“There wasn’t a time when I wasn’t telling stories.”
I am on a zoom call with my friend Paige Feldman. We met on Twitter during the pandemic and she has what the kids on TikTok are calling, “big sis energy.”
“When I was eight, I saw The Flintstones movie in the theaters and I hated it. I thought it was terrible. I saw Steven Spielberg's name as the executive producer at the end and I thought, 'I could’ve made a better movie than that!'”
Paige caught my eye on the internet when her tweet about refusing to submit to anymore screenwriting contests got some traction. She was transparent about how much money she had saved by entering contests, and how she had used that money to fund her own content. Instead of waiting around to be picked or noticed, she noticed herself and told everyone else to do the same.
I got to meet her kitten while on this zoom call! I love when itty bitty creatures feel comfortable enough with my aura though the screen to make an appearance!
Paige completed her undergrad at USC for Critical Studies which is now called Cinema and Media Studies. She stressed that since she wanted to go into development, she needed to do a lot of internships, and the experiences at these internships made her learn a lot of about the industry and - for better or worse - what it stood for. She did an internship at a talent agency and got reprimanded for reading a script she was photocopying. At another internship, she would stay until 8pm to finish work when she was off the clock at 6. Another internship presented itself to her, this one on the Warner Brother’s lot. Two days before she was to start, she got a call letting her know that her spot had been taken by the head of production's nephew who really wanted to get into film and television. After a series of “why the hell am I doing this?” she went to Northwestern Law School, and that was her way of quitting the entertainment industry once and for all! Or so she thought.
“I tried really hard to be a lawyer, but I would end up outlining stories in the margins of my PowerPoints while I was sitting in lecture. I just couldn’t pay attention.”
After being in the bottom third of her class and only finding interest in talking about the latest episodes of Lost, she could tell that she didn’t quite fit in with this crowd either. She saw how her peers had passion for law like she had passion for storytelling.
“I could be a good lawyer despite me not being very engaged in it, but it wouldn't make me happy.”
Paige tells me about Northwestern’s “Dean of Happiness,” a former lawyer who was forced to change his life after having a nervous breakdown. After wandering around the beaches on the upper peninsula of Michigan for a year, he returned to Northwestern and made it his mission to make sure that the students at Northwestern were happy. He wanted to know that students were going into law consciously and making decisions that were going to make them happy and not make them wander around the freezing beaches of Michigan for a year. Paige sought his guidance after feeling so disjointed. She decided that she would finish her degree and return to LA to try again. The Dean of Happiness helped her decide on her thesis - an idea that would loop her back into what she loved to talk about most: film. She wrote her thesis on the Hollywood production code of 1934 and how it kept congress away from film ratings. She then landed what she calls a “good” internship at a management company and then another internship on the Disney lot. She eventually worked her way up to where she wanted to be, in development work. She read scripts all the time and was never reprimanded for eying them by a photocopier.
Since then, Page has created her own works like INTERROBANG, a comedy series that features sex positive themes and situations that come up when we are vulnerable with ourselves and others. Paige showed me up on my grammar skills, telling me that an interrobang is the symbol that combines the question mark and exclamation point (?!). Although it is nonstandard, it is used in many languages and computer programmers use it to convey a “bang!” See what she did there?
Paige's first produced feature as a writer is WING-DAD, a story centering in on a father-son relationship set during the Coronavirus pandemic. This project was shot on location in Big Bear Lake in November and December of 2020. Co-written with director Lucas Astrom, it won Best Feature at the Santa Monica Film festival in January of this year and will be released on Amazon Prime in June.
The next question I proposed to Paige is something that has been on my mind for a long time. Personally I have been writing screenplays and stage plays for fun since I was a teenager. I joined twitter dot com and have connected with so many writers who also find fun in writing. A frequent and heavy topic of note is contests. Contests can be hugely helpful in advancing someone’s writing career (read about the success of Sean Collins Smith here! He's a righteous dude!) Every few months, people will take to twitter to share their excitement over moving on to the next round of a contest, or, more commonly, to vent about their heartbreak and frustration about not moving forward. I personally have not been huge on entering my writing into contests simply because entries fees are so expensive. I feel like not a lot of people talk about the burden of entry fees. Without any guarantees on who will read your work on the first round and what background credentials they have, it seems like a gnarly road to disappointment town. It is essentially a gamble to enter into these contests, and the only times I have ever had fun in Las Vegas was when I was outside playing in the swimming pool and not inside with the slot machines (did you know that the Golden Nugget has a waterslide that goes through a shark tank?! Omg look, I just used the interrobang! I am learning!) I have heard of so many people having negative experiences with contests and it is scary to put your self out there! Anyway, this isn’t about me!!! All this to say, I asked Paige the following question:
“Do you think that writing only for contest approval can be damaging to the creative process in the long run?”
To keep it abridged, Paige told me that she submitted INTERROBANG to some contests when it was in script form, and it didn’t win anything. Once it was made, however, it was accepted into film festivals. It seems like once you can visualize something that is meant to be seen through a visual medium, it works out pretty well!
“There is a certain level of clout with having actually made something and you get the laurels, and it is a good way to get things out there. With screenwriting contests... I am not against them, I don’t feel like they are wholly evil! I have just noticed that they do not respond to my work in those contests. I have maybe gotten to a second round twice? I don’t think they are terrible or evil, they just did not work for me, and that’s when I decided that I needed to stop, and say, ‘this is the amount of money I might have spent on my own work.’”
Paige told me that if you want to win contests, then just look at what type of screenplay is winning those awards, but for her, writing is much more about putting out something that holds weight in her eyes and not necessarily someone else's. Paige has real grit and a no-bullshit attitude, and this chat with her inspired me to up my boundary game. I get the sense that she has been though enough to know when to put her foot down and call it like it is. She is so punk rock in that sense and I wanna be her bff.
With her savings, Paige created her audio series How to Fall in Love the Hard Way. She is now editing episodes 2-10.
“That is work I can put out into the world that people can listen to and it is proof that I know what I’m doing.”
I asked Paige the final question, “what are you working on?”
She is currently working on a project that combines her love of sci-fi and romantic comedy titled Kaleidoscope. She hopes this project will be her feature directorial debut and is currently documenting the production process on her youtube channel.
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