When Gordon Pengilly submitted his script to the Canadian Short Screenplay Competition (CSSC), he knew there was something unique about his screenplay. But by no means did he think he’d emerge as the winner of this worldwide competition.
“I knew I’d written something I really liked, which meant that it was probably pretty good, but one never knows how good the competition is going to be or what the tastes of the judges are or what the prevailing winds are doing,” Pengilly shares. “It’s always a crap shoot.”
But looking at Pengilly’s extensive resume in the world of creative writing, it would only make sense that he’d win the grand prize of the CSSC: a professionally produced film among other prizes.
The Alberta native first put pen to paper as a nine-year-old boy when he contracted a childhood illness, and so the notebook became his companion. Either way, Pengilly was bound to be drawn to the arts; his aunt was a pottery-obsessed artist.
“At my bedside she showed me how to mix paints to make new tints and how to shade with charcoal to reveal contours,” says Pengilly. “And how to create a vanishing point.”
But it wasn’t just his aunt that introduced him to the world of the arts, Pengilly’s parents were also in on the action. While his mother gave him drawing-books and would constantly read to him plays she wrote for church and community functions, his father would always buy him the latest edition of National Geographic.
“He was an avid reader of those beautiful books and I became one too,” Pengilly recounts. “My first poems were descriptions of the photographs in them.”
When it was time to head off to university, he didn’t think twice about becoming an English major. After a year had passed, Pengilly stopped by the counselor’s office (who according to him shared a striking resemblance to James Taylor) and was told he could use some “opening up” and that drama was a great way to do so — and to “meet some girls” along the way.
“I wrote my first play in a 200-level intro course instead of writing an essay, and that was that,” shares Pengilly. He has since written countless plays as a playwright in residence for Theatre Calgary, Theatre New Brunswick and the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Pengilly has also written radio programming for CBC. In fact, his first ever radio airing was the play Seeds which he wrote for the broadcasting company in 1977. After eight years, he ran into Martie Fishman, who was in charge of producing drama for CBC at the time. “Over the next dozen years or so we created some fifteen hours of radio drama together,” he recounts.
He has since developed several of his stage productions to radio, television and the big screen. “You have to make a living, of course, and a good story can have a wide life as well as a long one if you care enough to learn a new craft,” shares Pengilly.
And learning was exactly what Pengilly sought out to do. He says he learned how to write for radio through practice and learned how to write for the TV and film industry partly by teaching it, after Mount Royal College had hired him to teach scriptwriting.
“I said I could do it and I started reading screenplays and teleplays like a madman and blasting through How To’s and industry magazines for structure and jargon and lore,” says Pengilly. “My first professional gig for TV was writing for a children’s series called Nuggets in 1979.”
And after writing for a variety of mediums, Pengilly knows more than anyone how hard it is to get a film produced. “It’s harder to get screenplays produced than it is stage plays,” he says. “And it’s harder than hell to get stage plays produced.”
Needless to say, he’s extremely excited for his short screenplay Seeing in the Dark — about a man in his twenties who leaves prison and tries to reconnect with his former life — to be professionally produced by Year of the Skunk Productions.
And with the contest being backed by sponsorship and partnership support from industry heavyweights, including Raindance Canada, Playback Magazine, InkTip, Meridian Artists, Ouat!Media and SaskFilm, Pengilly’s film is bound to get the attention it deserves.
So what’s his advice for other writers? Enter contests. “They’re a good investment. Win or lose you never know who the judges are and what impression you might make on any one of them,” says Pengilly. “The writer’s life is all quite serendipitous”.
For more information on CSSC, visit: www.screenplay-competition.com
*Written by Ilan Mester”
