Success Story: Steve Barr
Steve Barr hates to wait. Hey, it’s not as if the screenwriter and filmmaker lacks patience or is "Mr. Instant Gratification." It’s just that Steve would much rather make things happen, especially when it comes to making it in Hollywood. In fact, he and his writing partner, Tina Anderson, just got their big break.
They’re in a development deal with Walt Disney Pictures for their romantic/family/comedy feature script, Plant Life. The film will combine live action with CGI animation to crate photorealistic plants as characters. Producing the film are Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (Shrek, Pirates Of The Caribbean, etc.) of Scheherazade Productions. Also, Steve wrote and is now producing a low-budget, horror-western feature, Blood West, which is slated to shoot in late 2007 or early 2008.
But this “overnight” success didn’t happen so suddenly. Steve spent ten years honing his craft and creating relationships. Since Steve graduated with a BFA from the Professional Actors’ Program at USC, he’s written over 11 feature scripts. While at Meridian Productions
and as a private script analyst, he critiqued over 1,000 scripts.
Steve also won Scriptwriters Network’s Producers Outreach Program (POP) competition—now the Hollywood Outreach Program—for his action-horror feature script, Mating Habits. Steve said, “The POP opened some doors in the industry that would have remained closed. Getting through the POP screening process gave me a little extra legitimacy, which is always helpful to a writer starting out.”
And as a founding member of SoCal Film Group—a cadre of filmmakers specializing in the cutting-edge techniques of digital filmmaking—Steve’s participated in the production of 50 short films.
Steve wrote, co-wrote, produced, directed, edited and/or acted in a slew of these shorts: Steve And Danny Fuck Up, The Last Stall, Violet’s Home, Intersection, Belated, Survival Of The Fittest, Finding Space, Who’s On First: The Movie, Chuck Barr And His Penis: A Love Story, Emergi-Date, Quiet And My Life In Subtitles. Quiet, which he wrote and produced, was named one of the top ten short films of 2006 by Film Threat. (Check them out - www.socalfilm.com.)
And for the last ten years, Steve’s been a frequent contributor to Wordplay, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio’s screenwriting web site at: www.wordplayer.com.
Added to this, Steve Barr and Shawn Granger created a comic book series, Devil Water, which was based on a screenplay Steve wrote with Danny Grossman. The comic books follow the horrific and comedic story of Henry Hill's encounters with outlaws, demons, angels, and religious fanatics in the Old West.
Basically, Steve Barr’s experiences with Wordplay, SoCal Film Group, Scriptwriters Network and elsewhere taught him that becoming a successful screenwriter’s not magic, “It's actually pretty simple.It's not easy, but it's straightforward. There’s a set of skills you must learn and you have to work really, really hard.” And that’s just what Steve Barr does. Because, a screenwriting career is worth waiting for.