird's free spirit and the racial class-conciousness which questions her sanity.
SECTION EIGHT: Who killed PFC Dorothy Johnson, and why? A murder mystery set in the black Army Nurses Coprs of the segregated armed forces of WWII. Jordan, a black female attorney, is sent to uncover the truth of Pvt. Johnson's death and unmasks a world of prostitution, medical torture and one officer's version of enforced racism in the "special unit."
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