Lightning can strike thrice in the same place, as the screenwriting duo of Beth and Gary Hoover can attest. That plus the fact that dogged persistence and countless rewrites can make you a winner.
Their comedy, “The Real Thing,” has won three top contest prizes, the latest being the $10,000 grand prize in the 2007 American Screenwriters Association Competition.
The story is about a struggling actress who participates in a hoax to boost the ratings of a faltering reality TV show and finds fame has its price.
Many versions earlier, the script, then titled “Hitched,” won the $11,000 grand prize in the American Scriptwriting Competition entry, after writing more than 20 drafts before submitting it to this contest.
Between “Hitched” and “The Real Thing,” the writers changed the title to better capture the core concept and reworked their story.
“We deepened the relationships, raised the stakes and generally pushed the story so there’s even more conflict in the romance and more bite to the underlying satire,” they said.
Their diligence paid off still more. “The Real Thing” won the 2005 Liberty Film Festival Screenplay Contest’s top prize of $1,000.
“It also was named to the top 10 at Austin Film Festival in the comedy category?which is a pretty solid record for a single script,” say the Hoovers.
