Apply to this Screenwriter Job

Hello Applicants!

THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF INFORMATION, FOUND IN CAPS AT THE BOTTOM, IS: IF, AFTER READING THIS, YOU ARE TRULY INSPIRED, AS IN IT REALLY RESONATES, AND YOU HAVE AMPLE EXPERIENCE WITH THIS KIND OF SCREENWRITING, THAT YOU COMPOSE A 1-ISH PAGE COVER LETTER SHOWING THAT TO ME, GIVING EXAMPLES ILLUSTRATING HOW YOU WOULD APPROACH WRITING THIS MEMOIR DOCUMENTARY?

OK, so I have a very strange claim to fame.

I have the world's largest collection of answering machine messages.
16 years. 1988 to 2004.

Let's do the math. 70 (eighty) cassette tapes, each tape being 90 minutes.
That's 6300 minutes. Of course, there are some gaps and space as usual, so we'll say
6000 minutes. That is, of course, 100 hours of messages. Which is about 4 days worth, if one listened without sleeping.

What about number of days in 16 years? About 5,800 days.
And there were some vacations when I did not record, and other reasons for gaps.
So we'll say that on 5000 days, at about 10pm when I went to bed, I pressed the record button so save that day's messages.

Richard Linklater took 12 years to make "Boyhood".
The Tim Robbins character in Shawshank Redemption took 19 years to dig his way out of prison.
OK, I'm being silly, but it gets the point across. Unheard of, long term decision.

Documentary gold.

Any good film will address questions like "Is that weird, or obsessive? And we'll have fun with that.

But mostly it was an incredible process, one of the most amazing things that has happened to me, and I want to tell this story of saving them, and then re-discovering them, to the world.

I seriously don't know how I managed to keep them from being lost stolen, burned, destroyed by dust or water, etc.
It's just crazy that I now have a rare time capsule of the voices of a bunch of friends and family from the 90s.

Before cell phones. No voicemail, no texting, no Internet, not a single luxury (bonus if you know my silly reference).

Side note: my outgoing messages were drawn from 70's TV jingles, famous songs, and movie lines, with the intention to elicit interesting messages. And it worked!

These messages range from hilarious to heart-breaking to romantic, to bizarre, to capturing historical random events.

Now that you know WHAT I did, not for the WHY?

I have no idea.

That's not true, I have a lot of guesses. Yet it still being a bit of a mystery to me, and wondering what to make of my intense nostalgia and coming to terms with these voices from the past, well that is the central notion of my story: explaining the back story, my parents got divorced when I was 5, being heartbroken from missing my dad, him being a singer and storyteller who left long messages, his years living in Laurel Canyon, and my decision just after high school to start saving his messages and all those from my fascinating, weird, entertaining UC Berkeley friends.

The main emotional punch of this film will be that now, upon listening to the messages, I finally understand a lot more about my friends, girlfriends, family, etc. And I reflect on it. And will contact some of them 30 years later!

Hence the title "I Can Be Here Now: Please Leave a Message"

Finally, two other bodies of info are relevant:

1. My grandfather, whom I never knew, was a diplomat who had a letter from Steinbeck and several from LBJ and Humphreys.
2. I just spent the last 5 years getting priceless, authentic, incredible footage of my dad slowly dying from Alzheimer's.

Will you help me conceptualize, strategize, write, and edit this into an award-winning memoir documentary?

Hourly rate will depend on your background, experience, and the nature of how we frame how we work together.

If you feel drawn to this, and this is IMPORTANT: WRITE ME A PAGE-LONG COVER LETTER SHOWING ME THAT THIS IDEA/CONCEPT/STORY IS SUCH A GREAT MATCH, THAT IS SO INSPIRES YOU, THAT YOU HAD A BURST OF IDEAS/INSPIRATIONS ABOUT IT, WHICH ARE...(PUT IN COVER LETTER).

I already have a team of 3 *amazing* people, and I want to create a 5 to 6-person team, a writer's room if you will, so that we can workshop it together.

Finally, just so you get more of a sense for me, this is something I put together 9 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcTJq9QrTa4&t=237s

Thanks!
Scott