Success Stories

Today is August 5, 2014. My name is David Rountree and I am ranked 5th on the Top 10 Up-and-Coming Directors under 40 on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).    With two films of completely different genres receiving theatrical releases this year, and winning the Best Film and Best Director award at the 2014 Independent Film and Television Festival, I was recently interviewed about how I became an overnight success as a writer/producer/director. The irony is that my journey in achieving moder...

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours. -Richard Bach Excuses. Sometimes the most creative thing we do as creatives is make creative excuses for why we can’t be creative (trust me, it makes sense.) Over our last few Happy Writers / Stage 32 Online Pitchfests, we’ve had some amazing success stories. Today I’d like to highlight one of them courtesy of a creative who never argued for his limitations and only made excuses to keep on creating and believing in his skill...

A few months ago, we joined forces with The Happy Writers for our first Stage 32 Creativefest/Pitchfest.  Our purpose was to offer our screenwriting and filmmaking members a unique opportunity to gain access to top-level managers and executives looking for new talent and material. Our hope was that these executives would find a diamond in the rough here and there. We were wrong. They found a virtual mine. Here are some of the remarkably talented people who have found success through our...

When the first draft of my first screenplay was complete, I contacted a screenwriting teacher to read it and give me notes (let's call him "Joe"). At our first meeting, he gave me some advice..."Don't give it to family or friends to read." Oh crap! I had already sent it to my mom, aunt, cousin, and every friend who agreed to read it. I smiled politely at Joe; I sure as hell wasn't going to tell him I already screwed up on the first rule. Apparently my smile wasn't hiding the puzzled look in my e...

What a start to 2013. It seems many Stage 32'ers have to put the pedal to the floor as it relates to their dreams and aspirations. The success stories have been coming in fast and furious. Over the last few days alone, we've heard from: Two actors - one in Denmark, one in Chicago - who landed agents. An editor from Los Angeles who has cut no less than 23 shorts who scored his first feature job. A composer from Sydney who has been hired to score a film for a New York producer....

On my social media rounds this morning, I read a quote by Alfred Hitchcock: "In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director." Certainly I don't fancy myself as a god -- if I were I would be using a RED camera instead of a Canon 60D -- however I do feel responsible for the worlds I decide to build and the characters I create. A little background before I return to Hitchcock and the divine attributes of filmmakers. Since I was but a wee lad, I have been a movie addi...

I love technology. Without it, I'd be unemployable. I'm a software developer, more precisely a back end developer. I write code that ties a front end or what we call the presentation layer to some form of business logic or middle tier, which then in turn saves its data to a data store - also known as a database - though it could be a flat file, xml document, or what not. What does any of this have to do with film making? One of the things that attracted me to screenwriting was the syntax...

I'm one of those people standing on the outside of the film industry circle wondering how to get in. One of my attempts was started on this very site, Stage 32. The concept seemed simple; connect with as many people as humanly possible. Collaborate with writers, collaborate with crew, make a solid film, and enter a film festival... and win. OK so maybe the last part is the tricky bit, but it is important to take something like this step by step. The film festival I had in mind was on...