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by Bryn Elise Sandberg
he New York Mayor’s Office has named two winners for its female scriptwriting competition.
Patty Carey-Perazzo’s Half-Life and Robin Rose Singer’s Adult Behavior have won a first-of-its-kind citywide screenwriting contest focused on stories by, for or about women. The Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) and Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema announced the selections Wednesday.
The first project centers on a mother trying to restart her stalled career, and the other is about a young woman who moves to New York to work at a Bronx nursing home. The winning scripts were chosen from a pool of over 300 scripts by a panel of industry leaders to be developed into pilots that will air on NYC Media, the City’s official broadcast network with a reach of 18 million households. One of the two winning pilots will be selected for four additional episodes, to air on NYC Media in the summer of 2018.
“Congratulations to Patty and Robin, whose work stood out in a competitive field,” said MOME commissioner Julie Menin. “The contest they have won, as well as four other women’s initiatives our office is rolling out, reflect our commitment to addressing the well-documented underrepresentation of women in the film and television industry — both on and off the screen.”
“This opportunity is unparalleled,” said Carey-Perazzo, who took time out from her day job as a location manager to write about a woman’s attempt to lean back into her career after leaning out to raise her children….