{THE LAUNCH PAD} Top 25 Pilots and Writers Announced!!
1The day is finally here and we are very proud to announce the Top 25 scripts and writers for our first annual Launch Pad Pilot Competition! It was an incredibly difficult couple of weeks as we had to narrow the field down to these top 25. All of our readers, discussed, shouted, and threw punches (metaphorically and physically) in an attempt to get their favorites onto the semi-finals list and now that the dust has settled, we are all extremely excited about the pilots that will be going through the next round of judging. We do not envy those who need to make this list a top 10.
Here are some fun and interesting facts before we get to the names –
- Only two scripts submitted shared the same title.
- More than 2/3rds of the scripts submitted were drama. Numbers that are reflected in the Top 25.
- There are 9 female writers in our Top 25.
- These Top 25 were narrowed down from a list of over 70 pilots that made the initial cut.
- 5 of the Top 25 pilots were written by writing partners.
2014 SEMIFINALISTS (in alphabetical order by title):
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ANOTHER WORLD – Tony Lippera
Logline: Set in the cutthroat world of 1970’s daytime TV, an aging superstar must battle against a network’s attempt to oust her from a popular television show she starred in for twenty years.
BLOOD TIES – Tristan Thai
Logline: On the deathbed of his father, a young cop discovers he was switched at birth with another man – the son of the city’s biggest mob family. As both men discover where their true blood ties lie, they must decide which side of the law their loyalties will lie.
BUSCONE – Jeff Storms
Logline: A twist on cartel wars. Brings us into an original, unexplored world of “Buscones” or “street agents” that run like the mafia; but their “product/traffic” are young boys grooming them to become majors in baseball.
COLLAPSE – Nti Aning
Logline: High-concept drama about the origin of a robot apocalypse. In a dystopian future, human-like androids are under attack from the humans they’ve been created to serve until they decide enough is enough and begin to fight back.
COSMO’S – Asmin Pathare
Logline: A robot, an alien, and a time traveler walk into a bar— and then start working there? “The Big Bang Theory” meets “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” in this raunchy live-action geekfest about three extraordinary beings in one ordinary place.
DOUBLES – Kassia Miller
Logline: “Odd Couple” meets “2 Broke Girls”. Story of two twin sisters who are complete opposites, trying to make it in the city without killing each other.
EREBUS – Eliot John Hagen
Logline: Big event-series. Think “The Day After Tomorrow” meets “Lost”. Centers on a exploration team sent to the South Pole for a routine research run, who are caught amidst a sudden volcanic explosion and an unidentified object moving below the ice. Now they must fight for their survival in the most desolate place on earth.
FULL TIME DAD – Scott C. Reynolds
Logline: Broadcast comedy. Story of a recently-unemployed single dad in NYC, who suddenly has to take care of his teenage son, who has now been kicked out of every school in the state of Florida. Two generations struggling to figure out what they want to do with their lives at the same time.
GARRET GOES TO WASHINGTON – Ted Sperling
Logline: A reverse “Fresh Prince of Bel Air”. When a rich, privileged teenager is kicked out of his eighth boarding school, he’s sent to live with his blue collar relatives in Tacoma, Washington.
INHERITANCE, THE – Katiedid Langrock
Logline: “Sopranos” meets “House of Cards”. The repercussions of a political visionary’s personal sins rip through the Cavanaugh family as they continually struggle to prevent the sins of the past generations from being inherited by the next.
JUMP – Andrew Bumstead
Logline: Story of a time travel agency that recruits young people with nothing to lose to “jump” into the past and alter tragic events in their clients’ lives. However, these “jumpers” are just as lost and broken as the people they’re trying to help, and their dark pasts often lead to problems – both on missions and within the team.
KNIVES – Nick Moceri
Logline: After dropping out of med school to take over his parents struggling butcher shop in Boston’s north end, Alex ends up trapped in lifestyle he tried to escape and is forced to become a doctor for the mob in order to keep his parents business afloat.
LADYBOY – Pantida Vanasirikul & Jason Romaine
Logline: Think “Girls” meets “The L Word”. A recent post-op transgender from Thailand moves to Manhattan in hopes of starting fresh as a girl and finding the man of her dreams. She meets her fairy gay godfather and together they go on a quest to discover their own identity and their other halves.
LEMONS – Gini Adhikari & Kay Marvin
Logline: “My name is Earl” meets “Orange is the New Black”. A sweet, innocent and neurotic nurse sets out to make even the worst situations in her small town better, starting with the scathing Yelp review one of the inmates wrote about her care in the local municipal prison.
LONG ISLAND – Robert Weinberger
Logline: A 1970s suburban coming-of-age tale akin to “The Wonder Years” that follows the Sugarman’s move from Brooklyn to Long Island from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy.
PARADISE CITY – Sean Costello
Logline: Disparate perspectives on early 1980’s sensationalism and the new War on Drugs are seen through a Sunset Strip coke dealer versus the Detective who controls him.
PARADOX – Dylan Brod
Logline: “Alias” meets “Quantum Leap”. Set in the near future, the FBI prevents crimes through time travel missions executed by a secret department led by Agent Caden Hardwick. But when sabotage puts Caden and his team at risk, his fiancé Sarah must use the technology to avert a disaster.
PASS/FAIL – Caitlin McCarthy & Jim Forbes
Logline: “Dangerous Minds” meets “Boston Public”. A newly promoted, street-wise Assistant Principal with a dark past refuses to accept the benign neglect, malfeasance, and subsequent defeatism of an urban Voke school.
PROSPECT – Max Perry
Logline: Big event series with legs. After a massive mineral-rich asteroid crashes down in Africa and sparks a second gold rush, a fraying family movies to the African crash site in the hopes of starting a new life. But how long will they survive amidst the corporations, militaries and the daily battles for power in what has become the most valuable real estate on earth.
RIPPLE EFFECT, THE – Jim Simone & Sharon Cingle
Logline: “Sleepy Hollow” meets “Fringe”. A financially strapped detective, stumbles into the world of the supernatural when he teams up with a genius waitress and an eccentric new-age scientist as they investigate the death of a young man who mysteriously appears on a Seattle bridge, frozen to death.
SHANGHAI’D – Curtis Burdick
Logline: “MacGyver” meets “Marco Polo”. Educated in the sciences at Harvard, Joshua Cabot travels to ‘gold rush’ California from Boston in 1848 to establish an assaying office; a wife and baby die tragically, he escapes into alcohol, wakes up on a Pacific merchant ship as a shanghaied sailor.
SHINING CITY – Douglas Stark
Logline: “Minority Report” meets “Prison Break”. A devoted husband and father discovers that his job, his family, and his entire life are false memory implants and that he is, in fact, a former operative holding a dangerous secret living in a giant prison masquerading as a city.
SIDE BY SIDE – Lily Blau
Logline: New York City, 1938. Conjoined twins Bette and Evie Grand abandon the sideshow they grew up in search of a bigger, better life for themselves. But their patchwork family proves difficult to leave behind, and their divergent dreams threaten to tear the sisters apart.
TRIBE, THE – Gregory Navarro
Logline: The lives of two desperate men intersect on an Indian reservation where one of them is coming home to old ghosts and the other is running to escape them.
WINTER – Andy Heriaud & Kaitlin Kelly
Logline: “The Walking Dead” in tone, but from the perspective of the people and the government. The de-evolution of society as we enter into a modern ice age. In the year 2015, an unknown event has started severe global cooling, leading the United States to range from fertile croplands to frozen wastelands. During these times, four people struggle to hold themselves, their families and the country together, before forces of nature rip the world apart.
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For now, that’s it! Congratulations to everyone who made the Top 25, and thank you to everyone who submitted.
Our top 10 finalists will be announced in May, 2014!
All semi-finalists have been contacted by the TB staff. If you have not received an email from us, please contact us ASAP.
To read up on the Launch Pad Competition, or to see who the judges are for this year’s pilot competition, CLICK HERE.