Vanderbilt University screen-writing professor Will Akers says his first career goal was to become a cartoonist.
“But story strips went the way of the dodo,” Mr. Akers said in an e-mail interview. “I decided that movies were just like comic strips — people in a frame with a story. The only difference was that the movie moved. After graduate school, I started writing screenplays, and I still seem to be at it.”
Ultimately, he still met his goal of entertaining through humor: Mr. Akers wrote the script for “Ernest Rides Again,” the fifth of Jim Varney’s good ol’ boy comedies.
Saturday, Mr. Akers will be sharing tips about his craft with participants at the biennial Chattanooga Festival of Writers. The screenwriter and filmmaking instructor will be one of nine guest writers discussing their work and sharing advice they’ve learned through experience with workshop participants.
Laurel Eldridge, AEC program director, said this is the first year a screenwriter has been added to the seminar’s mix of professionals.
“We thought screenwriting was a topic that hadn’t been discussed before but one that everybody is interested in, especially with the recent writers strike,” she said.
Mr. Akers said he learned the technique for screenwriting in film school and by reading lots of scripts and a few books on the subject. He added to that by attending as many seminars as possible, he said, including the Nashville Screenwriters Conference.
After living in Los Angeles six years, he moved to Nashville, where he teaches filmmaking and screenwriting at Vanderbilt University.
“I go out to LA regularly to get work,” he said. “It helps to have a presence out there, either through representation or friends who know people in the business. You can live elsewhere and work as a screenwriter, but if you want to write for television, you have to move to Los Angeles.”
The Writers Guild of America went on strike in November after contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers failed.
There were disputes over DVD residuals, union jurisdiction over animation and reality program writers, and compensation for “new media,” which is content written for or distributed through digital technology, according to Internet sites.
Mr. Akers said since writers were enjoined from working for guild signatory companies, he was able to continue supporting himself as a teacher during the strike.
“The guild felt producers wanted to keep all the money for themselves, the producers felt otherwise,” he said. “The outcome was OK for the writers. The producers are still keeping most of the money, but not all of it,” Mr. Akers summarized.
At the time of the strike, he was working on a pitch to LA producers about an art-recovery specialist. He said despite the three-month hiatus, producers are still interested in his concept.
At the Festival of Writers, he will teach from his upcoming book, which offers 100 ways to improve a screenplay.
“We’ll get into the crucial first 10 pages, basic nuts and bolts about how the business works, character construction, a few of the fatal errors most beginning writers don’t know about and a bit about storytelling on the page,” he previewed.
Festival of Writers gets under way Friday night at the Sheraton Read House with a dinner and lecture by Ben Fountain. Four workshops and a lunch will be held Saturday in UTC’s University Center.
Tickets are available in one-day or two-day passes. Call 267-1218.
Susan Palmer Pierce is a reporter and columnist in the Life department. She began her journalism career as a summer employee 1972 for the News Free Press, typing bridal announcements and photo captions. She became a full-time employee in 1980, working her way up to feature writer, then special sections editor, then Lifestyle editor in 1995 until the merge of the NFP and Times in 1999. She was honored with the 2007 Chattanooga Woman of ...
