AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The Los Angeles Times

Some seniors at Camino Nuevo’s high school are screenwriters in training.

High school students tend to dread the 20-page term paper. But at Camino Nuevo High School, a charter school located on West Temple Street near L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood, some seniors have chosen to write 120 pages instead.

A unique collaboration between screenwriter and author Blake Snyder (”Blank Check”) and a gung-ho economics and English teacher named Peter Cook is harvesting a crop of soon-to-graduate screenwriters-in-training. Last fall, 15 Camino Nuevo seniors agreed to write industry-standard screenplays for their final project, and Cook, an aspiring author and screenwriter, pounced on the chance to run the pilot seminar.

“If there is an absence of humanity in movies, which I would submit that there is today, then you might have an absence of humanity in a lot of other places,” Cook says. “So what I’m trying to sell to the kids is to think about humanity in their movies and tell their human stories.”

All year, the teenagers have been having daily meetings with Cook to screen movies, brainstorm ideas, workshop scenes and practice pitching to visiting industry figures such as producer Stephanie Austin Taylor (”True Lies”) and Snyder, who wrote the popular “Save the Cat!” how-to screenwriting guide that Cook uses as a kind of textbook.

“We got a lot of producers visiting us, and we pitched them our stories, and they’re like, ‘Oh, they’re great, call us when you’re done!’ ” says 19-year-old Ayah Enverga. “It’s exciting.”

More…