Scott Simpson

I have a BA in English from Columbia and an MFA from Columbia Film School’s screenwriting program. I have had screenplays from across all genres compete and place in prestigious competitions and film festivals, such as WGAe Foundation Dramatic Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, the Oaxaca Film Festival for the past three years and the Nicholl’s Fellowship. I have written twelve screenplays -- the first two scripts I wrote for television both made the Second Round at the 2015 Austin Film Festival.

My Masters thesis was a comedy-slash-horror werewolf movie that would have been purchased outright while he was still in film school if not for five dreadful werewolf movies that were already in production at the time. Other screenplays include a family fantasy about a boy and his dinosaur, an all cat cartoon western, and a period drama of a Czech immigrant in East Texas circa 1920’s. I am currently expanding this screenplay into a pilot for a ten-episode pilot season of a television series that will cover the East Texas Oil Boom of the 1930’s.

I will be teaching screenwriting as an adjunct professor in the graduate English Department at the University of Texas at Tyler for the spring 2016 semester; and will use this occasion for further research on the earliest days of the Oil Boom.

Thirty years ago I wrote a screenplay, The MacKenzie Breakout, which is a post-Apocalypse western (action movie) with the premise that, after a nuclear winter, the Earth thaws and starts to overheat. It renders the lower latitudes uninhabitable and forces human migration to the polar regions where, whoever controls access into the Arctic Ocean basin can create their own Mediterranean-based Roman Empire.

Its longest sequence involves taking a boat ride across the Arctic Ocean at the dawn of a global environmental collapse at the polar ice cap – and this last October – I did it. I am the first screenwriter who has ever been accepted into the Arctic Circle Program.

A TexPatriot who grew up in Tyler, Texas, Scott and his wife, Kathy, of 32 years live in Washington Heights in Northern Manhattan and are proud empty nesters after having raised three lovely daughters in New York City.

When not writing, which is never, Scott works as a fundraising consultant and grantwriter.